Throughout 2015, the two nations have reopened their respective embassies, located in Havana, Cuba, and Washington, D.C. There has also been other significant progress made in returning to normal relations.
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Castro also repeated his call for the USA trade embargo against the communist nation to be lifted, saying President Barack Obama can do more to help end the embargo.
Cuba and the United States have made no progress in the past year on key issues that would improve bilateral relations, Cuban President Raul Castro said on Friday. Aviation safety was discussed and expanded, along with agreeing to fight against drug trafficking, illegal migration, alien smuggling, and migration fraud, Havana Times listed.
However, U.S. Congress is opposed to bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States and any attempt by President Obama to carry that plan through is set to cause outcry among lawmakers.
Likewise, she said that new areas for bilateral cooperation have opened, and highlighted the protection of the environment, exchanges on maritime-port security, the implementation and enforcement of the law and issues related to health.
Castro said that these accomplishments were reached through “a professional and respectful dialogue based on equality and reciprocity”, the news outlet further reported.
Cuban President Raul Castro confirmed his government’s “complete inclination” to continue building a brand new relationship with the U.S., while insisting that Washington’s economic embargo is the “principal obstacle” to full normalisation.
Raul Castro, who came to power in 2006 when older brother Fidel fell gravely ill, said that even full normalisation with the United States will not lead to the abandonment of the “principles and ideals for which so many Cubans have struggled for the last half-century”.
The Government of Cuba is fully willing to continue advancing in the construction of a kind of relation with the United States that is different from the one that has existed throughout its prior history, that is based on mutual respect for sovereignty and independence, that is beneficial to both countries and peoples and that is nurtured by the historical, cultural and family links that have existed between Cubans and Americans.
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Cuba, he said, will remain immersed in the process of transformations to modernize its economic and social model…to increase the wellbeing of the population and bolster the achievements of the socialist revolution..
