Panamanian authorities have been meeting with counterparts of different countries, seeking to decrease the spiraling political tension after U.S. President Barack Obama ordered new sanctions against Venezuela.
Vente Venezuela’s youth president, José Martínez, also asked Costa Rica to urge other countries to take up Venezuela’s human rights situation at next month’s 7th Summit of the Americas in Panama.
The two sides also have to iron out a number of other issues, such as compensation for American property nationalized after the Cuban Revolution, freedom of movement for diplomats and the embargo the United States has imposed on Cuba since 1962, which Obama would need the blessing of the Republican-controlled Congress to lift.
The top U.S. diplomat for Latin America, Roberta Jacobson, met her Cuban counterpart Josefina Vidal behind closed doors for a third round of talks on normalizing relations, but the atmosphere of reconciliation was marred by protests over Washington's treatment of Venezuela.
Russia is courting Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua "to gain access to air bases and ports for resupply of Russian naval assets and strategic bombers operating in the Western Hemisphere."
Roberta Jacobson, the United States' top diplomat for Latin America, will return on March 15 to the Cuban capital for a third round of negotiations, the U.S. State Department said in a statement.
HAVANA – Cuba policy sometimes makes strange bedfellows, which is how a man like Thomas Marten, a burly Illinois soybean farmer with a bushy red beard, had come to Havana to make a statement about the principles of free enterprise.
HAVANA, Cuba — With the United States and Cuba set to resume talks Friday in Washington on the restoration of diplomatic relations, a senior Cuban official said his government wants to be removed from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring nations and to be able to reopen U.S. bank accounts in order for the process to move forward.
Many of the Cuban diplomats negotiating detente with the United States are graduates of Cuba's Advanced Institute for Foreign Relations. Less widely known is that the building was originally constructed as the Instituto Cultural Cubano-Norteamericano (U.S.-Cuba Cultural Institute), and was once a mainstay of the two countries' deep and complicated ties.
HAVANA, Cuba – U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of congressional Democrats concluded a three-day trip to Cuba this week by heaping praise on President Barack Obama's attempt to mend relations with the island but offering few details about their meetings with high-level Cuban officials.
