Addressing reporters with Kerry after the ceremony, Foreign Minister Bruno 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 on Cuba that the government says must be returned. “We have profound differences on national security, human rights and political models”, Rodriguez said. It is something that two countries do together when the citizens of both will benefit.
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The ceremonial opening of the embassy is a major milestone in the diplomatic detente between Cuba and the U.S. that was announced last December by President Barack Obama and President Raul Castro.
The U.S. flag waves outside the newly opened U.S. Embassy, near a Cuban flag overlooking Havana’s seaside boulevard, the Malecon, in Cuba, Friday, August 14, 2015. A successful chef in Havana, Roque came to Philadelphia a year ago for new opportunities. “The territory where torture occurs and people are held in legal limbo isn’t under Cuban jurisdiction”.
His administration has argued that the long-standing policy of trying to force change in communist Cuba through isolation has failed.
After Kerry finished speaking at the ceremony, Larry Morris, Jim Tracey and Mike East – the three now-retired Marines who lowered the U.S. flag to close the embassy in January 1961 – saluted and handed a folded flag to three Marine guards in crisp uniforms.
The American flag was raised outside the U.S. Embassy in Havana today.
Now that the United States and Cuba have restored diplomatic ties, what does it mean for other Latin American countries?
US Secretary of State John Kerry presided over a flag rising ceremony at the residence of the US ambassador in Havana on Friday. Cuban political dissidents were not invited to attend the ceremony out of apparent deference to the Cuban government, and though Kerry met with some of those dissidents later in the day, the decision was attacked by some.
Secretary of State John Kerry celebrated the day but also made an extraordinary, nationally broadcast call for democratic change on the island.
“Cuba is owed compensation equivalent to damages, which total numerous millions of dollars, as our country has stated with irrefutable arguments and information throughout all our speeches at the United Nations”, Castro was quoted as saying, in a reference to Cuba’s economic hardship under the long- running U.S. embargo. He is also a former governor of Florida, home to the biggest Cuban emigre population.
The United States is seeking the return of fugitives granted asylum in Cuba and backs the claims of Americans whose property was nationalized in the years after Fidel Castro seized power in a 1959 revolution. Trade and travel restrictions were relaxed but Congress would not allow the lifting of the trade embargo that has been in place since 1960.
The sweet side includes many who consider themselves part of the traditional political left in the US and in Cuba.
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“In that frozen environment, diplomatic ties between Washington and this capital city were strained, then stretched thin, then severed”.
