Business and political relations between Brazil and Cuba will be restored, the Reuters news agency reports, citing a senior Brazilian foreign policy official.
Celso Amorim, a diplomatic adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (popularly known as Lula), met with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel in Havana recently and said: “We want to make the relationship between Brazil and Cuba one of great friendship.”
Ties between the two countries were frayed under Lula’s predecessor, the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. In the first year of Bolsonaro’s administration, 2019, Brazil voted for the first time against a UN resolution calling for an end to the US economic blockade of Cuba.
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According to Reuters, Amorim said stronger ties with Havana “will contribute to peace in our region, and that’s the greatest goal of diplomacy, alongside economic growth.”
He added that Brazil would soon send delegations of health and agricultural experts to its Latin American neighbour.
Amorim’s trip to Havana follows a meeting between Lula and Diaz-Canel in June in Paris – an encounter described as “fraternal” by the Cuban leader.
