Krauthammer: Cuba ceremony is “farce and an embarrassment”

US Secretary of State John Kerry chaired here on Friday the formal ceremony of raising the American flag in the recently reopened US embassy in Cuba, after 54 years of animosity between the two neighbours.

Before an invited audience of about 300 U.S. and Cuban officials, along with foreign diplomats, Kerry praised President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro for what he called “a courageous decision to stop being prisoners of history and to focus on the opportunities of today and tomorrow”.

If he did have the ear of Secretary Kerry, this is what he’d have said: “The [Cuban] government is feeling more relaxed to repress us because they are completely focused on transferring power to their families and political allies”.

“My friends, it doesn’t take a GPS to realize that the road of mutual isolation and estrangement that the United States and Cuba were traveling is not the right one and that the time has come for us to move in a more promising direction”, Kerry said.

Democrats seem to be the most on board with renewed U.S.-Cuba relations, with 83 percent in support compared with 56 percent of Republicans.

Secretary of State John Kerry was on hand to make it official.

But unresolved sources of tension include the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay and Cuba’s treatment of the media, activists and dissidents. Mr Kerry was meeting dissidents at a private event later in the day.

He says he looks forward to “A new era of U.S.-Cuban relations and the Cuba“. As the flag was raised, there were loud cheers and applause from the crowd of U.S. and Cuban dignitaries and longtime proponents of U.S.-Cuban engagement, and from people watching from neighboring balconies.

Presidential contender Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American senator from Florida, slammed the Obama administration for the absence of Cuban dissidents from the flag-raising ceremony.

Several hours later, at a joint news conference with Kerry, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez defended his country’s political system and took shots at the United States that underscored the steep challenge the two countries face in their effort to improve ties. The embassy officially reopened on July 20th, when diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba were formally re-established.

Former president Fidel Castro marked his 89th birthday with a newspaper column on Thursday repeating assertions that the US owes socialist Cuba “numerous millions of dollars” for damages caused by its decades-long embargo. “Many times, we haven’t been able to get to church”, Soler told the National Review at this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum. Rich Negrin, Philadelphia’s Managing Director, says, “I think it’s the beginning of not just normalizing relations and opening an embassy but hopefully dialogue that will continue to show reforms around democracy”.