Obama offers talks with Cuba

US President Barack Obama said he was ready to take up an extraordinary overture from Cuba for talks aimed at breaking the half-decade hostility between Washington and Havana, as long as they aimed for "a new beginning."

"Let me be clear: I am not interested in talking for the sake of talking. But I do believe that we can move US-Cuban relations in a new direction," Obama said in a speech on Friday at the Summit of the Americas with Latin American leaders that opened in Trinidad and Tobago.

"I am prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues -- from drugs, to migration and economic issues, to migration and economic issues, to human rights, free speech and democratic reform."

Cuba was excluded from the summit, which brought together all 34 other countries from the Americas.

But Cuban President Raul Castro on Thursday said: "We are open, whenever they US officials want, to discussing everything: human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to discuss."

That specificity was unprecedented, although Castro reiterated that talks could only take place if Cuba was treated as the United States' equal.

Unprecedented, too, was US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's assessment just before the summit on Friday that US policy towards Cuba had "failed."

That admission came as Latin American nations increasingly criticized the 47-year-old US embargo on Cuba that has stunted its economy and contributed to the widespread poverty on the communist island.

Several leaders at the summit, including those of Argentina, Nicaragua and Belize called for an end to the embargo.

The speed with which the United States and Cuba appeared to be ready to thaw an enmity held over since the Cold War was startling.

The impetus came from Obama's decision early this week to lift curbs on Cuban-Americans traveling and sending remittances to Cuba.

Although former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dismissed the gesture as inadequate, it stirred other Latin American countries.

The left-wing presidents of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Honduras issued a joint statement Friday before heading to the summit saying they would not back the prepared final declaration because it was "insufficient and unacceptable."

The summit "unjustifiably excludes Cuba, without mentioning the general consensus that exists the region condemning the blockade and attempted isolation" of the island, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said, reading from the statement.

Obama, who shook hands with Chavez at the start of the Americas summit but ruled out a bilateral meeting there, said his goal was seeing democracy in Cuba.

"Toward that end, the United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba," he said.

The US president acknowledged that "overcoming decades of mistrust" would be difficult, but "critical steps" such as his scrapping of the curb on travel for Cuban-Americans were possible.

He also said that "United States policy should not be interference in other countries, but that also means we can't blame the United States for every problem that happens in the hemisphere. That's part of the bargain."





A man works on the rotor head of a windmill at the fair grounds in Hanover, Germany, where preparations are under way for the Hannover Messe fair for industrial technology. AFP/DDP/Nigel Treblin