World Jun. 05, 2009 - 03:38AM JST ( 5 )

HAVANA —

The Cuban government Thursday declined to return to the Organization of American States (OAS), despite hailing a landmark decision to lift the body’s 47-year ban on Havana as a “major victory.”

The OAS vote is “a major victory for Latin America and the Caribbean and also for the Cuban people,” said Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba’s National Assembly, in the communist government’s initial reaction to the decision.

But, Alarcon said, the move “does not alter what Cuba thought yesterday, the day before yesterday and today.”

Cuba—the Americas’ only one-party communist regime, and a harsh OAS critic—has previously shown no interest in rejoining the organization, which it derided this week as a “pestilent corpse” in state media.

Former Cuban President Fidel Castro, in an article in the state-run press before the vote, denounced the OAS as being complicit in “crimes” committed by the United States against the Caribbean island and the rest of Latin America.

“At one time or another, all of the countries of Latin America had been victims of Washington’s interventions and political and economic aggression,” he wrote.

The OAS cleared the way on Wednesday for Cuba to rejoin the hemispheric body, revoking Havana’s nearly half century old suspension imposed for joining the Soviet bloc.

The move, supported by the United States in a surprise consensus vote at an OAS general assembly meeting in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, was hailed as a historic development by Latin leaders as well as by US officials in Washington.

The text declared a resolution passed on January 31, 1962 that barred Cuba from the OAS as being “without effect.”

It said however Cuba must request readmission to the OAS and that its return to the fold would be based on pro-democracy “practices, purposes and principles” of the OAS, including its Democratic Charter.

“Cuba will not return to the OAS tomorrow nor the day after. It will still take a long time,” said OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza. But he said Wednesday’s action “removed a piece of junk from the OAS.”

Honduras’s Minister of Foreign Relations Patricia Rodas said after the vote that Cuba’s readmission would take place when Havana made an application to the body.

“We have begun to construct a new history,” she said, adding the vote made amends for a grave injustice against the people of Cuba.

In a statement, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed satisfaction that “everyone came to agree that Cuba cannot simply take its seat and that we must put Cuba’s participation to a determination down the road—if it ever chooses to seek reentry.”

The U.S. State Department’s top diplomat for Latin America Tom Shannon said the resolution bridged a “historic divide” between left and right, and removed “an historical impediment to Cuba’s participation” in the OAS.

Wire reports