US Flag To Be Raised In Cuba After 54 Years

The new US embassy will be in the same building that housed the mission when the stars-and-stripes were last lowered 54 years ago – overlooking the iconic Malecon seaside esplanade.

The embassy opening “is a government-to-government moment – with very limited space, by the way – which is why we are having the reception later in the day, in which we can have a cross-section of civil society, including some dissidents”, Kerry said. In 2006, for example, an electronic ticker set up across the facade of the then-U.S. Interests Section flashed messages such as “Democracia en Cuba” or “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up” in five-foot-tall red letters.

Richard Blanco is a gay poet of duel American-Cuban nationality and will be performing the poem later today called, “Matters of The Sea” or “Cosas Del Mar” in Spanish. Kerry also plans a short walk around Cuba’s 500-year-old capital, officials said. “Cuba’s future is for Cuba to shape”. The move was a symbolic step of normalized relations between Cuba and the United States, CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan reports.

“There needs to be good will from both parties”, she said, adding the U.S. needed to change its views of how they see Cuba. Cuba, in turn, wants the US government to give back the Navy base at Guantanamo, which it has occupied since 1903, and lift the congressional trade embargo.

Havana has repeatedly demanded a complete lifting of the embargo. Some wore Obama masks, saying it was President Barack Obama’s fault that the Cuban government is growing bolder in moving against them.

Rubio, who is running for president, staunchly opposes the Obama administration’s new policy and criticized Kerry for not inviting dissidents to Friday’s ceremony.

The trio will return to Cuba on Friday together with Secretary of the State John Kerry, Aljazeera wrote.

The U.S. tried several times to hold discussions with Cuban officials about the details of Obama’s loosening of U.S. regulations, but those meetings never happened amid the pressure to strike a deal allowing the reopening of embassies in Havana and Washington on July 20.

Aljazeera’s source from the State Department said that the flag the three former Marines took down in 1961 isn’t going to be the same one they will erect in Cuba on Friday.

Kerry landed in Havana this morning for the ceremony, in which the three U.S. Marines who took the flag down in 1961, when President Dwight Eisenhower ended relations with Castro regime, would have the honor of raising it again.

Underlining the sticking points still complicating relations between the two countries, Fidel Castro said in an essay published in Cuban state media Thursday – his 89th birthday – that the United States owes Cuba “many millions of dollars” because of the US trade embargo on the island.