Cuba raises its flag in Washington
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CUBA’S blue, red and white-starred flag was hoisted at its embassy in Washington yesterday in a symbolic move signaling the start of a new era in US-Cuba relations.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez presided over the ceremony hours after full diplomatic relations with the United States were restored at the stroke of midnight, when an agreement to resume normal ties on July 20 took effect.
Earlier, without ceremony, the Cuban flag was hung in the lobby of the US State Department alongside those of other countries with which the US has diplomatic ties.
The two countries severed diplomatic relations in 1961 and since the 1970s had been represented in each other’s capitals by limited service interests sections.
Their conversion to embassies tolled a knell for policy approaches spawned and hardened over the five decades since US President John F. Kennedy first tangled with youthful revolutionary Fidel Castro over Soviet expansion in the Americas.
US Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Havana on August 14 to preside over a flag-raising ceremony at the US Embassy.
Shortly after midnight, the Cuban Interests Section in Washington switched its Twitter account to say “embassy.” In Havana, the US Interests Section uploaded new profile pictures to its Facebook and Twitter accounts that say “US EMBASSY CUBA.”
Conrad Tribble, deputy chief of mission for the US in Havana, tweeted: “Just made first phone call to State Dept. Ops Center from United States Embassy Havana ever. It didn’t exist in Jan 1961.”
Though normalization has taken center stage in the US-Cuba relationship, there remains a deep ideological gulf and many issues still to resolve. Among them disputes such as over mutual claims for economic reparations, Havana’s insistence on the end of a trade embargo and US calls for Cuba to improve human rights and democracy.
Some US lawmakers, including prominent Republican presidential candidates, have vowed not to repeal the embargo and pledged to roll back Obama’s moves.
Still, yesterday’s events cap a remarkable change of course in US policy toward the communist country under President Barack Obama, who had sought rapprochement with Cuba since he first took office.
Obama’s efforts at engagement were frustrated for years by Cuba’s imprisonment of US Agency for International Development contractor Alan Gross on espionage charges. But he was released in December, along with a number of political prisoners in Cuba and the remaining members of a Cuban spy ring jailed in the US.
On December 17, Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced they would resume full diplomatic relations.
Obama said the US could not keep doing the same thing and expect a change. Thus, he said work would begin apace on normalization.
That process dragged on until the US removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in May and then bogged down over issues of US diplomats’ access to ordinary Cubans.
On July 1, however, the issues were resolved and the US and Cuba exchanged diplomatic notes agreeing July 20 as the date for the restoration of full relations.
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