Havana, Oct 14 (CTK special correspondent) – The Czech Republic plans to be far more active in its approach to Cuba, compared with its so far approach that has been reserved due to human rights violation by the Cuban communist regime, Czech Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Tlapa, on a visit to Cuba, said yesterday.
He said the recent developments in Cuba have opened the door to political rapprochement and economic cooperation.
Prague will not cease to pay attention to the curtailed freedoms of the Cuban people, but it will not ascribe primary importance to this, Tlapa said.
“Cuba has embarked on the path of transformation, but the truth is that the state-run companies still dominate. In Cuba, there are market conditions that profoundly differ from those known from Europe,” Tlapa, who led a Czech government delegation, including over 20 businesspeople, on a four-day visit to Cuba, said at its close.
During the visit, he met representatives of the Cuban government and trade organisations.
The goal of the visit was to follow up a meeting of the two countries’ foreign ministers on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in September and launch the process of the two countries coming closer to each other, Tlapa said.
“We have concluded that it makes sense to develop Czech-Cuban relations, also in view of the changes that have been underway in Cuba and that seem irreversible to us,” Tlapa told CTK.
He said Prague plans to promote the mutual diplomatic representation level from that of charges d’affaires to that of ambassadors.
Czech diplomacy is well aware of the brother Castro regime’s unwillingness to introduce principles of democracy in Cuba, but it does not want to put emphasis on it like in the past, when relations between Prague and Havana cooled markedly in the 1990s.
The promotion of “human dignity and human rights is a part of our foreign policy. We think this is an issue we should present in Cuba. During the current trip I met representatives of not only the government but also the civic society,” said Tlapa, who also met the Cuban cardinal.
He said the Czech Republic will support the freedom of access to information in Cuba by enabling Cubans to follow the Internet, otherwise available to rich people only, at the Czech embassy.
Simultaneously with the Tlapa-led delegation, Cuba has been visited by a group of negotiators from the Czech Finance Ministry.
On Wednesday, they launched bilateral negotiations about the sum Havana owes to Prague, a debt dating back to the pre-1989 period.
Havana owes seven billion crowns to Prague, the Czechs say.
($1=23.853 crowns)
