By Andrew Cawthorne
Reuters
HAVANA, May 10 (Reuters) - Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, riding an unprecedented wave of international friendliness, looks set to revel in Geneva on his first foreign trip of this year.
Attending the World Health Organization's annual assembly this week should enable Castro, 71, to bolster a high international profile he has enjoyed since Pope John Paul's historic visit to Cuba in January.
And the probable presence in Geneva too of U.S. first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton -- maybe even sleeping under the same hotel roof -- adds just the sort of political spice to the trip that Castro both enjoys and knows how to take advantage of.
``He's a wily old soldier,'' said a Western diplomat in Havana. ``He knows he's on a good streak at the moment, and the Geneva visit is designed to milk that for all it's worth.''
For security reasons, Cuban authorities do not announce Castro's travel plans until he is in the air. But government sources confirmed he will almost certainly be leaving for Switzerland early this week.
A manager of Geneva's luxury Intercontinental Hotel told Reuters Cuba had booked 25 rooms from May 13-21, and Castro was expected to use the same suite as former comrade-in-arms Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara in 1964.
The communist leader's appearance in Switzerland would be his first trip abroad since the Ibero-American Summit on Venezuela's Margarita Island last November. It will be his first time in Europe since the 1996 World Food summit in Rome where he also had what he termed a ``miraculous'' audience with the Pope.
Castro's other high-profile trips in recent years -- always well chosen for their political significance -- include the 1995 U.N. Social Summit in Copenhagen followed by a visit to French President Francois Mitterrand, and to South African President Nelson Mandela's inauguration in 1994.
The bearded Marxist leader even entered the arch-enemy's camp with a 1995 visit to New York to attend the United Nations' 50th anniversary -- an occasion he used, predictably, to denounce the U.S. economic embargo on the Caribbean island.
In Venezuela six months ago, Castro's newsworthy presence eclipsed a turgid official agenda on ``The Ethical Values of Democracy.'' But he looked frail and weary and was uncharacteristically brief in his remarks.
Since then, his health has picked up notably -- as proven by a series of marathon public speeches, some lasting all night -- but he has not traveled again until this week.
Rather, Castro, used to being shunned and isolated by world leaders over the decades, has basked in the last six months in a remarkable flood of official foreign interest.
The undoubted high spot was the Pontiff's trip in January when the Pope famously called ``for the world to open up to Cuba, and for Cuba to open up to the world.'' That laid the ground for last month's ground-breaking visit by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien -- the first time a head of government from a major Western power set foot on Cuban soil in 12 years.
Between those visits, Cuba hosted important business missions from Spain, France and Japan, all eager to take advantage of the island's cautious opening to foreign capital in the absence of U.S. competition because of the embargo.
Cuba in those months reestablished diplomatic relations with Guatemala, Haiti and the Dominican Republic; ended a diplomatic spat with Spain; and saw the first defeat in years of a U.S.-sponsored vote at the United Nations to condemn its human rights' record.
While excluded from the Summit of the Americas last month in Chile, Cuba enjoyed the satisfaction in absentia of topping the agenda and hearing Latin American and Caribbean neighbors call repeatedly for an end to Havana's political isolation.
The diplomacy contrasts sharply with Havana's defensive mentality in the early 1990s as it struggled to come to terms with the Soviet collapse. But it has brought little sign of concrete changes soon to Castro's one-party socialist system.
The only concessions he has given, chiefly some releases of political prisoners and greater freedom for the Roman Catholic Church, are relatively small, analysts and diplomats say.
Castro, who came to power in a 1959 revolution, is certain to use the Geneva visit to try and build on the capitalist world's more conciliatory mood toward him.
But if recent form is anything to go by, he will also use it to hammer the U.S. embargo -- which he called last month ``a new version of the Holocaust'' -- safe in the knowledge that world support for the measure has never been lower.
Regarding himself as a champion for Third World Rights, Castro has traditionally chosen socially-oriented international forums as the framework for globe-trotting and a platform for his classically Marxist oratory.
At Copenhagen in 1995, for example, he told world leaders that there could be no social development ``where chaos and anarchy reign under the blind and savage laws of the market.'' REUTERS
10:20 05-10-98
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