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Obama will interact with Raul Castro at summit

by Mark Hensch - 04/04/15 9:53 AM ET

President Obama will directly encounter Cuban President Raul Castro at next week’s Summit of the Americas in Panama, the State Department revealed Friday.

A potential rendezvous between the two leaders would mark the first since January’s thaw in U.S-Cuba relations.

AFP reported that State official Roberta Jacobson confirmed the likely run-in during a Friday speech in Washington.

{mosads}“Clearly President Obama knew when he made the decision to go to the summit, and he knew that Cuba had been invited to the summit … that there would be an interaction,” Jacobson said at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

“The leaders are together a lot of the time,” she added. “And so there will be an interaction with Raul Castro.”

Jacobson would not predict what a possible brush between Obama and Castro would look like. For now, she said, the president’s only planned appointment is with Panamanian leader Juan Carlos Varela next Friday.

“None of the president’s meetings are scheduled other this bilateral with President Varela as the host,” Jacobson said.

“So I don’t know exactly what kind of an interaction that will be,” she admitted. “But they’ve obviously already spoken on the phone … and there’s been a lot of interaction since then at the lower level.”

This year’s Summit of the Americas runs April 10-11 in Panama City. The annual conference is a networking opportunity for world leaders from Central, North and South America.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz on Friday said Obama will meet Varela on April 10 before attending the Summit’s opening ceremony and its CEO forum.

The president will then attend the summit itself and participate in a related press conference the next day.

The Obama administration began 2015 with a landmark break in tensions with the Castro regime, authorizing eased trade and travel regulations on Cuba for Americans in January.

The Obama administration has had three diplomatic meetings with Cuba since January over restoring official embassies between the two former rivals.

State spokeswoman Marie Harf said Friday the U.S. will not likely have restored its embassy with Havana in time for next week’s summit.

“It’s not a lot of time, let’s put it that way,” she confessed.