The Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba reports that in the past week alone:

At a Madrid seminar, former Czech President Vaclav Havel urged the European Union to establish a fund in support of political reform in Cuba.

Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio said: ''Fidel Castro’s regime has run its course. The Cuban Suarez (a reference to Franco’s minister, who led the Spanish transition) is already in Cuba. ... In a few years, Cuba will be a democratic country.'' (El País, Madrid, July 2)

A Pax Christi representative, attending the Madrid meeting, suggested a ''selective boycott'' against ''Cuba’s government elite,'' denying them the right to travel to European Union countries. 

According to a column by former U.S. Ambassador to the OAS Harriet Babbit, ''The international community’s responsibility is now to register in at every possible moment in every possible venue its horror at the egregious violations of basic rights ...'' in Cuba.

French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin met with Reporters Without Borders and with Ileana de la Guardia and Jorge Masetti, Cuban exiles in Paris. Both urged Villepin to bring an end to all cooperation that fails to benefit the Cuban people, particularly programs of assistance to Cuba’s police and judicial system. 

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) activists distributed brochures to tourists traveling to Cuba at a Paris airport.  The brochure was titled ''Welcome to Cuba: The Largest Prison for Journalists in the World.'' ''It is not a call for a travel boycott ... but for those traveling to the island to realize that behind the sun and the beaches there is a totalitarian regime,'' RSF’s Robert Menard said. 

Calls for lifting the U.S. embargo against the Cuban dictator have become almost nil.  And Cuba’s economy continues to be in a tailspin.

Cuba’s National Bank reported that the island’s debt amounts to $12.21 billion, according to The Center for Cuba and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.

In October 2002, Cuba suspended payments to Bancomext, a Mexican government bank that finances exports.  Recently, France announced the suspension of a $175 million credit line to finance purchases of food guaranteed by sugar exports.

But don’t count Castro out.  Word out of Venezuela is that Castro ally Hugo Chavez has already steered $4 billion from his country’s treasury to help Castro take over Latin Amerrica.

The latest red alert about Castro comes from normally stable Costa Rica.  Costa Rica’s president, Abel Pacheco, said that ''foreign leftist leaders'' (from Cuba and Brazil) have infiltrated the country in support of a teacher strike and the blocking of highways associated with the strike.  According to the authorities, Carmen Godínez, a leader of Cuba’s official unions, participated in last week’s labor unrest.

Mexican ruling party loses seats in mid-term elections 
Mexican President Vicente Fox's National Action Party (PAN) was defeated in the mid-term electionson Sunday, losing at least 44 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the parliament, the electoral institute said. 

An official of the institute said returns from about half of the polling booths showed the PAN would win only about 30.5 percent of the vote. The former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), took a leading position with about 34.4percent. 

The elections, the first nationwide vote since Fox took power three years ago, are widely seen as a referendum on his presidency. 

Earlier opinion polls showed that the PAN could lose some seatsas Mexicans are frustrated with the president's failure to fulfillhis campaign promises of creating jobs and revitalizing the economy. 

Before the vote, the PAN held 202 seats in the lower house while the PRI had 207 seats. 

The Chamber of Deputies has 500 members with 300 of them directly elected and the rest distributed under rules of proportional representation. 

Canada searches for chemical and biological weapons 
Canada's defense department says it has begun combing through government archives looking for information about chemical and biological weapons, it is reported Sunday. 

The department wants to know what kind of weapons have been produced or tested in Canada and whether they could still pose a hazard. 

Canada and its allies, the United States and Britain, have worked with chemical and biological weapons since the First World War. 

In recent years, it has been revealed there were secret experiments in Canada during the Second World War and the Cold War. 

The defense department now wants to look at where weapons were stored and tested over the years and whether they were properly disposed of. 

The military is paying a consulting firm 1.4 million Canadian dollars (about 1 million US dollars) to search the government's archives for information about chemical and biological weapons.

Russia's suicide rate twice the world average: report 
Russia's suicide rate has climbed upover the past decade and is more than twice the average world level, the Interfax news agency reported Monday. 

The suicide rate in Russia increased from 26.4 per 100,000 people in 1990 to 39.7 in 2001, having peaked in 1994 at 42.1, the news agency quoted a report by the Russian Health Ministry's Research Institute of Psychiatry as saying. 

The rate was lowest in 1998, when Russia suffered an economic crisis, at 35.4 per 100,000 people. 

In 2000 the suicide rate in Russia reached almost 40 cases per 100,000 people, while the average world level was lower than 15 cases. 

Men are more suicide-prone than women in Russia, according to the report. 

Among men aged between 45 to 54, 106.7 people per 100,000 commit suicide, much higher than other male age groups. While women are most likely to kill themselves after the age of 75 (27.4cases per 100,000).