US, Cuba reopen their embassies after 54 years

“Passing my bipartisan bill to lift the embargo would benefit the people of both of our countries by boosting USA exports and allowing Cubans greater access to American goods”.

The formal restarting of tiesbetween the two countriesshould be followed by the dismantling of the USA blockadeagainst Cuba, according to VenezuelanPresidentNicolas Maduro.

Though normalization has taken center stage in the U.S.-Cuba relationship, both Rodriguez and Kerry admit that serious differences remain between the US and Cuba.

Diplomatic ties between Cuba and the United States have been formally restored.

Earlier, in the pre-dawn quiet, the red, white and blue Cuban flag was hoisted at the U.S. State Department, alongside the flags of the other countries that have diplomatic relations with the United States.

“In accordance with President Barack Obama’s announcement on July 1, effective today the United States and Cuba have re-established diplomatic relations“.

“Cuba is not just some small island with old cars; it is a country controlled by a despotic regime that provides a safe haven and base of forward operations to Russian Federation and China in our own hemisphere”, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican presidential candidate, said in a statement Monday.

Mr Kerry will visit Cuba on August 14 for a flag-raising ceremony at the U.S. embassy in Havana.

The head of Ecuador’s National Assembly, Gabriela Rivadeneira, welcomed the reopening of embassies in Havana and Washington as “one more step towards justice in our America”, while Chile’s foreign ministry said it was “satisfied” with the move.

Relations between the USA and Cuba aren’t totally normalized, but yesterday’s embassy openings are being cautiously hailed as the beginning of a new era in our relationship with the struggling country.

Conrad Tribble, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, tweeted shortly after midnight that he had phoned the State Department.

He said reopening embassies will “pave the way to the complex and certainly long process toward the normalization of bilateral relations”.

It remains to be seen whether the United States will lift the embargo, originally issued in 1960, or address documented human rights violations including censorship and repression that have plagued Cubans for decades.

President Obama had sought to engage Cuba since he first took office – his administration have progressively loosened restrictions on travel and remittances to the island – but the larger effort to formalize relations were frustrated for years by Cuba’s imprisonment of Alan Gross, a contractor for the US Agency for worldwide Development, on espionage charges. Their conversion to embassies tolled a knell for policy approaches spawned and hardened over the five decades since President John F. Kennedy first tangled with youthful revolutionary Fidel Castro over Soviet expansion in the Americas.

Code Pink member Tighe Berry said he knew the US would soon work to restore ties with Cuba.

The restoration of diplomatic relations has come about just seven months later.

Cuba was removed from US Terrorist Sponsor list on April 2015, when Obama administration said so.

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