Havana/Washington  - While hurricanes Ike and Gustav wreaked death and devastation across both countries, neither Cuba nor the United States showed any sign this week of putting aside differences to help in reconstruction.

Between Ike and Gustav, Cuba's agriculture will need to be rebuilt in at least two provinces, and 100,000 homes and buildings were damaged or destroyed, Cuban officials have said.

Combined damage is estimated at around 5 billion dollars.

But Cuba refuses to accept offers of humanitarian aid from the US. And Washington refuses to temporarily lift its decades-old economic embargo on trade and credit for the Communist island just off its coast.

The result is another stalemate in the prickly relations between the two countries separated by a mere 145-kilometre-expanse of warm Gulf of Mexico waters.

The latest instalment in the tiff came Thursday, when Cuban authorities dismissed the 5-million-dollar offer of US humanitarian assistance as a "propaganda operation" and "curtain of smoke."

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said in a press conference in Havana that the offer confirmed that "the United States government was trying to put up a curtain of smoke to deviate attention from the broad debate and the recurrent appeals for (Washington) to lift the blockade."

What Cuba wants and asked for three times during the harsh hurricanes - but never got - was a temporary loosening of the US embargo.

Perez Roque complained Thursday that the US had not answered the requests. He said Cuba had merely been asking for a six-month leeway to buy "indispensable materials" for the Caribbean country's reconstruction and to seek credit lines in order to purchase food.

"Cuba is waiting for an answer while they set up an operation of propaganda, rhetoric, and ill-intentioned publicity," Perez Roque complained.

In fact, the US has given several answers - but not the ones Cuba wanted to hear.

Nearly two weeks ago, after Gustav churned across Cuba and Ike was approaching, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it would not be "wise" to lift the embargo because long-time leader Fidel Castro had passed power to his brother, Raul, earlier this year without any elections.

"What we cannot do is to have the transfer of power from one dictatorial regime to another," she said.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack more recently said US policy was unchanged - but noted that Washington had authorized 250 million dollars in licenses since the storms to sell agricultural products including lumber for reconstruction to Cuba.

The United States imposed a comprehensive embargo on communist Cuba in 1962, while the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 further prevented US citizens from doing business with Cuba and imposed restrictions on assistance to the island.

Washington intended the embargo to force a change of government in Havana, while Cuba has long claimed that it is the embargo, and not its economic system, that hampers the island's efforts to attain economic success. (dpa)