The US and Cuban foreign ministers met in Panama on Thursday, a US official said, in the highest-level meeting between the two sides since the earliest days of the Cuban revolution more than half a century ago.
The discussions between US secretary of state John Kerry and Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez marked the first time the two nations' chief diplomats have met since a historic opening by president Barack Obama and his Cuban counterpart, Raul Castro, that was announced on December 17th last year.
The closed-door meeting took place at a Panama City hotel on the eve of a Western Hemisphere summit where Mr Obama and Mr Castro will cross paths. The State Department had said earlier that Mr Kerry and Mr Rodriguez planned to meet on Thursday
Other regional leaders also are gathering in Panama City for the Summit of the Americas held every three years.
An earlier statement from the US state department said nothing about whether Mr Obama may remove Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a move that is widely expected following the rapprochement between the two countries.
But a US senate foreign relations committee aide said on Thursday that the State Department had recommended that Mr Obama remove Cuba from the list.
Mr Obama's decision to move toward restoring diplomatic ties marks a sea change in relations since the Cuban revolution, when US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the island on January 1st, 1959, as Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries seized control.
John Foster Dulles and Gonzalo Guell were the last US and Cuban foreign ministers to hold a formal meeting, which took place in Washington DC, on September 22nd, 1958, said a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The highest-level meeting after the revolution took place in April 1959, between then-vice president Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro, who had become his country’s prime minister in early 1959. Relations between the United States and Cuba rapidly deteriorated soon after.
Reuters