When Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, was pressed on Cuba’s human rights record during a visit to Havana last week, she studiously avoided criticising the Castro regime, preferring to point the finger first at the US.

In spite of her personal history as a Marxist guerrilla who was tortured and imprisoned for three years by Brazil’s former military government, she said every country, including hers, had its faults. “He who throws the first stone [should not] have a glass roof,” she told reporters asking about human rights.

Ms Rousseff, in Cuba to discuss growing investments, including an $800m upgrade by Brazilian construction company Odebrecht of a port, said she would discuss rights with Cuban leaders. But the conversation, she said, would start with Guantánamo Bay, the US military prison in eastern Cuba where Washington is accused of rights abuses of its own.