The top U.S. diplomat leading negotiations with Cuba to normalize relations pledged Tuesday not to accept conditions barring meetings with the island’s dissident community.
“We could not accept not meeting with democracy activists and with the broadest swath of Cubans possible — because that is the goal of this policy,” Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of State, told a Senate committee hearing.
Jacobson made the statement after repeated questions from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a vocal opponent of President Obama’s attempt to normalize relations with Cuba and lift several travel and trade embargoes that have been in place for decades.
On Monday, Cuba demanded the United States stop sending aid for Cuban dissidents before the two countries can re-open embassies in each others’ capitals and renew full diplomatic relations.
Officials for both sides met in Havana in January, with a second round of talks expected to be held in Washington later this month.
Jacobson and other U.S. officials have repeatedly said that re-establishing diplomatic ties with Cuba by opening a fully operational embassy in Havana and expanding its staff would be the easy and first step in a long process of normalizing relations with the Cuban government.
Already, however, the process of re-engaging diplomatically is experiencing speed bumps.
Cuba’s lead negotiator Monday said in an interview broadcast on state television that it would not grant free movement for U.S. diplomats if those same diplomats continue to support Cuban dissidents and those opposed to the Castro regime.
“The way those [U.S.] diplomats act should change in terms of stimulating, organizing, training, supplying and financing elements within our country that act against the interests of … the government of the Cuban people,” Josefina Vidal said, according to a report in Reuters.
“The total freedom of movement, which the U.S. side is posing, is tied to a change in the behavior of its diplomatic mission and its officials,” said Vidal, Cuba’s top official for U.S. affairs.
Under initial questioning Tuesday, Jacobson said she was unsure whether Vidal’s demands were real or intended to play to the cameras.
“Things are said in public that is not a condition in private,” she said during Tuesday’s Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing.
She pledged to keep pushing the Castro regime for human rights changes and for other freedoms, adding that she “can’t imagine that we would go to the next stage of our diplomatic relationships with an agreement not to see democracy activists.”
In her interview on state-run TV, however, Vidal did not mince words.
“Matters of internal affairs in Cuba are not negotiable,” Vidal said. “Nor are we going to negotiate matters of an internal nature regarding Cuban sovereignty in exchange for lifting the embargo. Beyond that, everything else is a process of negotiation.”
