US President Barack Obama and Cuba’s Raul Castro will break bread with other Americas leaders at a historic summit Friday, a potent symbol of their efforts to end decades of animosity.
As the gathering in Panama approached, a White House official revealed that Obama and Castro had spoken by telephone on Wednesday. They had already spoken by phone in December, before they announced the historic diplomatic thaw.
Obama and Castro will join some 30 other leaders at the two-day Summit of the Americas, posing for pictures and sitting down for a seaside dinner in a complex of ruins from the era of the Spanish conquistadores.
“I can confirm that President Obama spoke with President Castro on Wednesday, before President Obama departed Washington,” the White House official said on condition of anonymity.
Their chief diplomats, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, made history themselves when they held talks Thursday evening.
It was the first meeting between the chief diplomats of the two nations since 1958, a year before Fidel Castro’s revolutionary guerrillas seized power.
Kerry and Rodriguez “had a lengthy and very constructive discussion this evening. The two agreed they made progress and that we would continue to work to resolve outstanding issues,” a State Department official said in a brief statement.
While the meetings are packed with powerful symbolism, the two countries have a long road ahead in their broader goal of normalising relations.
An Obama-Castro meeting is “part of the overall negotiations that are taking place,” said former Cuban diplomat and foreign relations professor Carlos Alzugaray.
“This doesn’t end with Raul’s presence at the summit, it’s the beginning.”
Obama acknowledged as much on Thursday during a visit to Jamaica, before landing in Panama.
“I never foresaw that immediately overnight everything would transform itself, that suddenly Cuba became a partner diplomatically with us the way Jamaica is, for example,” he said. “That’s going to take some time.”