Top Official: U.S. Wants Cuba 'Liberation' [View All]

[Rose Siding]

WASHINGTON -- President Bush will be committed during his second term to the "liberation of Cuba" by extending moral and political support to the Cuban people, a top State Department official said Friday.

Roger Noriega, who heads the department's Latin American bureau, also said that once Fidel Castro is no longer in power, the United States is ready to support broad economic and political reform in Cuba "to ensure that vestiges of the regime don't hold on."

Noriega noted that Washington has a blueprint for providing social, economic and other types of assistance to Cuba in the post-Castro era.
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"The transition essentially is under way today," Noriega told a gathering of more than 200 people at an event sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In recent days, Castro ordered the release of some prisoners who were facing long sentences following their convictions last year of collaborating with the United States in anti-regime activities.

The Bush administration denied the allegation and said the detentions of 75 activists in March 2003 exposed the repressive nature of the regime.

The prisoner releases appeared to have been the result of Spanish mediation and could lead to a thaw in Cuban relations with the Europe.

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