More foot in mouth from Lula on Cuba

Brazil’s President Lula is a largely beloved figure, in his country and abroad: Barack Obama is widely quoted as having told Lula, upon meeting at the G20 summit in London in April 2009, that the Brazilian leader was “the most popular politician on earth.”

But even Lula appears to have some issues that he cannot handle gracefully. His relationship with the Cuban government seems to be one of them. Many hoped, last month, that Lula would use his good rapport with the Castros to try to press for the release of the many prisoners on the island that the international community watches with concern. But he visited the island and departed without broaching the issue, avoiding requests from government opposition groups to meet him. This despite the fact that a jailed dissident hunger striker, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, had died the day before his arrival, and countries worldwide released a spate of condemnations.

And all this came to a head when, in an interview with the Associated Press last week, Lula came under much criticism for seemingly likening Cuban dissident prisoners to the criminals of Sao Paulo who ran drug rings and orchestrated a wave of killings in 2006. His comment: “I don’t think a hunger strike can be used as a pretext for human rights to free people. Imagine if all the criminals in Sao Paulo entered into hunger strikes to demand freedom.”

Eek. Poor choice of words. What might be his point was better made by his Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim. His comment: “It’s one thing to defend democracy, human rights, the right to free speech. It’s another thing to be supporting everything that is dissident in the world. That is not [Brazil’s] role.” Still, we have not yet seen Lula and the Brazilian government as particularly outspoken on democracy, human rights, and the right to free speech, either.

(Photo from topnews.in)