Obama and Castro to meet in rare talks
US President Barack Obama was to hold rare
talks with Cuban President Raul Castro yesterday in Havana, setting aside a
more than half-century bitter standoff between the US and the communist nation.
The meeting in the Cuban capital’s Palace
of the Revolution is only the third formal encounter between Obama and the
brother of Fidel Castro, who handed over the presidency in 2008.
At stake is the historic shift to end the
Cold War conflict, which has seen Washington try to bring Cuba to its knees
through an economic embargo, while Havana, a close Soviet ally, became enemy
territory.
Obama, who arrived on Sunday with his
family, is the first US president to touch down on the island, barely an hour’s
flight from Florida, in 88 years.
As Air Force One landed in Havana, Obama
cheerfully began the landmark trip by tweeting in local slang: “Que bola Cuba?”
— or “What’s up?”
Later he said that the last US president to
visit, Calvin Coolidge in 1928, needed three days to make the trip by train and
navy ship.
“This is a
historic visit,” he remarked to staff at the freshly reopened US embassy in
Havana.
The trip has been touted mostly for its
huge symbolic value, and comes more than a year after Obama and Castro
surprised the world in December 2014 by announcing that their countries would
begin normalizing relations.
“The presence
of a US president on the island for the first time since the 1959 revolution
marks a transcendental change in relations between the US and Cuba,” said
Michael Shifter, head of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington.
However, some tough issues are up for
discussion.
Although the embargo can only be lifted by
the US Congress, where Republicans are far less keen on rapprochement, the
Obama administration is chipping away at the edges of the sanctions.
For example, a trickle of US visitors over
recent years is soon expected to turn into a flood with the lifting of an
onerous requirement that they go to Cuba as part of pre-approved groups.
However, while pushing for an easing of the
decades-long sanctions regime, the White House continues to press for greater
human rights in a country where the Cuban Communist Party maintains its grip on
every key institution and little dissent is tolerated.
Just hours before Obama’s arrival on
Sunday, police in Havana arrested dozens of people from a banned group
demanding greater human rights. Several had been freed by the end of the day
and the rest were expected to be released shortly.
“I don’t think
Obama’s visit will have an immediate impact on Cuban politics, much less on the
near-term decisions of the regime,” Shifter said. “Full normalization will take
a lot of time and will be a complex process. To advance, the US Congress needs
to go further in lifting the embargo and Cuba needs to speed up its political
and economic opening and improve its human rights.”
A heavy police presence was evident when
Obama went on his first official event, a visit to the beautifully restored
Havana Old Town late on Sunday. Plainclothes agents swarmed through the narrow
streets and access to ordinary Cubans was all but impossible, leaving the
neighborhood eerily empty.
“Maybe they
let me come here because they think I’m a tourist with my backpack,” said civil
engineer Ariel Hernandez, 42, who was trying to get a glimpse of the president.
Tomorrow, Obama is scheduled to meet with a
few human rights activists. He is also to give a speech — the main set piece of
his trip — that is to be carried live on Cuban television, an unprecedented
concession from the authorities.
He is to round off the trip by attending a
baseball game between the Cuban national team and Major League Baseball’s Tampa
Bay Rays.
Although meant to be a celebration of
shared love for the game, the occasion is also to highlight yet another cause
of tension: the talent drain of Cuban stars attracted by the lure of the
big-money US circuit.
In another major piece of Latin American
business, US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is traveling with Obama, was
yesterday due to meet separately with representatives of the Colombian
government and the Marxist FARC rebels, according to a Colombian negotiator.
They have been negotiating in Cuba since
2012 to end their more than 50-year war. Both sides have acknowledged that a
deadline of tomorrow they had set themselves will pass without the signing of a
final accord.
Who: Barack Obama. Raul Castro
What: They held rare talks.
When: 21, Mar, 2016
Where: Havana
1.
embargo 禁止 (通商)
2.
transcendental 超越
3.
onerous 繁重
4.
regime 政權
5.
unprecedented 前所未有
