President Obama has announced the reopening of the American Embassy in Havana this morning, following rumors that the United States had agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations with the communist dictatorship this month as part of the White House’s “normalization” program to reintegrate the Cuban regime into polite international society.
While President Obama described the embassy as “not merely symbolic” and a move representing the liberation of the American people from “the past” in a speech this morning, the Cuban government issued a statement refusing to reestablish full diplomatic relations with the United States until America gifted the territory of Guantánamo Bay to Cuba and ceased broadcasting radio and television news reports into the island, which constitute the only way many Cubans have of receiving trustworthy international news.
“When the United States shuttered our embassy in 1961, I don’t think anybody expected it would be half a century before it reopened,” President Obama noted, arguing that “sometimes we allow ourselves to be trapped by a certain way of doing things.” “We don’t have to be imprisoned by the past,” he continued, announcing that Secretary of State John Kerry would travel to Havana on July 20 to attend the hoisting of the American flag over the new embassy.
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