PANAMA CITY – Bus drivers in Panama City began an indefinite strike Monday, unleashing transit chaos as the capital prepared to host the 2015 Summit of the Americas.
Issues crucial to Central America – ranging from immigration and climate change to violent crime and the region’s growing need for electricity – will also be on the agenda for the VII Summit of the Americas, to be held Apr. 10-11 in Panama City.
Granma published four photographs on its website of the 88-year-old Castro seated inside a bus or van and shaking the hands of supporters leaning in through the vehicle's windows.
In separate remarks, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf expressed skepticism that the thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations may lead to the opening of embassies in Havana and Washington before next week's summit.
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.
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 – 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.
Just 30 years after its completion, Cuba's grand temple of democracy and patriotism was virtually abandoned to the bats and the dust. Today the building is undergoing a rehabilitation that is not only physical but symbolic too
