Former President Bill Clinton said the United States could be “well
on its way” to ending the Cuban embargo if the island would release
USAID subcontractor Alan Gross.
In an interview with the Miami
Herald on Thursday, Clinton said that his wife, former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton had come out in favor of ending the half-century
embargo in her recently released book about her four years at the State
Department.
“I think we would be well on our way to doing it if
they released Alan Gross,” he said of the contractor who has served five
years of a 15-year sentence. “It is really foolish to allow what is
clearly a questionable incarceration to imperil the whole future of
US-Cuban relations, but that’s not my call to make.”
The former
president made the comments at the “Future of the Americas” summit that
his foundation is hosting Thursday at the University of Miami.
The meeting has brought together business, non-profit and
political leaders from around the region to plot the coming decades in
the hemisphere.
The meeting aims to produce specific goals and actions that will direct the 2015 summit in Panama.
The
event also falls on the 20th anniversary of the first Summit of the
Americas that was held in Miami and brought together regional leaders.
As
he inaugurated Thursday’s event, Clinton recalled the “heady” days 20
years ago when leaders believed they could lift the region out of
poverty through free trade and promoting democracy.
Today much of
that promise is fulfilled, Clinton said. The region’s economy is booming
and millions have emerged from poverty, even as problems of inequality
and gender disparity remain.
There were also unforeseen challenges in the last decades.
“The climate change problem is much more severe than we thought 20 years ago,” he said, “and it’s bearing down on us.”
The
meeting aims to bring in high-level thinkers to talk about energy,
infrastructure, the environment, healthcare, vocational training,
agriculture and chronic disease, among other topics.
Among the
attendees are Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Carlos Slim, the
world’s second-richest man and the founder of the Carlos Slim
Foundation; Inter American Development Bank President Luis Alberto
Moreno; and Susan Fonseca, the founder and CEO of Woman@TheFrontier.
Clinton
said the results of Thursday’s session would feed into the discussions
of the next Summit in Panama and aim to be specific and actionable.
“We are here to complement not complicate the coming Summit of the Americas,” Clinton said.
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