Korea willing to establish ties with Cuba

Seoul, Havana hold 1st foreign ministerial talks

By Jun Ji-hye, Joint press corps

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se said Seoul is willing to establish diplomatic ties with Cuba during ministerial talks in Havana, Sunday.

Yun, South Korea’s first foreign minister to visit Cuba, met with his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodriguez, behind closed doors at the Palacio de Convenciones for talks originally scheduled to last for 30 minutes, but which lasted 75 minutes.

The talks broke a decades-long absence of formal diplomatic exchanges between the two countries. Ties between Seoul and Havana were severed in 1959 when Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro took power and aligned with North Korea.

Yun told reporters after the meeting that the two spoke to each other frankly and earnestly.

“We had a broad exchange of views on bilateral, regional and global issues,” Yun said.

The minister did not elaborate on what was said about normalization of ties, but apparently took an optimistic view of the future.

“I expect there to be follow-up talks at various levels under a vision for the future,” he said. “Our government plans to put in a lot of effort for that vision and an improvement in bilateral ties in mind.”

Yun noted that he stressed the need for “giving tangible shape to the potential that the two sides have.”

The remark was construed as delivering a message on the need for formal diplomatic ties.

From the point of view of South Korea, the betterment of bilateral relations with Cuba can considerably help Seoul increase pressure on the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program, given that Havana has maintained ties with Pyongyang.

The United States’ normalization of relations with Cuba last year, after a 53-year estrangement, has led to expectations that South Korea, a U.S. ally, could also establish diplomatic relations with the island nation.

The government has cautiously increased nonpolitical exchanges in culture, economic and trade sectors with Cuba since the late 1990s in an effort to pave the way to normalizing bilateral ties.

In February last year, Minister Yun officially expressed the government’s willingness to improve ties during a session at the National Assembly.

Yun’s historic visit could be a crucial point for Seoul to establish diplomatic ties, observers say.

But critics have guarded against such optimism, citing the strength of the Cuba-North Korea alliance.

Yun arrived in Cuba Saturday for a two-day visit, during which he also attended the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) summit. Seoul was invited as an observer country by the 20-member ACS, which was established in 1995.

Seoul has been forging stronger ties with countries that have traditionally had close relations with North Korea, such as Uganda and Iran.

Yun’s visit to Havana comes after the North conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month, posing a serious threat to the Korean Peninsula as well as the international community.

In response to the provocative actions, the United Nations Security Council imposed its harshest sanctions yet on the Kim Jong-un regime in early March.

The government apparently expects that improving ties with countries that maintain diplomatic relations with the North will further pressure the repressive state, as its international isolation has already deepened following the sanctions.