Fidel Castro Turns 89; Blasts US Over Embargo

Acclaimed Cuban painter Michael Mirabal, known for his thought-provoking paintings of flags – sometimes made with flowers and barbed wires – will be one of the guests of Secretary of State John Kerry at a reception following the flag raising ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Friday.

Trimpa Group also hired Luis Miranda, former White House director of communications for Hispanic media, and created the organization #CubaNow, which pushed for the policy change and the lifting of the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

The story summarizes a new chapter in an updated edition of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana”, a book by the two writers that will go on sale in October. “This is obviously a unique environment”.

While the Cubans celebrated with a flag-raising in Washington on July 20, the Americans waited until Kerry could travel to Havana.

Three months later Castro declares Cuba a socialist state – just a day before the doomed U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion meant to topple Castro.

Klobuchar says, “Cuba is still a communist state, and we would like to see change there”. “There’s been a lot of hard work that went into this but it’s the right thing to do and to wake up on a historic day is actually pretty cool”.

Cuba’s boycott only hardened as the United States began inviting government opponents to the receptions.

That presented a quandary for U.S. officials organizing the ceremony on Friday to mark the reopening of the embassy on Havana’s historic waterfront. In 1999, U.S.-based relatives fight to keep Elian Gonzalez, rescued at sea at age 5 after his mother dies. But their backward-looking condemnations offer no real alternative to the old, failed policy, which isolated the United States from its hemispheric neighbors. The seal was locked away in a maintenance closet.

“Cuban officials, unlike in most other foreign postings, do not socialize with foreigners outside office time”. With the deal to reopen embassies already consummated, “this is the champagne-popping moment”, he said.

“I thought it was a paradise”, he recalled.

The father of the Cuban revolution, who stepped down from power in 2006 for health reasons, said that the US owe Cuba a debt amounting to several million dollars for the embargo.

But the controversy over the matter was omitted entirely from an NBC News article posted Thursday night on the MSNBC.com home page. But because papal diplomacy hasn’t worked out too well for Cubans, Francis could exercise some spiritual leadership and deny Castro communion at Mass in the same way Castro denies freedom for the people of Cuba.

“That (reparations), I think, is a non-starter”.

Fidel Castro marked his 89th birthday on Thursday with a column demanding damages from the US.

Previously, U.S. diplomats had angered Cuban officials by placing an electronic billboard on the top of the then U.S. Interests Section, handing out radios to Cubans allegedly to listen to anti-government broadcasts and even naming the mission newsletter “Granpa” after Fidel Castro.