Sir Ronald Sanders is a business executive and former Caribbean diplomat who publishes widely on small states in the global community. Reponses to: ronaldsanders29@hotmail.com

It must be even tougher to be a US Ambassador to small countries who are convinced that the US should not have ventured into Iraq at all unless it had done so as part of a United Nations force with the full authority of the UN Security Council, and who believe that the continued US military presence to prop up a dubiously installed (and clearly spiteful) government will further turn the country into a cauldron of violence and blood. 

It must be especially tough to be a US Ambassador in a week when the Democratic members of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee opposed President Bush's "new way forward" in Iraq, and the majority of the Senate, including many Republicans, was showing signs of deep disagreement with the administration over Iraq.

And, it must be especially tough to be a US Ambassador when every international human rights organisation, the governments of the European Union, and a host of others have decried the denial of rights to approximately 400 persons held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay with charges brought against only 10 of them.

But, it must be exceptionally tough to be a US Ambassador advocating respect for human rights in the same week that the British Broadcasting Service (BBC) released the findings of a poll which it commissioned from the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.  The poll, conducted in 25 countries, showed that 73 per cent of the persons polled disapprove of the Iraq war while 67 percent disapprove of the way the United States has treated terror suspects detained at Guantánamo Bay.

Being in tough situations on behalf of your government comes with the territory for every Ambassador. 

So, one has to admire the present US Ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, Mary Orismam, for her sense of duty to her government when, in the same week that all of this was happening, she delivered the message to Caribbean leaders to speak out for freedom in Cuba, and then went on to tell them that, in relation of Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chavez, “my mother told me as a child that you are known by the company you keep”.

Ambassador Orismam made this statement in Dominica where she was presenting her credentials to the President of Dominica, Nicholas Liverpool.

No official response was made to the statement at the time this commentary was being written, but, if one were to be made to this particular statement, it may have gone as follows:

Caribbean leaders are well aware that for 45 years, the United States has enforced an embargo against Cuba and has repeatedly sponsored forms of intervention and destabilisation in the country.  They also recognise that the present US administration is spending $80 million a year on promoting dissent within Cuba and on propaganda directed at Cuba.  No other country in the world has had to suffer such callous behaviour from another; Cuba is an abnormal place, made so by the abnormal treatment it has been forced to endure from successive US governments even against the wishes of the majority of people of the United States.

In this connection, Caribbean countries and their leaders recognise that, as long as the US continues both its embargo and the deliberate funding of dissent in Cuba, the people of Cuba are restrained from living in freedom with all the responsibilities, obligations and enjoyments that such freedom would bring.  When a US government decides to listen to its own Congressmen and the Governors of several states in the mid-West who want to do business in Cuba, and turn away from pandering to the pressure of the groups of Cuban-American exiles as part of its Presidential election process, and to normalise its relations with Cuba, Caribbean leaders will be in a better position to call publicly for normalcy in Cuba including the institutionalisation of freedom. 

It would also help if the US were to close down the atrocity to freedom that Guantanamo Bay has become.

And, as for Venezuela, Caribbean leaders keep company with democratically-elected governments the world over, even when the winner of an election has to be established by a Court.  Thus, the Caribbean maintains its relations with Venezuela as it does with the United States and other countries, recognising always that leaders and governments come and go, but countries endure.

It has also not by-passed the attention of Caribbean leaders that the United States and Venezuela have the closest economic relationship.  The United States is the biggest purchaser of Venezuelan petroleum and Venezuela is among the four biggest suppliers of petroleum to the US.  The two countries keep close company and, as the Ambassador’s mother told her as a child, they are judged by that company.