The White House said it had shared many such lists with the Cuban government before.
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McGovern also pushed Congress to lift trade
embargo and travel restrictions levied against Cuba, indicating Obama’s executive orders are not enough to fully normalize relations between the two nations.
Obama’s goal to deepen commercial ties with Cuba may gain some advance as leaders of both public and private businesses from Cuba met with their US counterparts at the forum.
“We share a national past-time – la pelota – and later today our players will compete on the same Havana field that Jackie Robinson played on before he made his Major League debut”, he said.
Beyond that meeting, aides said Mr Obama planned to use his speech to offer a vision for warmer relations extending beyond his own time in office. We hope that this historic visit by President Obama will pave the way for the complete removal of hostility that has plagued the two nations since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
We earlier heard from President Obama in Cuba when he spoke of the Brussels attacks.
“If I were in Cuba right now, the last thing I would be doing is going to baseball game”, Kasich said.
Castro went on to attack the United States for bringing up the human rights question when, he said, U.S. rights were themselves inadequate when it comes to health care, social security, and “double standards”.
President Obama was referring to the first game at Fenway Park after the bombings in 2013.
But he did not shy from criticizing Cuba’s lack of political liberty, saying the future would not depend on the USA but on homegrown change. Suppressing Internet access is just one more way to keep free speech in check.
Before Obama’s visit Josefina Vidal, director of USA affairs in the Cuban Foreign Ministry, said the president was welcome to visit but any trip shouldn’t be seen as an opportunity to interfere with Cuba’s political system.
Later in the day, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays will participate in an exhibition baseball game against the Cuban national team.
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Obama said the United States was “built on entrepreneurship and market-based principles, and it’s produced wealth that’s unmatched in the history of the world”, also adding that those same principles could empower Cubans to make them less reliant on government.
