Obama to extend hand to Latin America at summit

Fri Apr 17, 2009 5:47am EDT
By Pascal Fletcher
PORT OF SPAIN (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama meets his counterparts in Latin America and the Caribbean on Friday, offering practical cooperation over the ideological differences that have strained U.S. ties with the region.
But the Summit of the Americas he will attend with 33 other leaders in Trinidad and Tobago looks set to be dominated by debate over Washington's enduring ideological conflict with Cuba, the only one-party communist state in the hemisphere.
Cuba, excluded from these hemispheric summits that started in 1994, is not part of the agenda, which talks of confronting the global downturn and energy and security challenges.
But with one voice, the region's governments are calling on the U.S. president to honor his pledge for change by dropping the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba which has ended up isolating Washington more than its original target.
This seems further than Obama is willing to go at the moment after he relaxed some specific aspects of the embargo on Monday, opening a crack in a U.S. policy dating back to the Cold War, when Cuba was a player in the U.S.-Soviet standoff.
Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear on Thursday that while his administration is ready to talk to Havana about a rapprochement, it expects the Cuban side to reciprocate by freeing political prisoners and improving human rights for its citizens.
"I don't expect things to change overnight ... We are not trying to be heavy handed, we want to be open to engagement, but we're going to do so in a systematic way that keeps focus on the hardships and struggles that many Cubans are suffering," Obama told reporters during a visit to Mexico.
But he hinted earlier he was willing to leave behind entrenched ideological positions of the past to seek practical solutions to the serious problems facing the Americas, in particular the global economic downturn that has hit the United States as hard as it is squeezing the rest of the region.
"Years of progress in combating poverty and inequality hangs in the balance. The United States is working to advance prosperity in the hemisphere by jump-starting our own recovery," Obama wrote in an op-ed article.