Reuters/Havana

Cuba has warned the United States that it wants American diplomats to scale back aid for Cuban dissidents before the two countries can reopen embassies in each other’s capitals.
The long-time adversaries are negotiating the restoration of diplomatic relations as a first step toward reversing more than five decades of confrontation. Officials for both governments met in Havana in January and a second round of talks is expected to be held in Washington this month.
But Cuba’s lead negotiator said in an interview broadcast on state television that if the United States wants free movement for its diplomats in Cuba, it must stop using them to support the political opposition.
“The way those (US) diplomats act should change in terms of stimulating, organising, training, supplying and financing elements within our country that act against the interests of ... the government of the Cuban people,” Josefina Vidal said.
“The total freedom of movement, which the US 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 US affairs.
Washington has long criticised the communist government for repressing opponents of the one-party system. While public support for dissidents is limited, they receive plenty of attention from US and Western diplomats.
The United States says it supports Cuban activists who exercise their right to freedom of expression.
The restoration of diplomatic ties could happen before a regional summit in Panama in April, when president Barack Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro would meet for the first time since shaking hands at the funeral of Nelson Mandela in December 2013.
Obama and Castro spoke on the phone the day before their separate but simultaneous announcements on December 17 that they would attempt to end their Cold War-era hostilities.
The warning by Vidal suggested there were obstacles to restoring diplomatic ties, which has been seen as a relatively easy first step before the two sides try to resolve deeper differences on matters such as human rights and the US economic embargo of Cuba.
Vidal said the conduct of Cuban diplomats in Washington was “impeccable”, while suggesting the Americans were meddling in internal Cuban affairs.
“Matters of the 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.”
The United States won’t curtail its support for democracy and human rights activists in Cuba as part of any agreement to restore embassies between the two countries after a half-century interruption, the top US diplomat for Latin America said yesterday.
But assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs Roberta Jacobson did say that more US-Cuba talks on re-establishing full diplomatic relations were planned for later this month.
Testifying at the first senate hearing chaired by senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American and likely presidential candidate, Jacobson faced a mix of policy and political questions. Beyond the packed gallery, the sizeable presence of television media from Rubio’s home state of Florida was unusual for a senate foreign relations subcommittee session.
Rubio asked Jacobson and State Department human rights chief Tom Malinowski if they would be willing to sacrifice human rights in an embassy agreement. He read from an interview that Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s top negotiator, gave.
“We would not curtail the activities we’re doing now,” Jacobson answered. When Rubio pressed her for a firm commitment, she said she couldn’t imagine a US embassy operating in Havana under such conditions and suggested that Vidal’s comments may have been more posturing than an actual negotiating position.
Jacobson’s trip to Havana last month made her the highest-level US official to visit Cuban capital in more than three decades. The talks encompassed the details of reconstituting embassies in each other’s capitals, managing migration flows and the much larger process of normalising ties between governments with unresolved issues ranging from fugitives to financial claims.