Cuban and US presidents prepare to get together for historic talks
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GENERATIONS of isolation between the United States and Cuba were poised to fade away yesterday as their presidents prepared to sit down together for the first time since the height of the Cold War.
Although no meeting was formally scheduled, White House officials indicated a substantive conversation between Barack Obama and Raul Castro was all but assured to take place at the Summit of the Americas.
The historic gathering should give them the chance to infuse fresh momentum into efforts to restore normal relations between their countries.
A successful relaunch of US-Cuba relations would form a cornerstone of Obama’s foreign policy legacy.
But it’s an endeavor he can’t undertake alone. Only Congress can fully lift the onerous US sanctions regime on Cuba, and there are deep pockets of opposition in the US to that step.
Obama arrived at the summit yesterday morning for a day of marathon meetings with leaders from across the Western Hemisphere, gathered around a massive oval table.
He was to take questions from reporters in the evening before returning to Washington.
Obama and Castro traded handshakes and cordial greetings at the summit’s opening ceremonies on Friday night, their second encounter after Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa in December.
The friendly — if brief — encounter as they arrived at a Panama City convention center provided powerful visual clues that the rapprochement had already come a long way.
Video and photos of the two making small talk and nodding attentively quickly found its way onto the Internet.
Raising the stakes even further for the two leaders was mounting speculation that Obama would use the occasion to announce his decision to remove Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a gesture that for Cuba holds both practical and symbolic value.
The US long ago stopped accusing Cuba of conducting terrorism, and Obama has signaled he’s ready to take Cuba off the list. On Thursday, he suggested an announcement was imminent when he revealed that the State Department’s lengthy review of the designation was finally complete.
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