Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what steps he is taking to improve relations between the UK and Cuba.

Our engagement with Cuba is growing. I was the first British Minister to visit Cuba in a decade in 2014 and saw for myself Cuban efforts to reform their economy and encouraged further progress. The Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs, my Rt Hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Philip Hammond), became the first British Foreign Secretary to visit Cuba since 1959 when he visited in April. Whilst there he signed a bilateral agreement restructuring Cuba's debt to the UK, as well as agreements on financial services, energy, culture and education. He also met Cuban Ministers and discussed how to improve the business environment in Cuba for British companies. These agreements build on the steadily increasing engagement between the UK and Cuba in recent years. Examples of cooperation include the joint work between the UK and Cuba to combat Ebola in Sierra Leone and a trade mission to Cuba last year, led by the nobel member the Rt Hon. The Lord Hutton of Furness and supported by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which saw significant progress on projects worth over £350 million.