The longtime Cuban diplomat Ricardo Alarcón has died at the age of 84. He was a student leader during the Cuban Revolution who eventually became Cuba’s foreign minister and president of Cuba’s National Assembly. He played a key role in talks between the United States and Cuba for many years. Democracy Now! spoke to him in 2015 after the Cuban Embassy reopened in Washington for the first time in 54 years.

Ricardo Alarcón: “The real force that brought about this result was the struggle of the peoples — first of all, the Cuban people, for having resisted for so long time all the odds that that U.S. policy imposed upon us, but also a victory for the rest — the resistance of the rest of the peoples in this hemisphere, including many, many American friends.”