It flies 23 charter flights a week from Los Angeles, Miami and Tampa, Fla, to five destinations in Cuba: Camagüey, Cienfuegos, Havana, Holguin and Santa Clara.
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On December 12, American launched new charter service, offering flights between LAX and Jose Marti International Airport (HAV) in Havana.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the announcement by Presidents Obama and Raul Castro that they were ending a half-century of U.S.-Cuban enmity. CNN reported the deal had been finished as well with an official announcement expected Thursday, citing an unnamed USA official.
Sports and cultural activity is heating up too.
The U.S. embargo still prevents most American companies from doing business on the island.
Clark is accompanied by Joe Torre, the director of Sports Operations of the Major League; Dan Halem, the head of the MLB Legal Office; Dave Winfield, a MLBPA special consultant, and the baseball players Miguel Cabrera (Venezuela), Nelson Cruz (Dominican Republic) and Clayton Kershaw (United States).
Kavulich said that a flood of US visitors might be “disruptive” to Cuba’s one-party political system, but stressed that the Cuban government needs the revenue.
It has been an extraordinary year in Cuba-US relations.
Nearly none of that has happened. The Obama Administration’s removal of Cuba from the State Department’s list as a state sponsor of terrorism, manipulation of the facts regarding human trafficking to aid the Castros and neglecting Cuba’s valiant pro-democracy movement are just a few of the highlights of Obama’s shameful policy. We will talk about it, but I can not say anything, we are not sure that we will have good results, he added.
Obama’s decision to relax travel restrictions to Cuba earlier this year has led to a boom in USA citizens’ visits to Cuba, which are up 71 percent this year, with 138,120 Americans arriving through November. Travelers from Cuba must courageous long, chaotic lines to buy paper tickets.
American sand Cubans now must take charter flights that are complicated to book, don’t typically have online portals and often force travelers to email documents and payment information to agents.
Significant progress has been made towards restoring scheduled passenger flights between the Cold War foes since then, however a formal deal has yet to be reached.
Thousands of Americans are already visiting the island and hotels and hostels are booked for months.
The surge in tourism to Cuba this year is making many Cubans relatively well-off but those still earning meager state salaries and waging daily struggles to find scarce and expensive products express a rising sense of impatience and dissatisfaction. “I don’t see much change happening when it comes to the people of Cuba”, said another traveler at the airport. While the arrangement still only allows for travel on charter flights, as many as 110 flights can be scheduled each day.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.), who was born in Cuba and fled to the USA, criticized the Obama administration for strengthening the Castro regime. “Congress can support a better life for the Cuban people by lifting an embargo that is a legacy of a failed policy”, Obama said.
Cuban officials have declared themselves ready to do work with Oggun, an Alabama-based two-man firm that wants to build affordable, easy-to-repair tractors mostly for private Cuban farmers.
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Meanwhile, JetBlue also announced that will submit applications for new routes to the Department of Transportation once the carrier has fully reviewed the terms of the agreement. “It’s been six months that it’s been in the process”.
