Sascha Wil­son

For­mer prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning is call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go to apol­o­gise to Cu­ba Pres­i­dent Raul Cas­tro for in­sult­ing him. Speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence at his San Fer­nan­do East Con­stituen­cy of­fice yes­ter­day, Man­ning said the fi­as­co in­volv­ing the use of the Hilton Trinidad for the Fourth Cari­com/Cu­ba was to­tal­ly un­ac­cept­able and un­nec­es­sary. Man­ning said the Gov­ern­ment made a "a blun­der of great pro­por­tions," by of­fend­ing one of the coun­try's key al­lies in the Caribbean. Cas­tro was ob­vi­ous­ly in­sult­ed, Man­ning said, adding: "The Gov­ern­ment of T&T owes the Gov­ern­ment of Cu­ba and par­tic­u­lar Pres­i­dent Cas­tro an apol­o­gy for the fi­as­co they ex­posed him to," he said. Say­ing that Cas­tro made a great con­tri­bu­tion to the suc­cess of the Fifth Sum­mit of Amer­i­c­as in T&T 2009, he sug­gest­ed that the Gov­ern­ment send a spe­cial amnesty to the Cuban gov­ern­ment and Pres­i­dent.

Re­call­ing that in 1972, the Heads of four States, in­clud­ing T&T, passed a res­o­lu­tion in the con­text of sov­er­eign rights to de­ter­mine their own course and to break the iso­la­tion of Cu­ba. In­stead of ex­er­cis­ing the sov­er­eign right and host­ing the sum­mit in a fa­cil­i­ty that it owns, he said the Gov­ern­ment "sort to in­volve the for­eign pol­i­cy of an­oth­er coun­try and use that to change the venue of the meet­ing". He said the Gov­ern­ment ought to have recog­nised that there were sen­si­tiv­i­ties in­volved in host­ing the Sum­mit at the Hilton and used diplo­mat­ic mea­sures to deal with them. Man­ning said T&T Am­bas­sador in Wash­ing­ton could have gone to State De­part­ment and clar­i­fied the mat­ter be­fore it got out of hand.

Man­ning al­so called on the Gov­ern­ment to re­solve an is­sue of ir­rel­e­vance that arose in Par­lia­ment on Fri­day when he sought to re­spond to Ram­bachan's state­ment that cast as­per­sions on the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion which he had head­ed. Say­ing that Ram­bachan's state­ment al­so bore no re­la­tion to the Ad­min­is­tra­tion of Jus­tice Elec­tron­ic Mon­i­tor­ing Bill 2011, he said: "The ques­tion that has to be re­solved is whether rel­e­vance means rel­e­vance to the Bill at hand or rel­e­vant to the de­bate as the de­bate de­vel­ops." Man­ning said his view that it has to be rel­e­vant to the de­bate as it de­vel­ops be­cause if it is not then a bias will ex­ist in favour of one side. He said on Fri­day it was done by the Gov­ern­ment, but it can eas­i­ly be done by the Op­po­si­tion.