Obama, Castro speak amid bid to restore ties
PANAMA CITY: US President Barack Obama and Cuba’s Raul Castro were to break bread with other leaders from around the Americas at a historic summit Friday, a potent symbol of their efforts to end decades of animosity.
As the gathering in Panama approached, a White House official revealed that Obama and Castro had spoken by telephone Wednesday — just the second phone call between a US and Cuban leader in more than 50 years, and the first since December, just before they announced the game-changing diplomatic thaw.
The presidents were expected to join some 30 other leaders at the two-day Summit of the Americas.
The US and Cuban chief diplomats, Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, made history themselves Thursday evening when they held talks — the first such meeting since 1958, a year before Fidel Castro’s revolutionary guerrillas seized power.
An Obama-Castro meeting is “part of the overall negotiations that are taking place,” said former Cuban diplomat and foreign relations professor Carlos Alzugaray. “This doesn’t end with Raul’s presence at the summit, it’s the beginning.”
Obama may bring to the table a resolution to an old gripe from Cuba, as a senator said the US State Department recommended that Obama remove Havana from a list of state sponsors of terrorism.