Sean Penn meets Raul Castro in Cuba

Sean Penn has a new role: international peacemaker. The Hollywood actor (pictured) recently travelled to Havana to interview the Cuban leader Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, for the US periodical The Nation. In the course of their conversation, Castro revealed that he would like to meet the president-elect Barack Obama to discuss future relations between America and his country.

"We must meet and begin to solve our problems," Castro told Penn in the interview, which appears on the Nation's website. Castro said that the purpose of the proposed summit would be primarily to end the US trade restrictions imposed on Cuba.

Raul, who took over from his ailing brother in 2006, added that "at the end of the meeting we could give the President a gift . . . we could send him home with the American flag that waves over Guantanamo Bay."

Penn, whose new film Milk, about the gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk, opened in America this week, visited Cuba in October. He was accompanied by Christopher Hitchens, the US-based British writer, and he historian Douglas Brinkley.

However only Penn was granted an interview with Castro. The actor, who visited Venezuala at the same time, said he was moved to make the trip because of his frustration over the "demonisation" of the leaders of both countries by US politicians.