U.S. and Cuba to restore commercial air routes

Los Angeles Dodgers player Yasiel Puig, from Cuba, greets young baseball players before giving a clinic in Havana, Cuba, Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015, during the first Major League Baseball trip to the island since 1999. “We’re going to give our best on t…”

American officials and aviation executives have speculated that Cuba could allow more than a dozen flights to and from the U.S. a day.

(AP Photo/Jose Goitia, File).

FILE:The first passengers of the first chartered flight of Continental Airlines from Miami Florida, arrives at the Jose Marti Airport of Havana, Cuba.

Cuba and the United States always have shared a love of baseball, despite deep political and ideological differences over the years.

Cuba will not “negotiate matters that are inherent to its internal system in exchange for an improvement of relations with the United States”, Josefina Vidal, director of US affairs in the Cuban foreign ministry, said Wednesday.

Right now, American and Cuban travelers can only fly on charter flights that can be hard to book. US citizens who want to go to Cuba must still qualify under 12 official reasons, including educational and humanitarian visits.

The understanding comes on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the announcement that the two countries would restore diplomatic ties and turn the page on a half-century of animosity.

Major U.S. airlines like Delta, United, American, JetBlue, and Southwest have all said they are interested in providing regular flights from the United States to Cuba. The U.S. reopened its embassy in Havana in August after a more than five decade absence.

Thousands of Americans are already visiting the island and hotels and hostels are booked for months.

“There are very few things that, under the law, the president definitely can’t change”, Vidal said, calling on Obama to allow the Cuban government to use dollars in global transaction and export goods to the USA, among other measures.

It has been an extraordinary year in Cuba-US relations.

US teams played spring training games in Cuba before Castro’s revolution but none appeared here from March 1959 until the Baltimore Orioles faced Cuba’s national team in Havana in March 1999. And U.S. businesses eager to launch projects in Cuba say federal regulators are meeting many requests for licenses with confusion or silence.

“All we get is, ‘your application is still pending,” Oggun co-founder Horace Cleber said.