Flag raised over US embassy in Cuba

The symbolic moment served as a picture-perfect coda to 8 months of quick changes since the December 17 rapprochement announcement by US President Barack Obama and Cuban counterpart Raul Castro, which paved the way for the two countries to reopen their embassies on July 20.

In doing so, Kerry said, they had “made a courageous decision to stop being the prisoners of history and to focus on the opportunities of today and tomorrow”.

“There is no way congress is going to vote to lift the embargo if they’re not moving with respect to issues of conscience”, Kerry said.

“Secretary Kerry’s visit is especially insulting for Cuba’s dissidents”, said Jeb Bush, a Republican candidate for next year’s U.S. presidential election.

He will not, however, meet with either Castro or his elder brother Fidel, the icon who led Cuba from its 1959 revolution until his retirement in 2006.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) extends its congratulations to the United States of America and to our sister Caribbean nation Cuba, as they continue on the path towards their normalisation of relations.

“The road of mutual isolation and estrangement that the U.S. and Cuba have been traveling is not the right one”, Kerry said in remarks during the flag-raising ceremony.

We do know that there are people in the left who buy this nonsense that Cuba is a victim of the U.S. Only a day earlier, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had announced that diplomatic relations between the two countries would cease – the coup de grace to what had been an increasingly frosty relationship.

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. “We’ll see if it is extra than simply speak”, stated Leyania Martinez, 44, a neighbor of the U.S. embassy who watched the ceremony…

Kerry hailed the opening of the embassy as benefiting both the US and Cuban people.

We have different conceptions of sovereignty, democracy and human rights, Mr. Rodriguez said at a press conference alongside Mr. Kerry, but we are ready for dialogue on all subjects even if we do not always agree.

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. “The time has come for us to move in a more promising direction”.

Kerry met Cuban dissidents opposed to the island’s one-party political system at the US embassy residence in Havana later yesterday.

For his part, Kerry agreed that lifting the U.S. embargo is important for the normalization of bilateral relations.