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GENEVA, Apr 16 (IPS) - The outcome of the vote on the Cuban situation by the United Nations maximum human rights body was postponed Wednesday, though it is evident that it will take place amidst high diplomatic tensions. Cuban dissidents say that regardless of the vote results, little will change on the island. The debate in the U.N. Commission on Human Rights underwent a radical shift within a matter of hours as a result of reactions from Latin American and European delegations to the recent crackdown on dissidents and the execution of three hijackers on the Caribbean island. Until Wednesday...

HAVANA (AFP) - The UN Human Rights Commission is due to rate Cuba's human rights record just days after the summary executions of three ferry hijackers and the jailing of 75 dissidents. AFP Photo   The Geneva-based UN Commission is to take up this week a draft resolution co-sponsored by Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua and Costa Rica on Cuba's human rights. The executions Friday of three men who took some 40 people hostage on a commuter ferry broke Havana's three-year death penalty moratorium. However, human rights leaders in Cuba are not necessarily hopeful that a failing grade from Geneva would help...

''Where is Latin America?'' screamed a Herald editorial earlier this week. Where are the voices of democracy in the region now that Cuba is secretly sentencing 78 peaceful pro-democracy activists -- including 28 journalists -- to long prison terms for crimes such as having a tape recorder or -- God forbid -- a fax machine?Since my job in this newspaper is trying to provide answers to difficult questions like these, I called the foreign ministers of key Latin American countries and asked them whether they will speak out on this issue.Independent journalist Raul Rivero, for instance, was sentenced to 20...

MEXICO CITY - Mexico on Monday condemned Cuba's execution of three men who tried to hijack a ferry to the United States.   But Mexico kept silent on how it plans to vote on a resolution on its traditional ally's human rights record. The vote is expected in the coming days at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Mexico's foreign ministry compared Friday's execution of the three men to the death penalty, and stressed it "profoundly regrets" its application on the island. It said Mexico does not apply the death penalty and has made a point in speaking out...

Did America's continuing tough line on Cuba prompt Fidel to lash out? After sentencing 78 dissidents and independent journalists to terms of up to 27 years in prison, President Fidel Castro raised the stakes in his most severe crackdown in decades. Last week, three unidentified men who tried to hijack a ferry to Florida earlier this month were summarily executed — jolting human rights groups who had just begun to condemn the imprisonment of the dissidents, whom Castro accused of being in the service of the U.S. What's behind the clampdown? Those close to Castro's inner circle say he feels...

HAVANA - Cuba's accusations about dissidents in the pay of Washington have revived a long-standing debate over whether using U.S. government funds to support the Cuban opposition does more harm than good. Some $20 million has been paid by the U.S. Agency for International Development to U.S.-based groups working to end communist rule in the island. They run Web sites, distribute pro-democracy books and pamphlets, and even provide food and medicine to the families of political prisoners. But some veteran activists say the money only gives Fidel Castro's government ammunition to persecute dissidents, like the 75 sentenced in recent days...

Secretary of State Colin Powell said something remarkable today. Questioned by New York congressman Jose Serrano, a leftist and friend of Castro's Cuba, he said, "He's done some good things for his people." The "he," of course, was the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. I find the secretary's words alarming and repugnant, but they did provoke a memory. The year was 1986 (or thereabouts), and the place was Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The speaker, at a student forum, was Armando Valladares, the great Cuban dissident. He wrote a memoir called Against All Hope. Everything that is important to know —...

MIAMI -- Deep in south Miami-Dade County, a group of people dress up in camouflage, pack high-powered weapons and train for a possible armed invasion of Cuba. They are members of Comandos F-4, a Cuban exile organization that thinks armed action is the only way to bring change to Cuba. It is one of the last paramilitary groups still training in the United States since the heyday of such organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, when bombings and armed incursions into Cuba were common occurrences. Since then, a number of the former militants have died and others have laid down...

HAVANA - For years they were familiar faces in Cuba's opposition movement: the elderly man with a black beret, the reporter who used a cane, the efficient secretary.But last week their real identities became known: They were government spies and helped the regime to lock up 75 of its most vocal critics.''The True Faces of the Nation'' is what the Communist Party daily Granma called them -- as many as a dozen men and women who faked opposition to Fidel Castro's government to gather facts and figures about the dissidents.Several of the undercover agents were so trusted by U.S. diplomats...