Cuban President Raul Castro said in an interview released on Wednesday that he would like to meet president-elect Barack Obama on “neutral ground,” suggesting the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
The Cuban leader’s offer came in a rare interview in Havana with actor-director Sean Penn, who wrote about it for the Dec. 15 edition of The Nation magazine. The article was released on the magazine’s Web site.
Penn asked whether Castro would meet with Obama in Washington.
The Cuban president said he “would have to think about it,” but that it would not be fair for either leader to go to the other’s territory.
Instead he suggested the base at Guantanamo.
“We must meet and begin to solve our problems, and at the end of the meeting, we could give the president a gift ... We could send him home with the American flag that waves over Guantanamo Bay,” Castro said.
Cuba’s main focus in such a meeting would be on normalizing trade, Castro said.
“The only reason for the blockade is to hurt us,” he told Penn, using the term the communist leadership employs for the five-decade-old US trade embargo. “Nothing can deter the revolution. Let Cubans come to visit with their families. Let Americans come to Cuba.”
Obama has said he is willing to meet with Castro without preconditions and that after taking office on Jan. 20 he would “immediately” lift all restrictions on family travel and remittances to Cuba.
Under tough rules imposed under US President George W. Bush, Cuban-Americans can now visit their relatives on the island only once every three years.
But Obama has said he would not support lifting the embargo until Cuba releases all political prisoners.
Castro told Penn that “no country is 100 percent free of human rights abuses,” but insisted that “reports in the US media are highly exaggerated and hypocritical.”
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