Progress made in relationship with Cuba: US President Barack Obama

Cuba’s blue, red and white-starred flag was hoisted Monday at the country’s embassy in Washington in a symbolic move signaling the start of a new post-Cold War era in U.S.-Cuba relations.

Speaking at a news conference in Havana, Cuba’s Director of US Affairs Josefina Vidal told reporters that the two countries were close to reaching a preliminary agreement.

Under Castro, a passionate baseball fan who saw sports as an expression of national glory, defectors were banished from official memory, never mentioned on Cuban television even as they made headlines on US sports pages. The U.S. government claimed the talks were aimed to better improve the lives of the Cuban population and strengthen cooperation across the Americas.

The agreement must provide 30 regular airline flights a day, allowing a surge of American travel to Cuba that could eventually flood the country with hundreds of thousands of USA visitors a year.

Any planes landing in the USA will have to meet U.S. safety standards, so any old Russian planes in the Cuban fleet will likely only fly domestically within Cuba.

Under the terms of the aviation deal, up to 30 regularly scheduled flights per day will be permitted: 20 to Havana and 10 to other cities, the Associated Press reports.

The Cuban Embassy in Washington said the two countries had reached preliminary agreement on a memorandum of understanding for the establishment of regular flights.

American Airlines is also looking to take advantage of the opportunity the decision has presented and is planning to submit a U.S.-Cuba service proposal to the U.S. Department of Transportation in hopes of introducing scheduled service in 2016.

Beyond that, it remained unclear how flight rights for the new Cuba routes would be awarded.

Some members of Congress marked the first anniversary of Obama’s opening to Cuba by hailing the impact of the “small steps” that Cubans and American have taken toward each other.

The United States and Cuba has finally come to an agreement to restore commercial flights between the two countries. “What we’ve experienced today, and what we’ve experienced these last couple of days, is very exciting”.

Pretty much anyone can travel to Cuba.

“What we’ve seen instead of improvements is a huge spike in repression and in violence against the political opposition, repeated arrests of the same dissidents, and churches being shut down”, says Ana Quintana, a Latin America policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

(AP Photo/Desmond Boylan). Backdropped by pictures of Cuba’s President Raul Castro, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, center, and rebel leader Ernesto Che Guevara giving a speech at the United Nations in 1964, Josefina Vidal, director general of the U… With the changes first announced a year ago, the Obama administration authorized travelers to purchase up to $400 in Cuban goods legally, including up to $100 of cigars and alcohol. “I thought things were going to change”, said Julio Miro, a retired man of 83.