Follow Along: Re-Opening Our Embassy in Havana, Cuba

“The leaders in Havana and the Cuban people should also know that the United States will always remain a champion of democratic principles and reforms”, he said.

Cuba has been a Communist-run country and Kerry will also be meeting the dissidents at the embassy residence in Havana later on Friday.

Not all the talk was as warm as the sunny summer day.

“All the people in Cuba fighting for democracy – when they protest, they are rounded up, arrested and beaten”. Clinton said she understood any hesitancy in the Cuban-U.S. community.

It seemed that virtually all of Cuba was glued to a television or listening to a live radio broadcast on a cellphone.

There are still plenty of diplomatic hurdles before relations are fully renewed, including the Cuban government’s human rights record and the status of a U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay.

Today we are taking a historic step – and I would add that it should have happened much earlier – in the right direction and we are determined to move forward, said Mr Kerry.

“Cuba isn’t a place where there’s racial discrimination, police brutality or deaths resulting from those problems”, Rodriguez said.

Cuban dissident Antonio Rodiles is not holding his breath. Human rights groups say regular, short-term arrests and beatings of the government’s critics seek to intimidate dissent.

Former Cuban President Fidel Castro on Wednesday stated that the United States owes Cuba millions of dollars for the economic damages it caused through its 55-year-old trade embargo.

But Kerry said he was confident the rapprochement announced on December 17 by US President Barack Obama and Cuba’s Raul Castro would not be undone.

Three classic American cars like those that still ply the streets of Havana were parked on the street behind the podium where Kerry spoke: a 1955 and a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 1959 Chevrolet Impala, from the year of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.

Three retired Marines who last lowered the flag in 1961 took part in the ceremony, handing a new flag to the Marine Color Guard. Many islanders lauded Kerry’s call for reform, including greater access to technology on an island with one of the world’s lowest rates of Internet penetration.

Julio Garcia is a 51-year-old mechanic.

He said during the war the US kept its territory and industries, and the richest and most well-armed country on earth, while other countries counted their dead.

Protesters demonstrate against the reopening of the US embassy in Havana, in the Little Havana neighborhood in Miami, Florida August 14, 2015.

He said in a phone interview he hopes his new poem will spur Cubans to reunite emotionally after years of separation due to politics, travel restrictions and an economic embargo. “We want nothing to restrict us so we can decide our own future”, Maria de Jesus Francisco, an 18-year-old architecture student, told Xinhua.

“The policies of the past have not led to a democratic transition here in Cuba”.

Kerry was to meet with dissidents and representatives of Cuban civil society, who were not invited to the ceremony at the embassy.