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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the March 6, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Anti-Cuban law deepens U.S. rift with Europe

By Pat Chin

European nations, challenging the anti-Cuba Helms-Burton Law, are summoning the U.S. government before a panel of judges appointed by the World Trade Organization. The White House has responded by saying the U.S. government will not cooperate with the WTO. "We will not show up," snorted a White House official.

The Clinton administration is crying "national security" and denying that Helms-Burton is a trade issue. Therefore, the White House says, the panel "has no competence to proceed."

The challenge and the refusal come after six months of negotiations between Washington and its imperialist allies in Europe failed to reach a compromise.

The Helms-Burton Law aims to topple the Cuban revolution and its socialist system by choking the Cuban economy. It also punishes foreign companies that trade with Cuba by enabling U.S. citizens whose property was expropriated by the Cuban revolution to sue-in U.S. courts-foreign businesses that make use of this property.

Some of Washington's usual allies angrily protested the law's challenge to their sovereignty. This caused Clinton to twice postpone enforcing some of the Helms-Burton provisions that punish "third parties."

Using Helms-Burton, U.S. officials did bar some business executives from Canada and Mexico from entering the United States. These two countries, along with European countries, carry on extensive trade with Cuba. The two countries declared Helms-Burton a violation of international law, and have passed retaliatory measures that would kick in should Washington choose to impose sanctions on their businesses.

The WTO was created as part of a general trade agreement two years ago. As a signer of this agreement, Washington is bound by its provisions. But now the U.S. government is refusing to cooperate.

It's not the first time U.S. imperialism has chosen to ignore a world body it has recognized. This type of arrogant response is typical. When the Sandinistas were in power in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s, the World Court found the United States guilty of mining Nicaragua's harbors. The Reagan administration ignored these rulings, too.

Washington has long targeted Cuba because the people of that Caribbean country threw out the racist exploiters from the United States and their local junior partners, and have dared to carve out an independent path to development- without permission from Capitol Hill and the White House.

Now Washington wants its old allies-which are no friends of the Cuban revolution themselves-to knuckle under to its every whim regarding Cuba.

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