One week after President Barack Obama won reelection, Havana has offered a “draft agenda” for U.S.-Cuba negotiations that largely repeats its years-old positions but almost directly offers to swap Alan Gross for five Cuban spies.
The statement by Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla Lopez to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday received little initial media attention. It was disseminated more broadly Wednesday by his ministry and Cuba’s diplomatic mission in Washington.
Obama, reelected the previous Tuesday, has lifted nearly all limits on Cuban American travel and remittances to the island, allowed educational visits by other U.S. residents and restarted — and then stopped again — bilateral talks on migration issues.
But his administration has repeatedly said that more significant improvements in bilateral relations can come only after Cuba frees Gross, a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) subcontractor serving a 15-year prison sentence.
Wayne Smith, a former chief U.S. diplomat in Havana and now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, said Rodriguez laid out a list of issues that Havana has long said it wanted to discuss in any bilateral talks. “He simply reiterated their position. I don’t see anything new there,” Smith said.
“This is a non-starter. Same demands as in the past. No offers of major concessions on human rights, etc.,” Jaime Suchlicki, head of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami, wrote in an email.
Note EU-Digest: Regardless of the negotiation position taken by Cuba it would serve both Cuba and the US well to start negotiations with a clean slate. Politically and economically this would make a lot of sense. Not doing anything as Mr. Jaime Suchlicki suggests is not a good strategy.
Read more: Cuba again offers talks with Obama government - Cuba - MiamiHerald.com
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