Nobody should have been surprised by Cuba’s public spurning of the opening given it to return to the Organisation of American States (OAS). The OAS, meeting recently in Honduras, voted unanimously (that is, including America’s Barack Obama administration) to scrap the 1962 decision that suspended Cuba as Fidel Castro’s revolution took the island toward communism and an alliance with the Soviet Union.

That vote did not seem likely early in the meeting since the United States, through its Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had insisted that the Caribbean’s largest island should not be allowed to return to the OAS until it embraced democratic principles and made progress on human rights. Inevitably, that put pressure on the American delegation, not least from the Castro administration’s vocal allies in the region.

It would seem, though, that behind-the-scenes negotiations led to a diplomatic compromise under which Cuba’s re-entry would be ’the result of a process of dialogue begun at the request of the Cuban government and in line with the practices, purposes and principles of the OAS’. Therein, as they say, lay the rub since the OAS’s stated mission is to defend democracy in the western hemisphere, which means there was more-much more-to the compromise than met the eye.

If the Castro administration has repeatedly said it has no interest in returning to the OAS because of its stated view that the OAS is an instrument of US policy in Latin America, it has also shown not the slightest interest in moving from a dictatorship to a democracy, whatever the hopes initially raised by the elder Castro’s stepping down from the presidency in favour of his brother. In seeming to open the door, therefore, the OAS caveat means that it is up to Cuba to embrace the democratic reforms that would make it possible for it to return.

Cuba, we have repeatedly argued, is a Caribbean problem and while Caricom, for example, has agitated for the island’s complete return to the regional fold, it also has an obligation to nudge Cuba in a democratic direction. Either that, or our leaders would remain culpable of not doing everything in their power to lift the chains with which the Cuban people have been bound for nigh on 50 years.