Mexico’s up-and-down relationship with Cuba is now on a more secure footing than it’s been in years, claims Mexican career diplomat Roberta Lajous Vargas.

Speaking last month at New York’s CUNY Graduate Center, Lajous Mexico’s ambassador to Cuba from 2002 to 2005 said that with President Enrique Peña Nieto now in power, her country’s ties with Cuba will take a positive turn.

“I am sure they are already changing under Peña Nieto’s administration,” she said, noting that an encounter between Mexico’s new leader and Cuban President Raúl Castro during January’s CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) summit in Chile went very well.

“There are issues to iron out, such as the Cuban debt with Mexico [which reportedly stands at $400 million], and the renewal of Cuban trade with Mexico [bilateral trade in 2011 came to $373 million],” she continued.

“Mexico had been a main supplier of industrial goods to Cuba, since we were the geographically closest country to Cuba, and there was a U.S. embargo.”

Lajous said relations hit a low point in the early 2000s, when then-President Vicente Fox told Fidel Castro who was attending an international conference in Monterrey to arrive, give his speech, eat and leave his country as soon as possible. This led Fidel years later to call Fox “despicable and treacherous.”

But she said other factors were also at play.

“As of today, because of humanitarian reasons, trade between United States and Cuba [after 2000] is larger than between Cuba and Mexico,” she said.

Before the explosion of U.S. food exports into Cuba, Mexico was one of many countries supplying Cuba with consumer goods. The most conspicuous of those goods was Coca-Cola, which was canned by Mexican bottler FEMSA and readily found at Havana “dollar stores” and resorts.

In the early 2000s, despite the bad blood between Fox and Fidel Castro, Femsa reportedly considered setting up a bottling facility in Cuba before backing away from the idea.

One area of Mexican-Cuban commercial activity hit hard by the diplomatic spat was oil exploration.

By the time Mexican state oil monopoly Pemex had signed a non-binding letter of intent in 2012 to search for petroleum off Cuba’s Gulf of Mexico coast; various foreign oil companies had already started their own exploration efforts.

Lajous suggested, however, that Pemex has other priorities.

“What we’re looking for is more U.S. technology and capital to develop Mexico’s oil industry,” she said.

That means Pemex needs more advanced U.S. deepwater drilling know-how in order for the Mexican oil sector to move forward thereby slowing down, if not halting, any real Pemex participation in future Cuban oil exploration projects due to the U.S. trade embargo.

Russia’s Zarubezhneft, which had planned to drill offshore in 2012, was forced to delay its efforts because it had to find a rig with minimal U.S.-made components in order to avoid embargo-related legal hassles.