Obama and his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro announced in December last year measures to unfreeze relations that have been frosty for more than half a century.
The United States hopes to have an embassy in Cuba by the time of the Panama summit in April this year, President Barack Obama told Reuters Monday.
“My hope is that we will be able to open an embassy, and that some of the initial groundwork will have been laid,” he said.
Obama and his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro announced in December last year measures to unfreeze relations that have been frosty for more than half a century.
Obama told Reuters that the new approach toward Cuba was due to “50 years of a policy that didn’t work,” and so there is a “need to try something new.”
However, Obama explained that the normalization process would be slow and that there was still a long way to go.
“Keep in mind that our expectation has never been that we would achieve full normalization immediately. There is a lot of work that still has to be done,” he said.
Any establishment of an embassy would be based on the success of the overall negotiations. The U.S. agreed last week to remove Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, as the Cuban government has insisted that diplomatic relations cannot exist while one country has the other one on a list of sponsors of terrorism.
teleSUR, March 2, 2015
