U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuba's Raul Castro heralded a new era of bilateral relations on Saturday as they both addressed a landmark Summit of the Americas ahead of historic one-on-one talks.

Sitting around an oval table with some 30 other regional leaders in Panama City, Obama and Castro spoke one after the other in an unprecedented public exchange between the leaders of the Cold War-era foes.

The United Nations refugee agency will provide homes to six former detainees of the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo who have struggled to resettle in Uruguay, the country's president said Friday.

"Each one of them will have a home," President Tabare Vazquez told Uruguayan media after meeting U.S. President Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas in Panama.

Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro are expected to hold talks Saturday, a U.S. official said, raising the prospect of the first substantive meeting between an American and Cuban leader in more than five decades.

Obama and Castro are in Panama for the two-day Summit of the Americas, Cuba's first, raising expectations of a landmark follow-up to their historic announcement on December 17 that their countries would restore ties severed since 1961.

A massive corruption scandal at Brazil's state oil company. Protests over the presumed massacre of 43 students in Mexico. An Argentine prosecutor's mysterious death. Economies slowed by falling commodity prices.

Several of the Latin American leaders gathering at the Summit of the Americas in Panama on Friday and Saturday are facing major political headaches back home, from scandals to protests and sinking approval ratings.

Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said Wednesday she pressed a visiting U.S. diplomat over Caracas' wish to have Washington revoke an order calling Venezuela a national security threat.

Rodriguez, who met with Thomas Shannon, top counselor in the State Department, urged Shannon to have Obama revoke the order. 

Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in Jamaica since 1982 on Wednesday -- and made some time for the late reggae legend Bob Marley.

On arrival, Obama descended from Air Force One to greet a long line of people including Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller, whom he embraced.

A majority of Americans support the restoration of U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba as well as sanctions on Venezuelan officials, according to a  poll released Wednesday ahead of a regional summit likely to be dominated by those issues.

The Marist College poll found that 59 percent of those responding said they agreed with the re-establishment of relations between the United States and the island's communist regime, severed for more than half a century.

Prosecutors in Venezuela formally charged Caracas mayor and opposition politician Antonio Ledezma Tuesday with staging a U.S.-funded attempted coup against President Nicolas Maduro.

The charge comes as Maduro -- an elected socialist -- heads to a regional leaders' summit in Panama Friday at which Obama is to meet with Maduro's key political ally Cuban President Raul Castro.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuba's Raul Castro will have an opportunity for an historic face-to-face meeting at the Summit of the Americas this week, a senior White House official told Agence France Presse Monday.

"There will be time for the leaders of Cuba and the United States to meet," said Ricardo Zuniga, the National Security Council's Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs. "There will be some type of interaction."

Panamanian authorities held a Cuban dissident for several hours Sunday as she tried to enter the country for a meeting on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas, the activist said.

"Panama's National Security is holding me at the plane door," Rosa Maria Paya wrote on Twitter.