Cuba's Castro offers to meet Obama but downplays hope for progress
|
| Published on Monday, January 5, 2009 |
Email To Friend Print Version |
By Joshua Goodman
RIO DE JANERIO, Brazil (Bloomberg): Cuban President Raul Castro renewed an offer to meet with Barack Obama but expressed doubt that the president-elect will be able to improve a half-century of strained relations between the United States and the communist nation.
 |
| US President-elect Barack Obama. Bloomberg Photo |
Castro said he considers Obama an honest and sincere person, yet feels that hopes are “too high” that the new president alone will be able to change US foreign policy. The US imposed a trade embargo on Cuba in 1960 after Fidel Castro, Raul’s brother, expropriated American property and sought closer ties with the former Soviet Union.
“Hopefully I’m wrong about that and Mr Obama has success,” Castro, 77, said on state television late Friday, according to Spanish news agency EFE. “Gesture for gesture, we are ready to do it whenever it may be, whenever they may decide, without intermediaries, directly, but we are in no rush, we are not desperate” to meet.
Obama transition spokeswoman Brooke Anderson declined to comment on Castro’s remarks. During his campaign, Obama vowed to maintain the US trade ban, promising at the same time to loosen Bush administration regulations that limited visits and remittances to the Caribbean island by Cuban-Americans.
Obama also said he’d be willing to talk with Cuba and begin easing the sanctions if the government made democratic moves such as freeing political prisoners.
Castro, who took over from his ailing brother Fidel two years ago, urged supporters to reject such US overtures, which he called the “enemy’s siren songs,” at a public rally yesterday to mark the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.
Castro has offered to meet with Obama before, most recently at a December summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders in Brazil. In November, he told actor Sean Penn during an interview for the Nation magazine that he’d be willing to meet Obama on “neutral ground,” and suggested the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
The US took control of Guantanamo Bay, on the southeast end of Cuba, and established a military base there following the 1898 Spanish-American war. The Castro government considers the U.S. presence to be illegal.
Obama promised during the presidential campaign to shut down the US military prison at Guantanamo, which houses detainees seized after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will stay on at the Pentagon under Obama, has asked his staff to draw up a plan for closing the Guantanamo prison should Obama order a shutdown after he takes office Jan. 20. | | | | Reads : 647 | | | |
|
|
