"Step by step the World is breaking off with Castro" Cuba Local Custom Tip by mannymiami

In a bitter criticism of the executions carried out last week in Cuba, José Saramago, the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer considered Fidel Castro's best friend among European intellectuals, broke with the regime Monday.

''This is as far as I go,'' Saramago wrote in a short but powerful essay printed in Spain's leading newspaper, El País, as the European Union, various countries and organizations around the world continued to offer public repudiations.

Killing three men by firing squad at dawn Friday for trying to spirit a ferry boat is unacceptable -- especially since the would-be hijackers didn't hurt anybody, wrote Saramago, a communist.

``Cuba has won no heroic victory by executing these three men, but it has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, robbed me of illusions.''

Leaders of the EU, which opened a Havana mission earlier this year, alluded to rejecting Cuba's petition to join the Cotonou Agreement, a trade accord that offers economic help to more than 70 developing nations.

The executions, the first for a terrorism offense in Cuba in more than a decade, could also give momentum for a condemnation by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, a measure that could be heard in Geneva as early as Wednesday. A group of nations led by Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Nicaragua had planned on again asking the commission to send a special representative to the island to report on violations -- something Cuba rejected last year.

But the executions could give steam to an even stronger measure -- an outright condemnation of Cuba. Some Latin American countries, however, have been wavering.

Friday's executions capped weeks of tension on the island of 11 million that included a flurry of attempted hijackings, dozens of arrests and stiff jail sentences for dissidents. Last week, 75 dissidents were sentenced with terms up to 28 years. They were accused of collaborating with, or taking money from, U.S. officials.