Brussels - European Union foreign ministers have agreed to lift sanctions on Cuba in spite of deep divisions within the 27- member bloc about the regime's human rights credentials, officials said Friday.
'We have expressed the hope that Cuba will change,' said Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the EU until the end of the month.
'We see signs of transition,' he added, noting however that the bloc was 'still divided regarding our assessment of the Cuban situation.'
Diplomats said Sweden, Denmark and the Czech Republic had been among the most reluctant member states to lift the sanctions, demanding that Cuba first make progress in freeing political prisoners and in implementing other human rights concessions.
As a compromise, ministers agreed to review their decision in one year's time.
The Thursday night deal scrapped the sanctions that were imposed by the EU in 2003 and suspended in 2005.
Unlike the trade and investment embargo imposed by the US nearly 50 years ago, the EU sanctions were largely symbolic.
They include limits on high-level government visits and the role of EU diplomats in Cuba's cultural events.
'It wasn't working anyway,' Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said.
But the EU move has nevertheless drawn criticism from the island's dissidents and risks placing Brussels and Washington on a collision course.
Earlier Thursday, a US State Department spokesman said Washington opposed any moves to ease sanctions on Cuba, saying that the reforms introduced so far by the new Cuban president are merely 'cosmetic.'
The end of sanctions would give legitimacy to a dictatorial regime, deputy spokesman Tom Casey said, and countries should not signal that the 'continued oppression of the Cuban people is any more acceptable now than in the past.'
Dissidents in Cuba also objected to the lifting of the sanctions, charging the EU with hypocrisy.
The lifting of the sanctions 'confirms once more that, with some notable exceptions, the EU is following a hypocritical policy exclusively concerned with its economic interests and not about Cuba entering the circle of the democratic nations of the world,' Vladimiro Roca, one of Cuba's best-known dissidents and leader of the illegal Social Democratic Party, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Roca, who is a recipient of the EU's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, said he was ashamed of governments 'that, far from promoting the democratic values under which they live, are made accomplices to one of the last dictatorships in the world.'
Although EU diplomats said the lifting of the sanctions was aimed at encouraging democratic reforms in Cuba, the economist Oscar Espinosa, one of 75 dissidents whose arrests in 2003 led to the EU sanctions, warned the move could harden the attitude of its Communist government.
'It is worrisome because the lifting of the sanctions without something in return from Cuba could have a very negative effect on Cuba's internal affairs,' Espinosa said.
'It could send a signal to the hardline sectors of the government that it pays to be intransigent and inflexible.'
As the European Union ceased high-level contacts with Cuba's government in 2003, it also increased its contacts with Cuba's dissidents.
But the sanctions were suspended in 2005, and Spain pushed to have them officially lifted after Fidel Castro withdrew as Cuba's leader.
His brother Raul, who took over as president in February, implemented reforms including giving unused state land to farmers and allowing ordinary Cubans to use mobile phones, stay in tourist hotels and buy energy-consuming goods like DVD players.
While the EU saw signs of liberalization in those moves, Cuba's dissidents said they have seen no change in the government's treatment of the opposition. F
or instance, of the 75 dissidents jailed in 2003, 55 remain in custody.
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