[If Mr. Obama was ready to forget past grudges, Mr. Castro was
not. He gave a lengthy speech on Saturday that included a recitation of Cuban
grievances against the United States — including its support for Fulgencio
Batista, the Bay of Pigs invasion and its opening of the prison at Guantánamo
Bay — sometimes pounding the table for emphasis. But Mr. Castro also made clear
that he did not blame Mr. Obama for the legacy of bad blood between their two
countries, and expressed admiration for the American president, calling him an
“honest man” and praising as a “positive step” his reconsideration of Cuba’s
designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.]
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and
Randal C. Archibold
 |
| Picture: The White House Facebook |
Seated beside Mr. Castro in a small room in the convention
center downtown where the summit was being held, Mr. Obama called the event “an
historic meeting.”
The president cast his decision to seek normalized relations
with Cuba after 50 years of estrangement in a bid
to reverse a failed policy.
“It was time for us to try something new,” Mr. Obama said. “We
are now in a position to move on a path toward the future.” He added: “Over
time, it is possible for us to turn the page and develop a new relationship
between our two countries.”
Mr. Castro said the opening would take time, but eventually
could yield agreements on long-held differences.
”We are willing to discuss everything, but we need to be
patient, very patient,” Mr. Castro said, according to his translator. “We might
disagree on something today on which we could agree tomorrow.”
The meeting on the sidelines of the Summit of the
Americas was an important step for Mr. Obama as he seeks to ease tensions with
Cuba and defuse a generations-old dispute that has also affected relations with
the countries of the region. Ever since his first foray to the summit three
months after taking office, Mr. Obama has seen one bone of contention frustrate
his efforts to reach out to America’s hemispheric neighbors: the fact that Cuba
was blackballed from the gathering.
He was scolded by Argentina’s president for maintaining an
“anachronistic blockade,” lectured by Bolivia’s president about behaving “like
a dictatorship,” and, in 2012, blamed for the failure of leaders to agree that
year on a joint declaration — the result, his Colombian host said, of the
dispute over Cuba.
This year, Mr. Obama came to the summit meeting here determined
to change the dynamic with a series of overtures to Cuba.
In addition to the meeting with Mr. Castro, the summit was the
first time in the more than 20-year history of the summit meeting that Cuba was
allowed to attend. And it came as Mr. Obama neared a decision to remove Cuba from a list
of state sponsors of terrorism, a crucial precursor to the establishment of
diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana.
“The United States will not be imprisoned by the past — we’re
looking to the future,” Mr. Obama said of his approach to Cuba at the summit
meeting’s first plenary session on Saturday, speaking just before Mr. Castro
took the floor and before their meeting. “I’m not interested in having battles
that frankly started before I was born.”
“The Cold War,” he added, “has been over for a long time.”
He said the shift in policy would be a turning point for the
entire region.
If Mr. Obama was ready to forget past grudges, Mr. Castro was
not. He gave a lengthy speech on Saturday that included a recitation of Cuban
grievances against the United States — including its support for Fulgencio
Batista, the Bay of Pigs invasion and its opening of the prison at Guantánamo
Bay — sometimes pounding the table for emphasis. But Mr. Castro also made clear
that he did not blame Mr. Obama for the legacy of bad blood between their two
countries, and expressed admiration for the American president, calling him an
“honest man” and praising as a “positive step” his reconsideration of Cuba’s
designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.
For Mr. Obama, the gathering was a chance to showcase progress
toward a goal he aspired to during the first Latin American summit meeting he
attended — when he spoke of a “new beginning” with Cuba even in its absence —
and to clear away what had become a dysfunctional subtext of the meeting for
generations of American presidents.
“Our Cuba policy, instead of isolating Cuba, was isolating the
United States in our own backyard,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy
national security adviser for strategic communications. “This time, we arrived
here, yes, certainly not agreeing with everybody on everything,” he said, but
with “broad agreement with the leaders here that what the president did was the
right thing.”
“It is going to open up the door not just to greater engagement
with Cuba, but potentially more constructive relations across the hemisphere,”
Mr. Rhodes said.
While several Latin American nations have criticized recent
United States sanctions against several Venezuelan officials
it has accused of human rights violations, Mr. Obama’s overtures to Cuba, as
well as his recent executive action on immigration, to make it easier for some
people who are in the United States without authorization to stay legally, have
brought an unusual round of salutes and congratulations.
“President Obama is going to leave a legacy the way he is
supporting Hispanics in the United States, and also his new policy for Cuba for
us is very important,” President Juan Carlos Varela of Panama said just before a meeting with Mr. Obama
at the summit conference.
President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, who demanded Cuba’s
inclusion in this summit meeting as he closed the last one, in his country in
2012, also celebrated Cuba’s arrival.
“The Cuba situation has been an obstacle going back a long time
in the relations of the United States with Latin America and the Caribbean, and
without that obstacle the cooperation on many fronts will be more fluid,” he
told the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo days before arriving here.
“I think it will generate new milestones in the history of all
America,” President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico said just after landing here,
adding that he hoped for “more brotherhood, more closeness” in the region.
It was a far cry from the last Summit of the Americas in 2012 in
Cartagena, Colombia — marred by a prostitution scandal involving Secret Service
agents — when some Latin American leaders openly berated Mr. Obama for the
United States’ stance on excluding Cuba, and Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela
said they wouldn’t attend again unless Cuba could.
The president ended that gathering with a testy lament,
seemingly irritated by his inability to move past old disputes.
“Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born,”
Mr. Obama said in his closing news conference, adding that it felt at times as
if “we’re caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s, and gunboat
diplomacy, and ‘Yanquis’ and the Cold War, and this and that and the other.”
This time, Mr. Obama cast himself as the agent of change instead
of the victim of inertia.
“As you work for change, the United States will stand up
alongside you every step of the way,” he told Latin American leaders and civil
society representatives at a forum on Friday. “The days in which our agenda in
this hemisphere so often presumed that the United States could meddle with
impunity — those days are past.”
The meeting was not without tension or reminders of the old
animosities Mr. Obama is seeking to defuse. It was marred by several clashes in
the streets between Cuban dissidents and government representatives, one of
whom accused the demonstrators of being paid by foreign governments, including
the United States.
But longtime observers of the region said Mr. Obama’s move had
robbed hemispheric neighbors of an oft-repeated knock against this American
president and his predecessors.
“It opens the door for the U.S. government by removing this
argument that has been a pretext and an issue that has been invoked, not only
by Cuba but other countries in the region, as a distraction,” said José Miguel
Vivanco, the director of the Latin America program at Human Rights Watch, who
attended a round-table discussion of civil society leaders with Mr. Obama on
Friday.
“The focus has been for so many years on the U.S. policy toward
Cuba, not on the record of Cuba,” he added. “This puts the U.S. government and
the Obama administration in a very different position with much more
credibility when it comes to talking about democracy and human rights.”
Latin America’s often wary eye on the United States goes back
even to what historians consider a precursor to today’s regional summit
meetings, a congress the South American independence hero Simón Bolivar called
in Panama in 1826 among a handful of newly
independent countries.
They were suspicious of the United States then and of whether,
after throwing off the influence of Spain, the new nations would have to
contend with a new dominant power.
Periodic American intervention, coup orchestrations and outright
invasions followed and heightened the region’s sensitivity to sovereignty,
which continues to this day and often trumps all other concerns.
In recent decades democracy has taken root. Anti-Americanism
often plays well to domestic politics. And although the United States remains a
major if not the top trading partner to most of the region, the economies of
Latin American nations have diversified to be less reliant on aid.
“Latin
Americans are in stronger positions, as the result of more stable democratic
governments and more sustainable macroeconomic policies and a surer sense of
their national interests, which do not always coincide with those of the U.S.,”
said Richard Feinberg, an international political economist at the University
of California, San Diego, who is attending the summit meeting.
