Fidel Castro turns 89, says US has hefty debt to Cuba

“There have been too many days of sacrifice and sorrow; too many decades of suspicion and fear”.

Kerry acknowledged that the Obama administration would have a hard fight in Congress to end the U.S. trade embargo of Cuba so that normal business ties between the two countries could resume.

KELEMEN: Thale doesn’t see the embargo being lifted soon but says there are various bills working their way through Congress now.

“The building that we saw this morning is the old U.S. embassy’s from the ’50s and that was shuttered for about 15 years and kind of managed by the Swiss”, Barclay told KSBY.

Secret service personnel from both the United States and Cuba were prominent along the route from the airport to the city centre.

Last month, Merkel was confronted on a television show by a young Palestinian girl who politely explained that her family might be sent back to Lebanon after four years in Germany.

Demonstrations in predominately Cuban-American populated Little Havana resulted in at least two arrests, according to CBS Miami.

Kerry said the steering committee would meet in early September to draw a strategic roadmap on the way forward.

He said the duo agreed to engage on human rights, environmental protection, maritime security, including aviation issues.

“It would be equally unrealistic to expect normalizing relations to have a transformative impact in the short term”, he said.

“An embassy is reserved for countries we have diplomatic relationships with”, said the senator and GOP presidential candidate.

For sending its health care workers to other countries, the Cuban government receives about $7.6 billion per year, all while it grossly underpays those practicing overseas compared to non-Cuban doctors. “Responsibility for the nature and quality of governance and accountability rests, as it should, not with any outside entity; but exclusively within the citizens of this country“, he said.

Rafael Batista, a 60-year-old resident of Havana, told Sputnik that Cubans always wanted to have open and friendly relations with the United States and are happy that this process has started.

In prepared remarks from New York, he says the opening has ensured the socialist Cuban “regime will receive global legitimacy and a substantial economic boost to benefit its repression”.

Mr Kerry and his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodriguez, later announced the setting up of a joint commission to oversee a return to full relations.

On the other hand, after the revolution, US President Eisenhower froze all Cuban assets on American soil, imposed the first trade embargo in 1960 and broke off diplomatic relations in 1961. Numerous Cubans CBS News spoke to hope this change is more than symbolic.

During Obama’s press conference, Cuba made its own announcement in the form of a 700-word declaration posted on Granma, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party, saying, “To achieve normalization [of diplomatic relations] it will be essential also that the territory illegally occupied by the Guantanamo Naval Base is returned”.

“Kerry’s message was that the United States would continue to support democracy and pressing the subject of human rights in Cuba”, said Martha Beatriz Roque, one of 75 former political prisoners jailed in what is known as the Black Spring of 2003.