WASHINGTON -- Cuba recently gave a top State Department official a long-blocked permission to visit dual U.S.-Cuban citizens jailed on the island -- but it did not accept a U.S. offer to relax travel restrictions on each other's diplomats, El Nuevo Herald has confirmed.

The two issues, though relatively minor in the broad sweep of decades of bilateral hostilities, underlined both the opportunities and limits for improved relations facing the new governments of Barack Obama and Raúl Castro.

Havana's decision to allow the prison visits ``reflect the benefits that could accrue to both countries as a result of better communications and, conversely, how our interests are poorly served when we don't communicate,'' said Bob Pastor, the top Cuban expert in Jimmy Carter's administration.

The State Department confirmed Wednesday that acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Bisa Williams visited with jailed dual U.S.-Cuban citizens there during her trip to Cuba last month to discuss a possible resumption of direct mail services between the two nations. No further details on the visits were available.

Like other countries, including the United States, Cuba does not recognize dual nationalities. Cuba treats those cases as Cuban-only citizens and regularly denies foreign consular officials on the island access to the dual citizens jailed there.

State Department officials are known to have long been pressing for U.S. consular access to the U.S.-Cuban citizens jailed in Cuba. ``We hope the U.S. consular access to dual nationals imprisoned in Cuba would be on a continuing basis,'' the department said.

Cuba has imprisoned 19 U.S. citizens, including 10 or 11 believed to also have Cuban citizenship, according to the State Department. Those who have only U.S. nationality already receive consular visits. The charges against both groups include migrant smuggling, drug trafficking or possession, homicide and corruption of minors.

Requests for comment sent to the Cuban diplomatic mission in Washington were not answered. U.S. consular access to dual nationals jailed in Cuba has long been a sensitive issue for both sides as American officials in Havana sought to help U.S.-only citizens while trying to avoid any spillover of the assistance to their Cuban-American prison mates.

In the 1990s, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana had a cardboard box where officials dropped off reading and personal hygiene materials for U.S. prisoners, said a mission employee at the time. But the U.S. inmates could not pass the goods to their Cuban-American prison mates.

The U.S. proposal for a mutual easing of travel restrictions on diplomats was made by the Bush administration and repeated after Obama was sworn in, but Havana has not responded, the State Department confirmed.

Under current restrictions, each side must ask for permission for their diplomats in Havana, Washington or the U.N. headquarters in New York City to travel outside certain clearly limited areas -- permissions that are seldom approved, the official added.

Until 2001, Cuban diplomats could roam without restrictions within 25 miles of the White House. But after the FBI arrested the Pentagon's top Cuba analyst, Ana Belen Montes, as a Cuban spy that year, Cuban diplomats were restricted to the area inside Washington's Beltway freeway and a corridor to Dulles airport in Virginia.

U.S. diplomats in Havana generally have been restricted to the Havana provincial limits. Consular officials from both countries have more freedom to travel because of international treaties that require host nations to allow foreign consuls access to their citizens.

Cuba's permission for U.S. consular visits was one of the few friendly gestures toward Washington that Havana is known to have made since Obama began a string of efforts to improve relations with the communist-ruled island -- efforts that critics say are bound to produce little improvement.

``When the United States has stood tough, the Cubans have been a lot more reasonable than when the U.S. has tried to accommodate them,'' said Frank Calzon, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Arlington, Va.