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11/03/09 - AFP (Paris) - EU leaning toward normal ties with Cuba: official

(HAVANA) - Most EU member states want the European Union to resume normal
relations with communist Cuba, a European Union official said Tuesday.

European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Karel De Gucht,
on a visit to Havana acknowledged that the issue remains controversial for
some EU members.

But normalization "is an opinion (favored by) most EU members," he said
after meetings here with senior Cuban officials.

The European Union has long urged Havana to open up its political and
economic system as a condition for normal relations, even though it resumed
some aid to the island last year.

Spain, however, is expected to push for full normalization when it assumes
leadership of the EU early next year, even though some EU members insist on
requiring some diplomatic or political gesture from Havana as a condition
for fully normalized ties.

Cuba, the only one-party communist regime in the Americas, rejects political
opening and has not launched a major economic opening in 50 years of
revolutionary rule.

De Gucht, who met with council of ministers deputy Ricardo Cabrisas Tuesday,
called his meetings Monday with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez and Trade
and Foreign Investment Minister Rodrigo Malmierca "interesting."

The EU suspended ties after Cuba launched a major roundup of 75 dissidents
in March 2003, but resumed aid cooperation in 2008.

Havana is dead set against the so-called Common Position of the EU states
which in 1996 called for human rights and democracy progress in Cuba as a
condition for normal relations with the European bloc.