Obama, Castro to meet informally at historic Summit of the Americas

US president Barack Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro have talked by telephone about restoring diplomatic ties and will meet informally at a summit this weekend as they seek to set aside decades of hostility between their countries.

The historic rapprochement is set to dominate the Summit of the Americas meeting in Panama, less than four months after an announcement by Obama and Castro that they would seek to improve relations and boost trade and travel.

The two leaders spoke by phone on Wednesday, before Obama left Washington, and discussed the process of resuming formal diplomatic relations and opening embassies, the White House said.

They have separate agendas for most of the day but both attended the start of the summit along with other regional leaders yesterday evening.

The pair are expected to meet today, said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. “We certainly do anticipate that they will have an opportunity to see each other at the summit tomorrow, to have a discussion,” he said.

Apart from a couple of brief, informal encounters, the leaders of the United States and Cuba have not had any significant meetings since Castro's older brother, Fidel Castro, toppled US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in a 1959 revolution that soon steered the Caribbean island into a close alliance with the Soviet Union.

Face-to-face

US secretary of state

John Kerry

and Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez held talks at a Panama City hotel on Thursday night, the first meeting between the two countries’ top diplomats since the United States’ John Foster Dulles and Cuba’s Gonzalo Guell got together in Washington in 1958.

Sitting face-to-face in a room visible through a large glass window, Kerry and Rodriguez talked for over two hours. A senior US State Department official described it as a “lengthy and very constructive discussion” and said they made progress.

Obama, who visited the site of a massive expansion of the Panama Canal by helicopter yesterday morning, appears to be close to removing Cuba from a US list of countries it says sponsor terrorism.

The designation includes a series of automatic US sanctions. Cuba has cited its continued inclusion on the list as a hindrance to the planned restoration of full diplomatic ties and the opening of embassies that Obama and Castro announced last December. Washington broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961.

The State Department has now recommended that Cuba be taken off the list, a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide said on Thursday. Obama is expected to agree, although it is not clear whether he will announce his decision during the summit.

A US official said Kerry and Rodriguez used their meeting to smooth the way for Cuba’s removal from the list. The United States has pushed for Cuban assurances of no future support for terrorism, and Cuba has made the same demand of Washington.

In his break with Washington’s tradition of isolating communist-run Cuba, Obama has said it is time to try a new approach. He has already used his executive authority to ease trade and travel restrictions.

But only Congress, controlled by Republicans, can remove a decades-old US economic embargo on the island and the rapprochement by Obama, a Democrat, has met some resistance in Washington.

Sanctions on Venezuela

And while the US president’s policy has been widely praised around Latin America, this was tempered last month when his administration imposed sanctions on Venezuela, Cuba’s closest ally and main benefactor.

That controversy now hangs over the summit, which ends today. Kerry’s counsellor, Thomas Shannon, was in Venezuela earlier this week in an apparent bid to ease tensions.

Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro says he will present Obama with a petition signed by millions of people demanding that the sanctions be reversed. He is certain to receive support from Castro and other left-wing leaders in Latin America. – (Reuters)