The diplomatic track

Panama’s president just ended a visit to Cuba, and soon there will be visits by the presidents of Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile.

EFE reports separately on Cuban dissidents’ requests for meetings with the visiting heads of state, and on a statement by the spokesman for President Bachelet in Chile: “There doesn’t exist in any part of Chilean foreign policy a requirement that to go to a country one must meet the opposition.”

Meanwhile, former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda has looked at recent diplomatic activity and wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month, “Never before has Havana harvested diplomatic successes of the sort it has enjoyed in the last few months.” He noted that the “Castro brothers have convinced almost every Latin American government that the main item on the region's agenda with Barack Obama is the suppression of the U.S. embargo with the island.” That’s fair enough; the recent statements from the Brazil summit and Caricom probably came with a Cuban nudge. But Castaneda’s concluding idea that the United States could negotiate “political, if not regime, change with the Latin Americans, in exchange for normalizing economic ties,” doesn’t seem to be based on the Latin America that exists today.