Elian Gonzalez, who as a child was at the center of a bitter international custody battle between his Cuban father and his Miami relatives, now dreams of returning to the United States, he said in an interview broadcast Monday.

Now 21, Gonzalez was just six years old when he was found floating off of Florida's coast in November, 1999.

Mexico's navy picked up 23 Cuban migrants Sunday after they became adrift at sea while trying to reach its shores, and authorities said the boat-people would be repatriated back to the Communist island nation. 

The migrants were plucked from homemade rafts in two separate incidents off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula, the navy said.

American and Cuban officials will meet on May 21 to discuss reopening embassies and tackle broader migration, security and environmental issues, the U.S. State Department said Thursday.

The U.S. top official for Latin America, Roberta Jacobson, will host a team from the Cuban government led by Havana's director of U.S. affairs, Josefina Vidal.

The United States and Cuba will hold another meeting in the coming weeks in Washington on reopening embassies, the latest step in their historic rapprochement, Havana's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said Wednesday.

"In the coming weeks, there will be a new round of negotiations in Washington on reestablishing diplomatic relations and opening embassies," he told AFP in an exclusive interview.

The United States repatriated 50 Cuban migrants Wednesday who had been intercepted at sea in precarious rafts trying to reach U.S. shores.

The migrants were arrested last week in three different boats that had left Bahia de Cabanas bay in northern Cuba, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Cuba and the United States will exchange ambassadors once the island is removed from the U.S. blacklist of state terrorism sponsors, President Raul Castro said Tuesday, though Washington said there was no set timetable.

Castro said conversations on the countries' historic move to renew diplomatic ties were "going well," and that the process would advance after the expiration of a 45-day period -- on May 29 -- for the U.S. Congress to oppose President Barack Obama's plan to remove Cuba from the blacklist.

After a historic visit to Cuba, French President Francois Hollande landed in Haiti on Tuesday to sign cooperation agreements and support reconstruction efforts that continue since the deadly 2010 earthquake.

Hollande is only the second French head leader to visit what was once France's richest colony in the Caribbean. Then president Nicolas Sarkozy's visited Haiti after the quake, but Hollande's is the first official head of state visit since Haiti won independence in 1804.

Colombia's smaller insurgency, the National Liberation Army (ELN), has met with members of the main rebel force FARC, in Cuba, with the blessing of President Juan Manuel Santos, who is hoping it will lead to a second peace process.

The goal of the discussion, Santos said Monday, was "to make progress in our drive to put an end to more than 50 years of armed conflict" that has pitted the Marxist FARC and leftist ELN against the government and right-wing paramilitaries.

French President Francois Hollande called Monday for an end to the US embargo on Cuba, during the first visit by a Western leader to the island since Washington and Havana moved to restore ties.

Addressing the half-century-old trade embargo ahead of meetings with Fidel and Raul Castro, the brothers who have ruled Cuba since its 1959 revolution, Hollande said France will do whatever possible to see that "the measures that have so badly harmed Cuba's development can finally be lifted, repealed."

U.S. President Barack Obama has no immediate plans to visit Cuba but has not ruled out making such a trip "in the year to come," the White House said Monday.

As France's President Francois Hollande touched down in Havana, Obama's spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters who asked if the U.S. leader would follow suit: "I would not rule it out."