This includes opening embassies and also working through various issues, but the claims is the biggest issue that the sides have talked about to this point, and is more in-depth than the other issues.
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Claims brought on by the USA are estimated to be worth around $2 billion.
US officials told their counterparts that they are concerned about “the safety of the thousands of Cuban migrants transiting through Central America”, the State Department stated. But Cuba has tried to offset those claims by making counterclaims of billions of dollars in damages due to the embargo, which was put in place largely as a reaction to Cuba’s expropriation.
The U.S. State Department meets with the Cuban government Tuesday to begin official negotiations over outstanding claims of American individuals and corporations who fled Cuba during the Cuban revolution and whose property was seized by the Castro regime.
US and Cuban diplomats have held numerous meetings this year on their normalization agenda. The two sides will discuss “a wide variety of claims”, including those certified by the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, government claims and claims related to unsatisfied U.S. court judgments against Cuba, the State Department said.
The talks come just before the first anniversary of the historic rapprochement, announced by Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro last December 17.
Preliminary discussions for compensation to USA companies broke off in 1960 after President Dwight D. Eisenhower suspended Cuba’s sugar export quota to the United States.
This issue has been systematically postponed in the talks between the two countries.
On the other side, Cuba claims to have suffered losses from the economic embargo, which was approved by Congress during the Cuban Missile Crisis but has endured long past the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
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Feinberg and others say the fact that most of the money is owed to USA companies could make the negotiations easier, if some of the firms are willing to accept tax breaks or other concessions from the Cuban government to ease their potential return to the island. The other almost 5,000 individual claims against Cuba amount only to about $200 million, a relatively modest amount, Feinberg said, even for the cash-strapped communist government.
