U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro have begun a highly anticipated meeting on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas.
The two met shortly after their back-to-back speeches to leaders at the regional summit, which opened Friday.
In his address, Castro delved into a long, impassioned history of Cuban grievances against the United States, but stopped to apologize to the U.S. leader, calling him an “honest man” and absolving him of responsibility for the longstanding U.S. embargo on Cuba and other actions taken under previous administrations.
I have told President Obama myself that I am very emotional when I talk about the revolution,” he said. “I apologize because President Obama had no responsibility for this.”
The two leaders’ informal meeting is the first since Obama announced in December his intention to normalize relations with Havana. There has been no face-to-face discussion between the two countries’ top leaders in more than five decades.
In their speeches earlier Saturday, the U.S. and Cuban presidents both indicated a willingness to open a new chapter to end more than 50 years of icy relations.
Obama said he is focused on the future and is not, in his words, caught up in ideology.
“The Cold War has been over for a long time and I’m not interested in having battles that, frankly, started before I was born,” he said.
Obama said he has called on the U.S. Congress to begin work to end the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, a move Castro welcomed.
The Cuban president spoke for 48 minutes, much of that time delivering a stinging indictment of what he said was U.S. intervention in the island nation and the rest of Latin America.
But he praised Obama’s efforts to remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, which he said should have never included his country.
The terrorists, Castro said, are those like the C.I.A. operative who participated in the capture and interrogation of executed leftist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who died in 1967 in Bolivia in a failed attempt to lead a guerrilla uprising.
Addressing the regional gathering of leaders just before Castro, Obama said re-establishing diplomatic ties with Cuba would enhance opportunities for the island nation, the United States and beyond.
“This shift in U.S. policy represents a turning point for our entire region,” he said.
Appealing to other Latin American leaders, Castro said “we have to continue striving and supporting President Obama in his intentions to remove the blockade.”
The Cuban leader said he welcomes as “a positive step” Obama’s announcement that he soon will decide whether to remove Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, which also includes Iran, Sudan and Syria.
There is speculation that move could come within hours, when the two leaders meet. Cuba’s demand to be taken off the list has been an obstacle in negotiations on restoring diplomatic ties.
As the two-day summit opened Friday evening, Obama and Castro shook hands, a gesture widely seen as symbolic of their effort to bury decades of animosity.
It has been two years since their first handshake at the memorial service for former South African President Nelson Mandela.
Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press and Reuters.
