Secretary Clinton goes to South America

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Secretary Clinton goes to South America: "

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton heads to Peru today for the meetings of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States, which will be held in Lima. Her trip will also include stops in Ecuador, Colombia and Barbados, and she’ll already be back in the States on June 10 (Thursday). The trip has nothing to do inherently with Cuba, but unfortunately for Washington, in discussions of hemispheric relations it is seldom easy to skirt the contentious Cuba issue.

And so, Friday’s briefing by Assistant Secretary Arturo Valenzuela on Clinton’s trip eventually turned to the question of Cuba, though not the issue that might have been expected: after the OAS voted to allow Cuba to apply for membership into the organization last year, one might have assumed that the press would ask where that stands (the answer, of course, is that Havana’s disinterest in joining the OAS has manifested itself not simply in turning down the offer to apply, but in a commitment with Caracas and several Latin American nations to create an alternative hemispheric body that would exclude the United States and Canada).

The questions in the press conference delved into other issues. First, have there been contacts with Cuba on the oil spill crisis? As we’ve noted previously, the simple answer (and the short answer Valenzuela provided) is yes. Then: are there any updates on the detained U.S. government contractor in Cuba, Alan Gross? No updates; there have been consular visits and U.S. officials remain “extremely concerned about that case.”

Then the best one—the final question of the briefing:

QUESTION: One more on - the embargo of Cuba is going to come up for sure. They’re going to keep pressing the U.S., but you will just keep repeating the same old positions. Is that right? (Laughter.)

ASSISTANT SECRETARY VALENZUELA: Is that a leading question? (Laughter.)

And that was all.

Perhaps the most disturbing part is the laughter, laying bare the embarrassing fact that the “same old positions” are not valid justifications but age-old fallbacks, and everyone in the briefing room gets it enough to realize that the whole matter is just laughable. And there is no response to the question, because there is no plan for figuring out how to gracefully slip out of the rhetoric of the past half century into a new approach. Instead, the press conference ends without an answer.

(Photo: Reuters/Molly Riley)

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