Brazil calls for Cuba membership of OAS

Brazil said on Monday that Cuba should be allowed to join the Organisation of American States but that it is not seeking a standoff with the United States over the issue at a regional summit this week.

The call by Latin America's main diplomatic power to bring Cuba in from the cold adds weight to growing demands for U.S. President Barack Obama to go further in unravelling Washington's decades-old policy of isolating Cuba's communist government.

Obama eased the 47-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba on Monday by allowing U.S. telecommunications companies to do business there and lifting limits on family travel and money transfers to the island by Cuban Americans. [ID:nN13331508]

At a Summit of the Americas meeting that starts on Friday, several Latin American leaders will push for a broader re-integration of Cuba into the OAS regional group.

"Cuba being absent from the inter-American system, including the OAS, is an anomaly and needs to be corrected," Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told reporters in Rio de Janeiro.

The Obama administration has made it clear it will not completely lift the embargo as it aims to keep up pressure for reforms in Cuba. It also does not want the April 17-19 Summit of the Americas to be dominated by the Cuba issue.

OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza also expressed caution, saying Cuba needed to show clearly it was committed to democracy to be readmitted to the group.

"We need to know if Cuba is interested in returning to multilateral organizations or if it is thinking only about the end of the embargo and economic growth," Insulza told Brazilian daily newspaper O Globo.

"This is a summit of countries with good will but good will alone is not enough to cause change."

All 34 leaders at the Summit, from which Cuba is barred, are from democratic countries, said Insulza, a former Chilean foreign minister.

"The general assembly of the OAS decided that all member countries must adhere to democratic principles," he said when asked about Cuba, a one-party state that has been ruled by Fidel Castro and his younger brother Raul since they took power in a 1959 revolution.

Despite its support for Cuba, Brazil is unlikely to push the issue too hard at this week's summit.

"I think neither the Cubans nor we want to transform the summit into a confrontation between the United States and Latin America," Amorim said.

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