By ANITA SNOW
Associated Press Writer

HAVANA -- Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Monday that the United States will fail in its efforts to have Cuba condemned by the top U.N. human rights watchdog.

"This will constitute the first defeat by the United States" in its annual efforts to condemn Cuba at the United Nations meeting, Perez Roque told a news conference.

The Bush administration has said it plans to submit to the U.N. Human Rights Commission a resolution critical of Cuba's rights record.

The commission, now meeting in Geneva, is expected to consider the U.S. resolution on Cuba by mid-April.

U.S. say they are making no prediction on the outcome of the Cuba resolution, pointing out that in past years the vote has almost always been close.

The U.N. commission last year narrowly passed a resolution critical of Cuba's rights record.

Cuba, meanwhile, plans to present to the commission nine of its own resolutions expected to appeal to other developing nations, including ones that characterize access to food and freedom from foreign debt as human rights.

Cuba says it respects human rights more than the United States and other developed countries by guaranteeing its people broad social services such as free health care and education.

This year's U.N. vote comes just a few weeks after the second anniversary of Cuba's roundup of 75 government opponents, a move that sparked sharp criticism around the globe.

Several weekend events by dissidents marking the anniversary of the March 2003 crackdown were marred by counter protests by government supporters.

The most publicized was a large counter protest by female members of the government support group Federation of Cuban Women, who faced off outside a Roman Catholic Church Sunday with political prisoners' wives holding a silent march to protest their husbands' continued incarceration.

The foreign minister said he was unfamiliar with another counter protest on Saturday -- witnessed by an Associated Press writer -- in which government supporters chased a dissident physician into his home and hit him with sticks, drawing blood on his hands and arms.

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