Senior U.S. diplomat to return to Havana for new Cuba talks

[March 14, 2015]  By Matt Spetalnick
 
 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is moving as quickly as possible to decide whether to remove Cuba from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring countries, a senior State Department official said on Friday ahead of a new round of talks in Havana next week.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, offered no timetable for a decision but said that Washington disagreed with Havana's effort to link the issue to broader negotiations on reopening embassies and restoring diplomatic relations that were severed more than 50 years ago.

Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson will travel to Havana on Sunday for discussions likely to begin on Monday aimed at normalizing ties, the official told reporters on a conference call.

U.S. and Cuban diplomats have met twice this year, the last time in Washington at the end of February, since President Barack Obama and President Raul Castro made a breakthrough announcement on Dec. 17 that upended decades of enmity.

Washington still hopes that the United States and communist-ruled Cuba will be able reopen their embassies, as Obama said in a Reuters interview last week, by the time of a Western Hemisphere summit in Panama in mid-April, the U.S. official said.

Cuba's presence on the U.S. terrorism blacklist remains a point of contention, and U.S. officials have made clear that a review ordered by Obama is being expedited.

"All I can continue to say is the review is under way and we’ll complete that as quickly as we can," the State Department official said, adding that this would also require getting "information that is needed from the government of Cuba."Josefina Vidal, head of the U.S. division of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, told state media last week that Cuba is willing to restore relations as soon as the Obama administration declares its intent to take Cuba off the list.

Cuba was added to the terrorism sponsors list in 1982, when it aided Marxist insurgencies.

Seeking to keep expectations low for the Havana talks, the U.S. official said that while "we're making very good progress," no big announcements are likely.

The official said the Obama administration was "disappointed" but not surprised by Cuba's criticism of new U.S. sanctions imposed on a group of officials in Venezuela, a close ally of Havana.

The official said Washington also remained concerned about what it sees as an increase in short-term detentions of dissidents and political activists by Cuba.

(Additional reporting by David Adams in Miami; Editing by Sandra Maler and Lisa Shumaker)

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