U.S. embargo

President Joe Biden said Thursday the United States was considering ways to force open internet access in Cuba, which he called a failed state as the communist leadership faces down the biggest protests in memory.

The ceremony -- attended by Cuban President Raúl Castro and some 10,000 of the country's ruling elite and their guests, but not by the frail 88-year-old Fidel -- was the first since the restoration of relations with the United States.

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 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 — 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.

Cuban President Raúl Castro celebrated the recent thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations in his address to the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in San José on Wednesday but took a hard line against the United States.