THIS WEEK, Louis Michel, the EU commissioner, concluded a four-day visit to Cuba. The EU imposed diplomatic sanctions after Fidel Castro jailed 75 dissidents in 2003. Those sanctions were suspended after the release on medical grounds of 14 of the prisoners, and the EU has set itself till June to judge whether a diplomatic approach is the most effective course. Unfortunately, the signals are almost a parody of the world according to Donald Rumsfeld. “Old Europe” bears the stereotype of feebleness in the face of appalling regimes. The stereotype is true.

The dissidents’ trials were closed to foreign diplomats and journalists, founded on trumped-up charges of being foreign agents (some of the dissidents had met members of the US mission), and resulted in prison terms of up to 28 years. M Michel apparently received neither an explicit commitment from Havana that the remaining prisoners would be released, nor any other undertaking to improve Cuba’s human rights record. Yet he declared himself optimistic because he had been allowed to meet pro-democracy activists and wives of political prisoners. For good measure, he added an impertinent flourish by advising the democracy campaigners to avoid provoking Castro.

Support for the overthrow of Castro’s tyranny ought to be as much an issue for progressive opinion as was opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. It is clearly not regarded that way. A particularly dispiriting example appeared in Saturday’s Guardian. An appeal signed by Harold Pinter, Danielle Mitterrand and the Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu among others, declared: “There has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra judicial execution (in Cuba) since 1959.” The qualifier “extrajudicial” is a moral evasion Orwell could scarcely have satirised when depicting the apologists for Stalin’s show trials.

I believe strongly in the EU’s capacity to promote democratic values in the world. Cuba is a test case where current US diplomacy is self-defeating. The Helms-Burton Act, which mandates sanctions on foreign companies that invest in expropriated US property in Cuba, is so arbitrarily punitive that the US is wary of applying its provisions. In that mess, the aim of democratic change in Cuba becomes obscured by disputes among allies. Tragically, the EU is the last place to look for a constructive alternative.