At a historic meeting in Havana with Cuban President Raul Castro, President Obama paused at the top of his remarks to address the loss of a U.S. Marine in Iraq over the weekend. The U.S. president acknowledged the topic, promising that he would continue to “speak out on behalf of universal human rights, including freedom of speech and assembly and religion”.
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Castro denied that Cuba takes political prisoners and made it clear his definition of human rights differs from Obama’s.
“Give me a list of those political prisoners right now and if the list exists they will be released before the night is through”, Castro said. Castro said there are no political prisoners in the country and he would release them today if there were.
While Mr. Obama called on Congress to lift the trade embargo to Cuba, he said, “After more than five very hard decades the relationship between our governments will not be transformed overnight”. Estimates indicate the Cuban government has at least 60 political prisoners and an approximately 103 were killed in 2014.
He stressed that Cuba has a strong record on rights such as health, access to education and women’s equality.
Castro did not greet Obama at the airport Sunday, sending his foreign minister instead, and a heavy police presence has ensured that Cubans have no chance of gathering spontaneously at any of Obama’s appearances around the city. Obama has said he’ll press Castro on the country’s crackdown dissidents.
“My vocabulary is the equivalent of a 2-year-old’s”, Obama joked.
The White House has not released a list of the activist leaders Obama plans to meet. He also said there are likely a “couple hundred” political prisoners, though his organization has named 51. In an awkward moment, the Cuban leader instead grabbed Obama’s arm and lifted it up as the US president’s wrist dangled, an image that immediately grabbed attention on social media.
Obama, in an interview with ABC News, said he has no problem with such a meeting “just as a symbol of the end of this Cold War chapter”.
Castro later read out a list of areas where he said the US was failing and ended the question-and-answer session after a second inquiry on human rights, saying he’d said “enough”.
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Obama will attend a state dinner later Monday at the Revolutionary Palace. “We’re always going to be grateful for what the United States has done and given to us but my father was always heartbroken”, he told me.
