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Francois Hollande has become the first French president to visit Cuba since 1898, holding talks with revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in the capital Havana. The French leader is using a one-day trip to the island to build business and diplomatic relations, five months after a detente between the Caribbean nation and the US.
Hollande also on Monday held private talks with President Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother.
Earlier, Hollande addressed the University of Havana saying, “to be in Cuba is to be in a country that in Latin America has represented dignity and independence”.
He made no allusion to the more than decade-long freeze in ties between Cuba and the European Union and no mention of human rights issues that led to that freeze in 2003.
“A country with culture is a strong and free country, and we [Cuba and France] want to be increasingly strong and free,” he said.
The visit is the first by a Western European leader in almost 30 years and, more significantly, the first since the EU froze political and cultural ties with Cuba’s government in response to the arrest of 77 dissidents in 2002.
Al Jazeera’s Latin America Editor Lucia Newman, reporting from Havana, said France clearly wanted to take a leadership role in “untying the ideological knot”.
“It believes the EU needs to position itself politically and economically ahead of the US when it eventually lifts the economic embargo against Cuba,” she said.
Hollande, who brought along executives from French multinational hotel, airline, supermarket, liquor and telecommunications firms, said France would be a “faithful ally” of Cuba as it re-entered the global economic system. — AFP
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