Former diplomat to Cuba reacts to US flag raising at embassy

The report notes, “Blanco is an award-winning poet who came to the U.S. with his Cuban exile parents from Spain when he was an infant”.

You know … the one our government was still trying to overthrow as recently as past year.

“For more than half a century, U.S.-Cuba relations have been suspended in the amber of cold war politics”, Secretary of State John Kerry said in a speech at the seaside facility.

Kerry also played down concerns that the next U.S. president might roll back Barack Obama’s policy of engaging Cuba after 10 prior presidents had sought to isolate Havana. “It remains an unyielding dictatorship, a tragic example of the folly of communism, and an affront to the conscience of the free nations of the Western Hemisphere”.

“What a pathetic policy President Obama has embarked on that shuns Cuban dissidents like this, yet has welcomed Castro regime officials to the White House”.

He said Cuba and America still had profound differences ranging from human rights, political models, interpretation of history, applications of global law, including issues of military interventions in other countries.

Although most of these debates are focused on the give-and-takes of the diplomatic restoration, the appropriate answer can be found in the historical examination of the different aspects of the Cuban revolution and the evolution of Cuba’s internal affairs since 1959.

Obama wants Congress to lift the embargo, which US officials say will take time and requires congressional action.

Kerry, the first US secretary of state to visit Cuba in 70 years, told the ceremony it was obvious that “the road of mutual isolation and estrangement that the US and Cuba have been travelling is not the right one, and the time has come for us to move in a more promising direction”. “What they’ve done is that they’ve established diplomatic relations and we have diplomatic relations with countries all over the world where we have significant issues”.

“That is a government-to-government moment, with very limited space, by the way, which is why we’re having the reception later in the day at which we can have a cross-section of civil society including some dissidents”, Kerry told a TV station.

Giant Cuban flags hang from the balconies of nearby apartment buildings and people are gathering at their windows with a view of the embassy.

The US is preparing to reopen its embassy in Havana on Friday (August 14, 2015), more than 54 years after it was closed.

He addressed a group of diplomats, Cuban-Americans and advocates of diplomacy with Cuba before a trio of Marines raised the Stars and Stripes in the stately home’s back garden.

“Two days ago, Fidel Castro or someone writing in his name published this article where he wrote the United States must now pay Cuba millions of dollars in reparations”, said Rubio.

From 1961 until 1977, the embassy was protected by the Swiss but remained unused, collecting dust as monument to a tortured relationship between Cuba and the United States.

Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother, Raul Castro, in 2008 because of poor health.

Addressing reporters with Kerry after the ceremony, Rodriguez responded by indignantly opening his remarks with complaints of U.S. human rights transgressions – from police shootings of black men to mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base that Cuba says must be returned.