BY ANITA SNOW
  Associated Press

  HAVANA - Vicki Huddleston, America's top diplomat in Cuba, half-joked Friday that she wouldn't be surprised if communist officials rolled out a red carpet
  leading to her departing plane later in the day.

  ''Yes, I think that they are happy to see me go -- but for all the wrong reasons,'' Huddleston said at a news conference on her last day as chief of the
  U.S. Interests Section. ''I think I may have contributed in a small way to focusing attention on the human rights situation'' in Cuba, she said.

  During her three years in the country, Huddleston has overseen one of the United States' most sensitive missions. The United States severed full
  diplomatic relations with the communist country four decades ago.

  It was under her watch that Castro's government waged an intense political battle for the repatriation of Elián González, the 5-year-old castaway whose
  custody case divided Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits.

  Huddleston's term was also marked by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's visit in May.

  In a live, televised speech sanctioned by Castro, Carter talked frankly to Cubans about human rights and democracy. She also mentioned a little-known,
  homegrown signature-gathering effort asking that voters be allowed to decide on whether they want increased civil liberties such as freedom of speech
  and the right to own businesses.

  Huddleston's replacement is James Cason, a longtime State Department official who most recently served in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs in
  Washington.

  Huddleston reiterated her belief that a transition in Cuba began a year ago when President Fidel Castro fainted while giving a speech in the searing
  tropical sun, demonstrating his mortality for the first time.

  Castro, who has been in power for 43 years, turned 76 in August.

  But Huddleston also said it would be a mistake for U.S. officials simply to sit by idly waiting for a ''biological solution'' -- Castro's death -- or the end of the
  U.S. trade embargo.

  ''Both of them have a determinate life span and perhaps they both are connected,'' Huddleston said. But until the inevitable occurs, she said, the U.S.
  government must prepare for change by supporting human rights and the development of a civil society on the island, as well as backing Cuban
  Americans who favor reconciliation.

  ''I don't think that the transition will be peaceful or prosperous without them,'' Huddleston said of Cuban Americans.

  She said most do not fit the stereotype of embittered migrants who want to return to Cuba to recover family properties expropriated decades ago.

  Known by many average Cubans as the ''radio ambassador,'' Huddleston enraged officials on numerous occasions, especially over her campaign to
  distribute hundreds of shortwave radios among the general population.

  Communist authorities have said the radios were provided to encourage Cubans to listen to Radio Marti, a U.S. government station that Havana has
  jammed in the past.

  Huddleston consistently denied that, saying the radios gave Cubans an option to state-controlled media and put them in touch with the outside world.

  Huddleston, who will become ambassador to Mali next month, walked a rocky road in Cuba that turned sharply to the right when President Bush took
  office in 2001.

  Beginning in November 1999, two months after her arrival here, Elián González was found in an inner tube off Florida.

  Huddleston served as a liaison between Washington and Havana during the subsequent seven-month custody battle between the child's relatives in
  Miami and his father in Cuba.

  After the fight went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Elián returned to Cuba in June 2000.

  During the Clinton administration, Huddleston kept a relatively low profile.

  But she became more outspoken under Bush, who insists that tough trade and travel restrictions on Cuba will not be eased until the island embraces
  democracy.