Questions over US-Cuba talks amid Venezuela dispute

Questions over US-Cuba talks amid Venezuela dispute
BY PETER ORSI AND ANDREA RODRIGUEZ ASSOCIATED PRESS
03/18/2015 11:57 PM 03/18/2015 11:58 PM

HAVANA
It has been a strange few days for U.S.-Cuba relations that are meant to
be on the mend.

First, the two sides emerged from surprise talks in Havana on Monday
with nothing to say about progress toward reopening embassies after more
than a half-century hiatus. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta
Jacobsen returned to Washington as quietly as she arrived.

Cuban President Raul Castro, meanwhile, jetted off to a summit of
leftist leaders in Venezuela on Tuesday to lambast U.S. policy toward
Venezuela, his island's top ally. The U.S. recently declared the South
American nation a threat to its national security and levied sanctions
on seven Venezuelan officials.

The whole thing had some observers scratching their heads, wondering
whether there is now an obstacle blocking the road to detente.

The two countries announced their intent to normalize diplomatic
relations on Dec. 17, but progress has been slow going in the
intervening three months. The next steps in the rapprochement are widely
seen to be the reopening of embassies and the removal of Cuba from a
State Department list of terror-sponsoring nations.

Given the desire to turn the page expressed by both Castro and President
Barack Obama, many people had been expecting at least one of those
issues to have been resolved by now.

"The jockeying may be to strengthen bargaining hands and/or to parlay
pressures from domestic hardliners," said Richard Feinberg, a former
White House adviser on Latin America during the Clinton administration
who now teaches international political economy at the University of
California, San Diego.

"They're entering a tricky phase," said Paul Webster Hare, a former
British ambassador to Cuba who also served in his country's embassy in
Caracas.

If the sides don't announce some progress ahead of the April 10-11
Summit of the Americas, "then clearly people are going to begin to talk
about whether the thing will be stalled for a period of time or might
even go backward," Hare said.

But he said the slow pace and lack of regular updates are probably not
indications of any serious problems, and he noted that Cuba has a
reputation of taking its time in negotiations.

"Once you go public, and of course these sessions have been very, very
public ... you get much more media pressure to give a running commentary
on what happens," Hare said.

The earlier two negotiating sessions — one in Havana, one in Washington
— were much higher profile, with officials holding news conferences and
staging photo ops. This time, the Cuban and U.S. sides said only that
the discussions were "professional" and "constructive."

Issues being discussed include staff levels at diplomatic missions and
current limitations on the movement of diplomats in each other's
countries as well as Cuba's difficulties with banking in the U.S.

An official with knowledge of the talks confirmed to The Associated
Press that Venezuela came up in Monday's talks. The official said the
Cuban delegation expressed essentially the same concerns in private that
it has in public, but the issue did not cause any real tension or
complicate the discussions. The official lacked authorization to discuss
the matter publicly and agreed to talk about the session only on
condition of anonymity.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki defended the U.S.
declaration against Venezuela.

Castro reacted to the U.S. move by saying: "The U.S. needs to understand
once and for all that it can't seduce or buy Cuba, just as it can't
intimidate Venezuela. Our unity is indestructible."

Carlos Alzugaray, a Cuban academic and longtime diplomat, said
Washington's differences with Venezuela and Havana's support of its ally
should not be a major impediment.

"For me, those are the accepted rules of the game," he said. "It will
always have some impact, but I don't see any signal from Cuba that it is
not still interested in moving forward, nor do I see it from the United
States."

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Associated Press writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this
report.

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Peter Orsi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Peter-Orsi

Andrea Rodriguez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ARodriguezAP

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