Relations between the United States and Cuba are warming up.

Speaking for the first time at the Summit of the Americas, an event which was first initiated in 1994, the Cuban leader Raul Castro described U.S. President Obama as an “honest man.”

Castro, feeling comfortable enough to joke, said due to the fact Cuba had been blocked from previous gatherings, he should get to speak six times longer than anyone else.

The Panama Summit is being seen as a perfect opportunity for the U.S. to reset its relationship with Latin America, especially in terms of how negatively some Latin American countries have viewed the more than five-decades long embargo the U.S. has had against the Cuba.

As reported in Bloomberg, Castro went on to state that Obama could not be faulted for policies against Cuba that had been set in place by 10 previous presidents, recounting two centuries of Cuban history, and noting a repeated number of U.S. administrations that he believed had interfered with his country.

Sounding like he was halfway joking himself, Obama addressed the burgeoning bonds between the two nations and said that he was was not interested in fighting battles that were started before he was born. He instead urged the assembled leaders of the Americas to get past their respective ideological differences and focus on the future.

“The fact that President Castro and I are both sitting here today marks a historic occasion," Obama said.

“If we can continue to move forward and seize this momentum in pursuit of our mutual interests, then better relations between the United States and Cuba will create new opportunity for cooperation across our region.”

This week the State Department recommended that Obama take Cuba off a list, which denotes the country as a backer of terrorism.