When US president George Bush delivered a caustic speech aimed at the government of Cuban leader Fidel Castro at the State Department this week, Maltese ambassador Mark Miceli-Farrugia was conspicuous in his support for the president’s lambasting remarks.

The Cuban media reported this week that, while the other ambassadors assembled at the State Department to hear the speech sat stony-faced and did not applaud, Mr Miceli-Farrugia broke the event’s diplomatic trend and applauded Mr Bush, along with members of the Cuban-American community gathered who greeted Bush’s condemnations of the Castro government with loud applause.

In his speech, Mr Bush labelled Cuba a “tropical gulag” and said that easing sanctions on the Caribbean country would be “giving oxygen to a criminal regime”.

The end of communism in Cuba, Bush said, would reveal “horrors still unknown to the rest of the world”, and he called the current government “a failed regime” in its “dying gasps”.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque replied to Bush’s remarks by accusing him of inciting violence and issuing a call to arms. Bush’s comments were, he said, “an appeal to use force to defeat the Cuban revolution” and an attempt to “re-conquer Cuba by force”, adding that it was not clear if Bush was trying to incite an internal uprising or an invasion.

But while the ambassadors present diplomatically refrained from expressing themselves one way or the other, it was noted in press reports that Malta’s ambassador proved to be the exception.

But perhaps the move was less of a blunder and more of a carefully calculated endorsement of Bush’s policy toward Cuba that could lead to the resolution of two outstanding issues between Malta and the US – the signing of a double taxation agreement and Malta’s inclusion in the US Visa Waiver Programme.