I have no problem and applaud the notion of having a scrolling screen at the US Interests Section in Havana informing Cubans of the terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in case you were wondering why US policy towards Fidel Castro all too often does more harm than good, read this:
Mexico and Cuba criticized the United States on Monday for demanding that the Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel here order a group of Cuban officials, who were meeting last week with representatives of American oil companies, to check out of the hotel and leave the premises.
On Friday, the United States Treasury Department contacted the company that owns the Sheraton and warned them that they were violating federal laws against trading with Cuba by allowing the meeting to take place in their hotel.
The hotel told the Cuban representatives to leave, and sent their room deposits to the Treasury Department. The meeting was moved to a hotel not owned by an American company.
The American action has provoked a minor storm. Mayor Alejandro Encinas of Mexico City, a member of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution, said Monday morning that he would ask his prosecutors to find out if the hotel had broken local antidiscrimination laws and seek to shut it down if it had.
For an administration that has expressed nothing but contempt for international law, it certainly has no problem exporting US law outside US territory:
Then, the Mexican foreign minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, said the idea that a United States law was being enforced on Mexican soil was troubling. He said the government would take action against the hotel if it proved true. "There does not exist and neither should there exist the extraterritorial application of this law in our nation," he said.
This does nothing to help the cause of freedom in Cuba. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.
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