Cuba "will not allow (Chanet) to carry out her mandate," Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque said Friday.
He clarified, however, that the refusal to authorize the visit should not be understood as anything personal against the special representative herself or against UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Sergio Vieira de Mello, who appointed her.
Pérez Roque underlined that his country viewed the designation of a special human rights representative to visit Cuba as invalid, as it forms part of a UN Commission on Human Rights resolution that it deems illegitimate.
The decision to name a special representative was part of a resolution condemning Cuba, approved in April 2002 in the Commission by a vote of 23 to 21, with nine abstentions. The initiative was presented by Peru and Uruguay and backed by several other Latin American nations as well as Canada.
The text urged Havana to guarantee civil and political rights, and endorsed the designation of a special representative by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, to visit Cuba.
The Commission has passed resolutions condemning the human rights situation in Cuba every year since 1990, with the exception of 1998. Last year's resolution was the first to be introduced by Latin American countries.
The condemnation of Cuba's human rights situation triggered a diplomatic row between Cuba and Uruguay, which ended with the rupture of relations between the two countries.
The Cuban government complains that the resolutions are "fabricated by the United States with the basic objective of justifying its (four-decade) blockade and aggression against the Cuban people," said Pérez Roque.
"Cuba has rejected, and will continue to reject, that anti-Cuban exercise," for which it holds the U.S. government and the "Cuban mafia in Miami"--an allusion to the vociferously anti-Castro Cuban exile community in that U.S. city--responsible, the foreign minister said in a news briefing. ***