HAVANA -- Prime Minister Jean Chrétien arrived last night to a warm welcome from Cuban President Fidel Castro, passing up an opportunity to deliver a direct message on human rights to a live Cuban television audience.
Mr. Chrétien made only glancing references to rights and democracy, stressing instead the commercial ties between Canada and Cuba in the only live broadcast planned during his three-day visit.
While helping Mr. Castro inaugurate a new airport terminal partly financed by Canada, he said the Western Hemisphere and the world were changing "and we must all adapt."
But Mr. Chrétien stated he was proud that Canada and Cuba "have always chosen dialogue over confrontation, engagement over isolation, exchange over estrangement" and added: "Now . . . that approach is more important than ever."
Mr. Castro replied by thanking Canada for its help and delivering a blistering attack on the United States trade embargo against Cuba, which he compared to the genocide embodied in the Holocaust of the Second World War.
"It's like using biological, chemical or nuclear weapons," he said. "Those who do such things should be taken before an international court of law to stand trial as war criminals."
Then he gave Mr. Chrétien a brief tour of the terminal,
exchanging quips through interpreters with the Prime Minister and his wife
Aline.
Mr. Castro joked that he wished Canada had 100 million people instead of
30 million "so you could have more tourists" visiting Cuba.
Eyeing the colour scheme of the terminal, in which railings and other accents are painted bright red, Mr. Chrétien commented that it was the colour of Canada's Liberal Party.
"And after the visit they'll accuse you of being a Communist," Mr. Castro replied.
Then he raised the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U.S. president during the 1930s and 1940s. "They used to say he was a Communist, but actually he saved capitalism."
That, Mr. Chrétien said, was evidence that the world of several decades ago is not the world of today. "Now it's a new world. I would be pleased to discuss that with you tomorrow."
"Yes," Mr. Castro replied, "because here the press will find out everything we talk about."
Canadian officials said later that Mr. Chrétien would press for the release of four prominent dissidents jailed last year and still apparently held without charge.
The four were arrested after calling a press conference to criticize a document prepared for the Communist Party's fifth congress, held last fall.
One of the four, economist Marta Beatriz Roque Caballero, is reportedly suffering from breast tumours. The others are Rene Gomez, Feliz Bonne Carcasses and Vladimiro Roca, son of a prominent revolutionary leader.
In his speech, the Prime Minister said Canada would continue to work on a 14-point co-operation agreement signed last year. "It promotes discussions on a wide range of issues, such as universal human rights," he said.
But the Cubans who applauded when the Pope urged greater religious and political freedom in televised masses during his January visit heard no such call from Mr. Chrétien.
He said the new terminal, the third at the Havana airport, symbolized Cuba's desire for closer relations with the rest of the world, including "a more dynamic, more democratic, more prosperous hemisphere."
It was the only reference to democracy in an 18-paragraph speech by the Prime Minister, who promised before he left Canada to raise human-rights issues with Mr. Castro and will have the chance to do so in meetings today.
Canadian officials learned only yesterday that the ceremony welcoming Mr. Chrétien on a three-day visit would be broadcast live.
The move is unusual in a country where power shortages have severely restricted television transmission time.
Mr. Chrétien's visit is the first by a Canadian prime minister since 1976, when tens of thousands of cheering Cubans welcomed Pierre Trudeau and his wife Margaret to Havana.
Mr. Castro usually frowns at suggestions about how Cuba should run its internal affairs. But Mr. Chrétien's trip has awakened unusual expectations.
He has an hour-long meeting today and a working dinner tonight with Mr. Castro, who heads a one-party Communist state that routinely jails political dissidents.
The Chrétien trip is a giant step forward in the Canada-Cuba relationship, which has been maintained through 35 years of U.S. hostility and is now diversifying rapidly.
Canadian companies are active in mining, construction, tourism and biomedical industries. Academic and cultural exchanges are proliferating.
Aid agencies have set up programs with Cuban counterparts. Legions of experts funded by Ottawa are advising Cuba on how to organize modern state institutions such as a tax collection system and a central bank.
Former B.C. ombudsman Stephen Owen recently completed a report on Cuba's citizen's-complaints procedure for the Canadian government, and yesterday he urged Mr. Chrétien not to be satisfied with Cuban promises of dialogue on the 14-point accord.
"Canada should attach clear conditions to step-by-step progress that can be measured off," Mr. Owen said. "Whatever we do should be measured by performance."
Mr. Owen, who now teaches at the University of Victoria, spent a week in Cuba in February studying a network of public-complaints commissions that allow Cubans, in theory at least, to criticize public officials.
In a telephone interview, he declined to give details of his report to Ottawa on how the system might be turned into a bona-fide ombudsman scheme.
But he said Cuban officials told him they want to make the complaints system work better. Among other things, they want independent investigative power, full access to government records and the right to report publicly, he said.
"There is a willingness, a keenness, to receive direct assistance from Canada to see how laws could be drafted."
Mr. Chrétien's visit follows one by Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy last year, during which the two countries signed the 14-point agreement to co-operate on various fronts.
The Chrétien trip gives a fresh jolt of international recognition to the Castro regime. When Cuba unpacked its red carpets in recent years, it was often for the leaders of small island nations.
But Cuba has been scoring diplomatic points on several fronts since the Pope visited in January and called for an end to its isolation.
A U.S.-sponsored resolution condemning human-rights abuses in Cuba was defeated at the United Nations human rights commission in Geneva for the first time since 1992.
Spain, Cuba's former colonial master, has patched up a rift that left its embassy in Havana without an ambassador for more than a year. King Juan Carlos plans to visit Cuba before the end of the year.
Mr. Chrétien is scheduled to return to Ottawa tomorrow night,
hoping to snuff out a revolt by Liberal backbenchers over the government's
failure to compensate all victims of blood transfusions tainted with the
hepatitis C virus.
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