EU leaning toward normal ties with Cuba: official

(HAVANA) - Most EU member states want the European Union to resume normal relations with communist Cuba, a European Union official said Tuesday.

European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Karel De Gucht, on a visit to Havana acknowledged that the issue remains controversial for some EU members.

But normalization "is an opinion (favored by) most EU members," he said after meetings here with senior Cuban officials.

The European Union has long urged Havana to open up its political and economic system as a condition for normal relations, even though it resumed some aid to the island last year.

Spain, however, is expected to push for full normalization when it assumes leadership of the EU early next year, even though some EU members insist on requiring some diplomatic or political gesture from Havana as a condition for fully normalized ties.

Cuba, the only one-party communist regime in the Americas, rejects political opening and has not launched a major economic opening in 50 years of revolutionary rule.

De Gucht, who met with council of ministers deputy Ricardo Cabrisas Tuesday, called his meetings Monday with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez and Trade and Foreign Investment Minister Rodrigo Malmierca "interesting."

The EU suspended ties after Cuba launched a major roundup of 75 dissidents in March 2003, but resumed aid cooperation in 2008.

Havana is dead set against the so-called Common Position of the EU states which in 1996 called for human rights and democracy progress in Cuba as a condition for normal relations with the European bloc.