He was received by the new charge daffaires at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, and Cuban Foreign Ministry officials.
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As a U.S. Army brass band played the American national anthem, the three elderly Marines who last lowered the flag here in January 1961 handed a new, folded banner to the young members of the new contingent of Marine guards, who raised it and saluted.
Kerry’s Cuban counterpart, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, also expressed his country’s will for the re-establishment of diplomatic ties.
“There’s a sense of an opening possibility only – and we’re exploring whether or not we can find a series of steps that we agree on”, Kerry said of worldwide conversations that include the Russians and Saudis alongside the U.S. “Clearly everybody is seized on this issue right now, because of the threat of ISIS, Dayesh, that is growing, and the disorder and catastrophe that Syria has become”.
At the opening ceremony Mr Kerry was firm in saying Congress would not lift the economic embargo unless there was political change in Cuba. The secret talks that led to the re-establishment of U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations are just the highest-profile example. While the Cubans celebrated with a flag-raising in Washington on July 20, the Americans waited until Kerry could travel to Havana.
Washington “frequently flouts the rules”, warned Esteban Morales, founder and honorary director of the University of Havana’s Center for Hemispheric and U.S. Studies.
Three classic American cars like those that still ply the streets of Havana were parked on the street behind the podium where Kerry spoke: a 1955 and a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 1959 Chevrolet Impala, from the year of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.
Cuban leader Fidel Castro said, in an open letter released on Thursday, the US owed millions of dollars to Cuba as a result of the 53-year-long embargo.
Cuban television switched from cartoons to live coverage of the U.S. embassy flag-raising, and broadcast Kerry’s arrival at Havana’s Jose Marti airport.
He is the first SoS of the United States to have visited the island since 1945, symbolically marking the reconciliation between the two former Cold War foes announced mid-December by US President Barack Obama and Raul Castro of Cuba.
During the historical event, Kerry made a statement calling for an end to “mutual isolation”, stating that the two countries have “stopped being prisoners of history”.
The US embassy in Cuba will hold a ceremony on Friday, August 14, to raise…
The US and Cuba officially restored their diplomatic ties last month with reopening of the Cuban Embassy in Washington.
“But the lifting of the embargo will not be the magic wand”. It has not responded to Obama’s actions with measures that would allow ordinary Cubans to benefit from them, such as allowing low-cost imports and exports by Cuban entrepreneurs looking to do business with the U.S.
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Leahy says he’s confident that over time, democratic policies will begin to emerge in Cuba as more and more Cubans gain access to the Internet.
