PORT-OF-SPAIN, TRINIDAD (AP) - It looks like the United States and Cuba are getting unstuck, taking tentative steps in a diplomatic dance that could resolve a half-century of hostility. Within the last 24 hours, Barack Obama, Raul Castro and Hillary Rodham Clinton have made a flurry of conciliatory gestures, and expectations for a thaw are soaring.
The head of the Organization of American States acknowledged the momentum Friday by saying he’ll ask his group to readmit Cuba 47 years after it suspended the communist country to support the U.S. trade embargo. Caribbean leaders said they would gladly provide neutral ground for U.S.-Cuba talks.
The U.S. secretary of state not only called America’s Cuba policy a failure, but characterized the Cuban President’s latest comments as a “very welcome gesture.”
Diplomatic moves were coming quickly Friday after the U.S. president made relations with Cuba the focus of his comments going into the Summit of the Americas, an OAS-sponsored gathering that includes every nation in the region but Cuba.
Obama and Clinton called on Havana to reciprocate for Obama’s “good faith” gesture of removing restrictions on some American money and travel to Cuba.
Raul Castro made no promises, but his response was quick and conciliatory enough to move things nevertheless. Castro said Thursday that he is ready to talk with the U.S. and put “everything” on the table, even questions of human rights and political prisoners. He even acknowledged that Cuba’s approach to the U.S. could be flawed.
“We could be wrong, we admit it. We’re human beings,” Castro said. “We’re willing to sit down to talk as it should be done, whenever.”
Clinton responded warmly on Friday: “We welcome his comments, the overture they represent and we are taking a very serious look at how we intend to respond.”
The OAS reversal could be part of that response.
“We’re going step by step,” OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza said, explaining that he will ask the group’s general assembly in May to annul the 1962 resolution that suspended Cuba.
The U.S. provides more than 70 percent of the OAS budget, which affords it certain privileges, and the Washington-based organization operates by consensus, so it is very unlikely that Inzulza would have announced this move without a green light from the Obama administration.
Other leaders arriving in Trinidad also offered to help. Jamaica’s prime minister, Bruce Golding, told The Associated Press that the 15-member Caribbean Community is willing to mediate any Cuba-U.S. talks on easing tensions and lifting the decades-old American trade embargo against Cuba. But Golding also said Caricom leaders don’t want to do anything to sabotage a thaw.
“I’m hoping that nothing is done that will make the process more difficult and that we seek to encourage further progress rather than cause the situation once again to become polarized and intractable,” he said.
For 47 years, the OAS has officially considered Cuba’s communist system to be incompatible with its principles. But there is a growing clamor in the region to end efforts to isolate Cuba, and it comes not just from Raul and Fidel Castro’s close friends, but also from conservative U.S. allies like Mexico.
The Cuban president spoke Thursday at a meeting of leftist leaders in Venezuela who vowed to represent Cuba’s interests in Trinidad. Vehemently defending his government’s resistance to the U.S., he said “the OAS should disappear” and that Cuba would never want to join the organization he called a tool of the U.S.
“The North Sea will unite with the South Seas, a serpent will be born from an eagle’s egg before Cuba joins the OAS,” Castro said.
Inzulza said Castro’s feelings are only natural: “If my country were suspended from an organization for nearly 50 years I’d be very upset.”
Castro’s comments on negotiating with the U.S. represented the most conciliatory language that either Castro brother has used with any U.S. administration since that of Dwight D. Eisenhower in early 1961, when the nations broke off relations.
Raul Castro has previously said he would be willing to discuss all issues with Obama. But Cuban officials have historically bristled at including human rights or political prisoners in the talks, saying such matters are none of the Yankees’ business.
Castro said his only conditions are that Washington treat his government as an equal, and respect “the Cuban people’s right to self-determination.”
Most Cubans, however, likely heard little about these overtures, unless they watched TV using illegal satellite hookups.
The Communist Party newspaper Granma on Friday did not carry Castro’s comments about the U.S., focusing instead on his talks on regional matters with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leaders. Granma also ignored Obama’s statements about Cuba, and dealt instead with Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s call to drop the embargo. And Fidel Castro, who still pens enormously influential columns from the sidelines of power, was silent.
Obama said a relationship frozen for 50 years “won’t thaw overnight.” But their words seemed as historic.
Relations warmed briefly during Jimmy Carter’s administration, adding direct flights between Miami and Havana and opening interests sections in lieu of embassies in each country. But that honeymoon soon ended with a refugee crisis when 125,000 Cubans fled to the United States from the Mariel port west of Havana in 1980.
Warming relations under Bill Clinton were put in the freezer after Cuban fighter jets shot down two civilian planes off the island’s coast in 1996, killing the four exiles aboard.
Obama called the steps he’s made so far “extraordinarily significant” but ruled out a unilateral end to the embargo, even as Clinton said Friday that “we vew the present policy as having failed.”
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said before Obama’s plane landed in Trinidad Friday that Cuba can show it is serious by making its own unilateral moves: “They are certainly free to release political prisoners. They’re certainly free to stop skimming money off the top of remmitance payments. They’re free to institute greater freedom of the press.”
No one should expect a sudden, major breakthrough in U.S.-Cuba relations, but these latest developments should not be lightly dismissed, said Peter DeShazo, a Latin America expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former U.S. diplomat.
“These are very preliminary steps,” he said in a telephone interview in Washington. “But they are significant” not only as symbolic gestures of good will but also as building blocks of a foundation for a new relationship.
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Associated Press writers Ben Feller aboard Air Force One; Frank Bajak and Bert Wilkinson in Trinidad; Christopher Toothaker in Cumana, Venezuela; Anita Snow in Havana and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.
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