HAVANA >> The United States and Cuba held talks on Thursday to re-establish diplomatic ties broken during the Cold War, aiming to put the countries on a path toward normal relations after decades of hostility, acrimony and mistrust.

The sides met for several hours at a convention center here, mostly to iron out technical issues in converting their diplomatic outposts known as interests sections into full-fledged embassies, which were closed when the countries broke diplomatic relations in 1961. They set no date for the mutual reopening, a move that President Barack Obama and Cuban President Ra?l Castro announced last month, but agreed to continue to meet to work it out.

With 50 years of what Roberta S. Jacobson, the most senior U.S. diplomat to visit the island in 35 years, called a "particular and peculiar" relationship "not built on confidence or trust," some bumps emerged to highlight the profound differences that remain.

One revolved around one of the more divisive issues between the governments, Cuba’s practice of detaining citizens who speak out against it. On that matter, Jacobson and Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s most senior representative at the talks, could not even seem to agree on whether human rights in Cuba were to be discussed in the first round of talks Thursday morning.

Jacobson told reporters, "I did discuss that issue today" and said the Cuban response "was they have differences with us on that subject."

Minutes later, in a separate news conference, Vidal said, "We have not discussed the issue," leaving reporters scratching their heads. A U.S. official said Jacobson stood by her account, while Cuban officials declined to elaborate.

Vidal also suggested that a sticking point to moving forward would be that Cuba remains on the State Department’s list of states that sponsor terrorism, which inhibits Cuba’s international commerce. The Obama administration is reviewing that status, but has not said when a decision will be made on whether to keep the designation.

"We expressed that it would be difficult to explain that diplomatic relations have been resumed while Cuba is still unjustly listed as a state sponsor of international terrorism," Vidal said.

She reiterated that, while Obama’s lifting of many restrictions on travel and trade could send thousands of U.S. visitors and additional cash to the island, dropping the lingering economic embargo would open the way to true normalization.

Still, both sides made an effort to emphasize cordiality and the mere fact that they were meeting regarding establishing diplomatic ties for the first time since 1977. That year, the interests sections were established in the respective capitals as a first step toward normalization that ultimately foundered.

Gustavo Mach?n, Cuba’s deputy chief of North American affairs, at one point broke away from the morning meeting to assure reporters everything was going well, while the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted pictures on its website of smiling encounters among the diplomats. Jacobson and Vidal attended a dinner together at the home of the chief of the U.S. interests section, a rare visit there by a high-level Cuban official.

"Look at my face," Mach?n, grinning, told reporters. "It reflects the spirit in which we’ve been talking up until now."

Later both sides discussed topics beyond diplomatic relations, including law enforcement, telecommunications, the coordination of responses to oil spills, and Ebola, but neither side offered details or said any accords had been reached.

The interest sections perform many of the functions of an embassy, but both countries impose limits on the diplomats working there, including their ability to travel freely in the respective countries, and they have figured prominently in espionage cases.

Mach?n was expelled from Washington in 2002, while Vidal went home in 2003 because her husband was one of 14 Cuban diplomats kicked out of Washington and Cuba’s U.N. mission for what the State Department considered spying.

Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, is the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat to visit Cuba since 1980, when Peter Tarnoff, then executive secretary, the rank equivalent to Jacobson’s, visited three times during the Mariel boatlift, the crisis in which some 125,000 Cuban refugees made their way to Florida across the sea.