HAVANA – Cuba must show signs of progress on protecting fundamental rights as a step to fully normalizing relations with the European Union, the bloc’s aid commissioner said at the end of a visit to the island that included a meeting with President Raul Castro.

Karel de Gucht said that a change in the EU’s “common position” on Cuba – which was approved by the bloc in 1996 and which Havana wants eliminated because it calls for the island to institute democratic reforms – will require a “consensus” on which both sides can work.

“On Cuba’s part, it implies gestures with respect to fundamental rights,” De Gucht told a group of reporters shortly after boarding a plane to Brussels following his five-day visit to the island.

The aid commissioner, who arrived at the airport after meeting for more than two hours with Gen. Castro, described their talks as “very open, frank and constructive” and said “the EU’s position is not regime change in Cuba.”

He said the bloc accepts that “human rights differ from one country to another,” but added that “there’s a core of basic rights that is universal” and that more progress is needed in that sense.

The EU’s “common position” on Cuba was approved in 1996 at the behest of Spain’s then-prime minister, conservative Jose Maria Aznar, while the current administration in Madrid has pledged to work to eliminate it, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said recently in Havana.

The EU’s stance toward Cuba was the most sensitive topic during De Gucht’s talks with Cuban authorities over the past few days.

Shortly after the start of the aid commissioner’s first working meeting, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez told him that that EU policy is unacceptable and should be replaced with a bilateral accord.

The Cuban government has repeatedly rejected EU leaders’ demands that the island make gestures in the area of human rights as a condition for normalizing relations.

The European Union in 2008 lifted the largely symbolic sanctions it had imposed five years earlier on Cuba for jailing 75 dissidents. That move led to a resumption in aid flows, but still no consensus exists among the bloc’s members on ending the “common position.”

The aid commissioner, meanwhile, characterized the United States’ 47-year-old economic embargo on Cuba as “an ineffective tool for international relations,” adding that sanctions have “a limited impact.”

During the meetings with officials here, De Gucht reviewed the EU’s cooperation projects on the communist-ruled island, which in 2009 were valued at 40 million euros ($59.4 million) and in 2010 will involve a similar expenditure.

He also discussed the debt that Cuba has amassed with European companies, including some 600 million euros ($891.5 million) owed to Spanish firms alone.

Speaking Thursday in Madrid, Spain’s secretary of state for EU affairs said Europe should completely normalize ties with Cuba, noting it maintains relations with other countries that “are not paragons of democracy.”

Diego Lopez Garrido, in a breakfast organized by the New Economy Forum, said “it’s nothing new, it’s nothing extraordinary” that Spain supports a “normalization” of ties with the Castro regime. EFE