Asserting that there has been a sea change in US-Cuba relationship, the White House today said President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Havana next month will help in concretizing the progress made in bilateral ties.
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While the storms between both countries thundered on over the years, Cuba has remained visually unchanged. Paul Brady, Conde Nast Traveler’s consumer news editor, joins CBSN with details.
Calvin Coolidge was the last American president to visit Cuba.
Noting that the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement also has boosted relations with other Latin American nations, Rhodes said that immediately following Obama’s trip to Cuba, he will visit Argentina in hopes of beginning “a new chapter of improved relations” there as well.
To the administration, the two-day trip is a logical extension of Mr. Obama’s Cuban outreach, one of his most significant foreign policy achievements.
In addition to meeting with Castro, Obama will interact with members of Cuban “civil society”, the White House said, referring to activists that advocate for various social causes.
Still, Obama’s advisers said the USA isn’t satisfied with Cuba’s human rights approach, citing a rise in short-term detentions as one example. South America and North America south of the U.S. “But we need not be defined by it”, Rhodes wrote.
After decades of animosity following Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the two countries agreed in 2014 to move to reopen ties.
First lady Michelle Obama will also go on the trip, which is taking place during the president’s final year in office.
The Republican majority in Congress has defied Obama’s call to rescind the five-decade-old embargo, so he has used his executive authority to relax trade and travel restrictions.
Barack Obama could become the first president in 88 years to step foot in Cuba. A foremost example was when Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, a Florida senator whose parents emigrated from Cuba, was asked if he would visit Cuba.
“Probably not going to invite me”, Rubio said.
The expected trip comes after Obama’s administration restored diplomatic relations last summer, when Secretary of State John Kerry raised the American flag over our embassy after a half-century of enmity. He said the US wants to expand business opportunities in Cuba and persuade the government in Havana to spread the economic benefits to its people.
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He wrote that the White House has already witnessed how the normalization of ties with Cuba “can improve the lives of the Cuban people”, though Rhodes admitted that more progress needs to be made. Not Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, they’re not suffering. President Harry Truman landed at the US-controlled Guantanamo Bay naval base on the southeastern coast of the island in 1948.
