Castro at regional summit as a symbol

WASHINGTON — Cuba ends more than five decades of official isolation from the institutions of the Western Hemisphere this week when President Raul Castro attends a regional summit with up to 35 heads of state, including President Barack Obama.

The White House said there will be “many opportunities” for conversations between the two leaders at the two-day Summit of the Americas that begins Friday in Panama, but noted that no formal bilateral meeting had been planned.

Administration officials said it is unlikely that the United States and Cuba would complete negotiations aimed at re-establishing diplomatic relations before the summit. But on Thursday, Obama said the State Department has finished a review of whether to remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

For Castro, attendance at the summit is a symbolic reentry into the hemispheric infrastructure that avoids the question of Cuban membership in the Organization of American States, which Havana still considers an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Although the OAS, which expelled Cuba in 1962, has invited the country to rejoin, Castro has said he would “never” do so.

Obama left Wednesday for a four-day trip to the region, traveling first to Jamaica to meet with a 15-nation grouping of Caribbean nations and arriving Thursday evening in Panama. The hemispheric summit, held every three years, is the third of Obama’s presidency and the first not overshadowed by Latin American opposition to U.S. insistence that Cuba be excluded. Beleaguered by ongoing crises in the Middle East and Ukraine as well as polarized politics at home, the visit is likely to be a welcome respite for Obama.

This time, “there is no question that Obama goes from a position of strength, with the wind at his back,” said Mack McLarty, an architect of the summit process, which began under President Bill Clinton’s administration in 1994. Resolution of the Cuba issue “takes away a very contentious, complicated issue” of previous gatherings, McLarty said.

In the weeks since the White House placed new sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials it charged with human rights abuses, President Nicolas Maduro has spoken of almost nothing else, attempting to shift attention away from his government’s economic troubles.

If Maduro seizes the spotlight in Panama and twists his domestic struggles into a clash with the United States, “the summit could get hung up on the region’s dislike of sanctions ... which Maduro and his allies have used as proof that the United States has continued in its trajectory of paternalistic behavior” in the region, said Carl Meacham, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But most attention will be on Cuba and the extent to which Castro feels it necessary to support Maduro. With the future of Venezuelan largesse increasingly in doubt, Cuba is especially keen to attract foreign capital. Castro has an unparalleled opportunity to make the case that his country is modernizing, opening to foreign investment and poised for growth.