Panama President Hopes US-Cuba Dialogue Resumption

Varela said that he will keep fighting for that dialogue between Cuba and the United States materializes and becomes stronger

Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela is confident that the US Government will resume the dialogue with Cuba in the next Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru, as it happened before in a similar meeting in Panama, in 2015.

Answering a question by the news agency Prensa Latina that if his country had taken any step to mediate between the sides, as it had offered recently, Varela said: ‘permanently. I am a person that is permanently seeking dialogue,’ and extended his willingness to do it as well in the conflict between the United States and Venezuela.

He added that there were still six months before the continental meeting in Lima, where he expected the regional rapprochement to continue and said that he faithfully believed that we had to seek a united continent and the Americas should be united. ‘We never know when we will be hit by a hurricane, an earthquake, a natural disaster, an attack…’

The first meeting between the Cuban and US presidents, Raul Castro and Barack Obama, respectively, was held in the a summit in this capital, to seal the reestablishment of the diplomatic relations between both countries and the beginning of their normalization.

Contrary actions by the current US Administration caused backward steps in the rapprochement that were boosted by the far right in Miami, which insists on maintaining the conflict between both countries.

Varela insisted that ‘the countries should be united and security capacities should be used to help each other and solve the problems of our countries. So, I faithfully believe in that dialogue and I have told President Donald Trump and shared it in international forums.’

On the Cuban issue, he concluded that ‘I will keep fighting for that dialogue between Cuba and the United States materializes and becomes stronger,’ he at the end of his speech during the ceremony on the World Maritime Day 2017 and the 100th anniversary of the Panamanian Ship Registry, in the conference center Megapolis in this capital.