Castro to hold court at Ibero-American summit

By Andrew Cawthorne

HAVANA (Reuters): Cuba's veteran communist leader Fidel Castro, isolated internationally for long periods of his four- decade rule, should receive another end-of-century diplomatic tonic with next week's Ibero-American Summit.

Yet with five of the region's presidents staying away, and local dissidents taking advantage of the event to publicize their criticisms of his one-party socialist system, Cuba's "Maximum Leader" may not have an entirely smooth ride.

"The summit is a bit of a double-edged sword for Fidel -- I think overall it will be another diplomatic success for him, but undoubtedly there's a potential for snags," said one European diplomat in Havana.

Castro, a wily politician who has defied 40 years of U.S. opposition to stay in power, will be hoping the summit goes as smoothly as last year's landmark visit by Pope John Paul II.

That trip, the first by a pope to Cuba, was a relatively trouble-free foreign relations' triumph for Castro, bolstering his image as an international statesman and paving the way for a wave of rapprochement from abroad with his government.

Despite the pontiff's reputation for helping bring down communism in Eastern Europe, and his calls for greater freedoms within Cuba, the visit did not spark any serious challenge to Castro's political hegemony. His condemnations of the U.S. economic embargo strengthened Castro's case internationally.

This time, in the most important event for Cuba since then, Castro hosts leaders from around Latin America, Spain and Portugal during the ninth annual meeting of the regional body.

"The success of the event is already guaranteed," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said last week.

In a foreign relations' coup, he will also welcome King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain during the summit on their first visit to the former Spanish island-colony.

The official theme of the summit is "Ibero-America and the international financial situation in a globalized economy."

That will enable Cuba to broadcast its familiar message in favor of "globalized solidarity" and against "savage capitalism," and to again decry the ills of Third World debt.

Perhaps more importantly, however, the summit will, Havana hopes, implicitly highlight Washington's failure to isolate Castro, 73, and make the U.S. embargo on the island look increasingly outdated in the post-Cold War era.

Anti-Castro critics hope the summit will serve a different purpose by providing a rallying point for opponents to expose him as a dictator, and increase pressure for political reforms and prisoner releases.

Castro aides say the famously garrulous president, whose 1959 Cuban Revolution is one of the great landmarks of 20th century Latin American history, plans to be a discrete host.

"The line we have adopted is to give priority to the interests of others ... the summit is not for Cuba or for the honor of Cuba, but for the guests," Castro himself said in a eight-hour session with media this week to discuss the event.

Five of the region's 22 heads-of-state are staying away.

Presidents Carlos Menem of Argentina and Eduardo Frei of Chile are boycotting the meeting in protest at Spain's handling of the case of former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet.

And the leaders of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, are not coming because of political differences with Castro.

Within Cuba, many of the small, illegal dissident groups have seized on the summit as a focus for protests and a chance to press their case to the international community.

Meetings, news conferences, and special messages to the summit heads have proliferated in recent weeks.

Castro has publicly accused them of trying to organize a "parallel summit," lambasting the dissidents as "counter- revolutionary traitors" in the pay of the United States.

The government has responded with some temporary arrests and house confinements around the most provocative events.

One man likely to rock the boat at the Havana summit -- in absentia -- is Chile's ex-strongman Pinochet, whose arrest in London on the request of a Spanish judge has fueled passions and old rifts throughout the Ibero-American world. As well as already producing two major absences, the Pinochet case is sure also to be a center of summit debate.

Few doubt, however, that Castro's burly, bearded figure will again be the abiding image of the summit.

One of the world's longest-serving and most controversial figures, and an icon of 20th century communism, Castro has dominated media coverage of previous summits, and is expected to do so even more as the event's host. "This is Fidel's show -- as always," a European diplomat said.