Barack Obama will attend a Summit of the Americas in Panama this week, a gathering that could see the first substantive meeting between US and Cuban leaders in half a century. Raul Castro — who took control of the 11-million-strong still nominally Communist island from his brother Fidel seven years ago — has confirmed he will be the first Cuban leader to attend. “The leaders are together a lot of the time,” at the summit said senior State Department official Roberta Jacobson. In December 2013, amid an upwelling of amity that followed Nelson Mandela’s death, the pair shook hands briefly at a memorial service in Johannesburg.