Mexico Nettled after US Meddled
Granma newspaper sympathized with Mexican protests this Friday that the United States has acted "with impunity and absolute disrespect" towards that government and people when it expelled a Cuban delegation from a hotel there.

The daily´s editorial tells how Washington assumes the right to ignore Mexico, and slams the way in which the Cuban energy officials and executives were expelled from the Maria Isabel Sheraton Hotel, where there was a meeting scheduled with US businesspeople.

According to international laws, "the nationality of a subsidiary is that of the country where it has been constituted, so the Sheraton Hotel is subject to Mexican laws and not those of the United States," the daily states.

A meeting had been scheduled at the Maria Isabel Sheraton between Cuban officials and businesspeople with representatives from large US companies interested in the potential of the Cuban energy market.

Organized by the US-Cuban Commerce Association, the business gathering was open to the media and press and would bring together representatives from Exxon Mobile, Caterpillar, the Valero Energy Corporation, which runs the US largest refinery, and from the National Council of Foreign Trade with Cuban officials and businesspeople.

Also attending were members of the Louisiana State´s Economic Development Department and the Corpus Christi port in Texas.

The action, apart from being legally questionable, has a deep practical content above all in the current globalized world, where foreign shareholders can have companies in any nation, Granma daily points out.

The newspaper also pointed out that the White House "did not even bother to inform Mexican authorities and the expulsion was ordered by a US Department of Treasury bureaucrat."

The daily praised the attitude of the Mexican people, legislators and social organizations that rejected with indignation the violation of their national sovereignty.

Mexican authorities, states the publication, announced a group of measures against the Sheraton Hotel, although Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez abstained from sending an official note of protest to Washington and he only presented a "verbal request."