MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Summit of the Americas: President Obama haunted by ghost of Cuba

Mr Obama is wary of upsetting the entrenched anti-Castro lobby

Mr Obama will announce that Washington is lifting the toughest restrictions on travel to the island for Cuban-Americans and the dollar remittances they can send back to impoverished relatives.

But he will be confronted by a clamour of calls - from America's traditional friends and foes in the region alike - to lift the 47-year-old US trade embargo and to allow free travel for Americans to the island.

The tropical communist outpost is the ghost at the summit table in Trinidad and Tobago as the country was suspended from the Organisation of American States in 1962 when Fidel Castro aligned the country with Moscow.

But US policy towards Cuba has dogged 10 presidents since the Castro-led revolution half a century ago.

Even the leading Cuban exile group, long a hardline bastion of support for sanctions, last week called for the White House to expand relations with Havana and fund more money to the Cuban people. And bills have recently been introduced in Congress to end the travel ban.

For now, however, Mr Obama is wary of upsetting the entrenched anti-Castro lobby. He is expected to make further concessions on travel in the future, but is in no rush to tackle an issue which still incredibly sensitive.

Just last week, a group of African-American congressmen were feted in Cuba, meeting both President Raul Castro and Fidel, his ailing older brother who has not been seen in public since his health failed in 2006.

But Marc Thiessen, a former senior Pentagon and White House official under President George W Bush, argued that lifting the embargo now, with the Castros' era drawing to a close, made no sense as the embargo gives the US leverage in pushing for a democratic transition.

“The dumbest thing we could do today would be to enact legislation unilaterally lifting the embargo,” he said. “Like it or not, it is our only leverage, aside from our military, to affect the transition in Cuba. Why would we fritter [that] away?” Indeed, although Raul Castro has introduced some minor economic reforms, 200 political prisoners remain in jail and he has just conducted a purge of his top lieutenants - a clear sign that he has no intention of easing his grip on power.

The country's two most prominent non-Castro politicians, foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque and economics tsar Carlos Lage, both tipped as future leaders of the country, were abruptly sacked in the shake-up.

Cuban officials have said that the two men had become “too visible” and “conveyed to foreign politicians false expectations” about how the country might change. The New York Times last week offered a rare glimpse into behind-the-scenes intrigues in Havana when it reported that Mr Perez Roque and Mr Lage had also been secretly taped making vulgar jokes about Fidel Castro's age and Raul's political capabilities.

That revelation could explain a reference by the older Castro to the two men being enticed by the “honey of power” into making misjudgments.

“Raul was clearly showing his intention to consolidate power before the party congress later this year,” Brian Latell, former senior Cuba analyst at the CIA and author of the book After Fidel, told The Sunday Telegraph. “Perez Roque's demise was particularly sudden. I've heard he had his bags packed for a trip abroad as foreign minister when the axe fell. It was that sudden.” (Telegraph)