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LatinNews Daily - 28 September 2015

Cuba: Obama-Castro to meet at UN

Development: US President Barack Obama will meet his Cuban peer, Raúl Castro, at the margins of the United Nations General Assembly tomorrow (29 September), White House officials have confirmed.

Significance: This will be the second time that the two leaders will formally meet, having first met at the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April. Obama also telephoned Castro ahead of Pope Francis’s recent trip to Cuba, which coincided with further US regulatory changes to facilitate travel and trade with Cuba. The White House is continuing to chip away at the US embargo, while urging Congress to approve its removal.

  • As expected, Castro used a 25 September address at the United Nations (UN) to lambast the US embargo and call for its removal. Speaking to a UN summit of world leaders on sustainable development, Castro hailed the restoration of diplomatic relations with the US as “major progress” but declared the embargo “the main obstacle to our country's economic development”, adding that it also affected third countries due to its extraterritorial scope; and was “hurting the interests of American citizens and companies”.
  • Today (28 September), Castro will address the UN General Assembly for the first time since becoming president, where he will repeat that message. Ahead of the annual UN vote on a resolution backing removal of the embargo, US diplomats have suggested that Washington is considering abstaining from the vote, provided that the draft text is toned down a little. Should the US abstain, it would represent another major diplomatic gesture by the Obama administration, and would add to the pressure on the Republican-controlled Congress to reconsider its hardline position, which looks increasingly out of touch, not only with international opinion, but also with US public and business opinion.
  • Separately, US and Cuban officials are scheduled to hold talks today and tomorrow on a new civil aviation agreement, needed in advance of the expected opening of commercial air travel between the two countries. In a sign of the confidence in these talks, the low-cost US carrier JetBlue yesterday (27 September) announced the addition of a second weekly charter flight from New York City’s John F. Kennedy international airport to Havana, in a bid to consolidate its position before commercial airliners begin operating scheduled flights.

Looking Ahead: While general US tourism to Cuba is still banned, the Obama administration has made it significantly easier to travel to the island for Cuban Americans and the 12 permitted categories of US visitors. Legislation proposing the removal of the tourism ban (and the removal in full of the US embargo) is due to go before Congress by year-end.

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