“This is the year for laying down the foundation blocks”, said Pedro Freyre, Chair of International Practice at the Miami-based Akerman law firm, which has been working with large USA corporations interested in doing business with Cuba.
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Thursday 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.
This does not mean American tourists can now start flocking to communist-run Cuba to lie on beaches, sip rum and fire up cigars.
Mr. Obama wants Congress to lift the economic embargo on Cuba.
Republicans are wary of rewarding Cuba until it improves its human rights record.
However, under current regulations, those trips must be booked on charter flights and are hard for travelers to arrange online. Until now, it will only be allowed to fly from one country to another through charter or from third countries.
Relations between Cuba and the United States continue to thaw as a new aviation deal has been reached.
JetBlue plans to apply for new routes after it has reviewed the terms of the agreement and is clearer on the process. He says there are 10 to 15 charters daily to Havana, and a few to other cities.
“Interest in Cuba has reached levels not seen for a generation”, its Senior Vice President for Airline Planning Scott Laurence said in the statement.
November 19: U.S. bank Stonegate announces it has begun offering its American clients debit cards they can use in Cuba. He also said Obama could exert more of his executive authority on Cuba. It is better to engage Cuba and work with it, he said.
New Orleans and Cuba are less than 700 miles apart. “But we are much closer than we were in our determination to address those matters in a systematic and mutually respectful way”. Had the United States made Ukraine a top priority after the EuroMaidan Revolution, with more generous financial and military aid, the administration and its European allies might have been able to wield greater influence on Ukraine’s leaders to seriously uproot corruption, overhaul the criminal justice system and, crucially, defeat Russian Federation in a war that will be two years old come February.
While US officials still criticize Cuba for human rights, they now believe promoting political and other freedoms is more likely to be achieved through engagement.
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Since detente, Cuban overland arrivals to the United States have soared almost 80 percent while the number arriving by sea has more than doubled.
