US president emphasises there is considerable work to do as countries re-establish diplomatic ties but hopes embassies can open in coming weeks

Barack Obama has said he hopes the US will open an embassy in Cuba ahead of an Americas summit in April, one of the first major steps in restoring diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana.



The US president emphasized that considerable work remains to be done as the two countries seek to re-establish diplomatic ties, but said in an interview with Reuters on Monday that he hopes recent negotiations can lead to the embassies reopening in the coming weeks.

Both Obama and the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, are expected to attend the Summit of the Americas, which is set for 10 and 11 April in Panama City. Obama said before the summit: “My hope is that we will be able to open an embassy, and that some of the initial groundwork will have been laid.”

“Keep in mind that our expectation has never been that we would achieve full normal relations immediately,” Obama said. “There’s a lot of work that still has to be done.”

The US and Cuba announced in December that they plan to restore diplomatic relations after severing them in 1961. Reopening embassies in each country is expected to be the first major step to demonstrate the renewing of diplomatic ties.

The former embassy building in Havana is currently occupied by the US interests section, which provides a US government presence in Cuba. In Washington, Cuba has its own interests section, which is managed by Switzerland.

While the US is pushing to open the embassies, the Cuban government has balked at the US’s classification of the country as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. The US imposed this status in 1982, but it is currently under review by the State Department.

On Friday, delegations from both countries met in Washington for the second round of negotiations.

Josefina Vidal, the Cuban foreign ministry’s head of US affairs, said after the meeting that removing Cuba from the list is “not a precondition” for opening the embassies.

“It is a matter of sheer justice,” Vidal said. However, she added that “we have not established links between opening embassies and the removal from the terrorist list.”

US secretary of state John Kerry said that discussions about normalizing relations are separate from the terrorism classification discussions at a news conference earlier on Friday. “It is not a negotiation,” Kerry said of the classification evaluation process.