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John Kerry to raise US flag at Havana embassy Cuban dissidents not invited to Friday's flag-raising at US embassy in Havana
(35 minutes later)
The US secretary of state is to raise the American flag at the recently restored US embassy in Havana, another symbolic step in the thawing of relations between the two cold war-era foes. Political dissidents in Cuba will not be permitted to attend the ceremonial opening of the US embassy in Havana on Friday, a move that signals the lengths Washington is prepared to go to nurture its emerging rapprochement with the communist state.
The ceremony, raising the flag over the building for the first time in 54 years, comes nearly four weeks after the US and Cuba formally renewed diplomatic relations and upgraded their diplomatic missions to embassies.
While the Cubans celebrated with a flag-raising in Washington on 20 July, the Americans waited until John Kerry could travel to Havana.
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Kerry, the first US secretary of state to visit Cuba in 70 years, will be accompanied by aides, members of Congress and three US marines who last lowered the flag there in January 1961. Washington severed diplomatic ties with Havana as relations soured soon after the 1959 revolution.
The seven-storey seafront building in Havana and Cuba’s mansion in Washington were closed from 1961 until 1977, when they reopened as interests sections.
Seeking to end the long hostilities, the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, and Barack Obama announced last December they would restore diplomatic ties, reopen embassies and work to normalise relations.
Obama has also used executive power to relax some US travel and trade restrictions but the Republican-controlled Congress has resisted his call to end America’s wider economic embargo.
The Obama administration says Washington’s longstanding policy of trying to force change in Communist-governed Cuba through isolation did not work. Kerry told Univision television ahead of his trip he hoped to see a “transformation” begin to take place.
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“More people will travel,” he said. “There will be more exchange. More families will be reconnected. And hopefully, the government of Cuba will itself make decisions that will begin to change things.” The US secretary of state, John Kerry, is to raise the flag over the building for the first time in 54 years. He conceded that Cuban dissidents, who for decades have been at the heart of US foreign policy toward Cuba, have not been invited.
Kerry will meet Cuban dissidents at the US embassy residence in Havana on Friday afternoon. Dissidents were not invited to the morning flag-raising in deference to the Cuban government, which sees dissidents as US-sponsored mercenaries. Kerry told the Telemundo TV network that it was a “government to government moment, with very limited space”.
Restored diplomatic ties mean US diplomats can travel more freely and increase staff. Cuba has also reduced the number of security guards who keep on eye on Cubans going in and out. Under pressure to show how the diplomatic thaw will lead improvements in human rights standards in Cuba, Kerry said he would still meet dissidents at a gathering later in the day at the the chief of mission’s residence. He also said he would have an “open, free walk” in Old Havana. “I look forward to meeting whoever I meet and listening to them and having, you know, whatever views come at me,” he said.
The task of normalising overall relations is more complicated. Cuba wants Washington to end the embargo, return the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, and halt radio and television signals beamedonto its soil. Kerry insisted that Cubans should be reassured that a return to diplomatic relations with Washington would result in the country’s leaders being held to account over their human rights record. “The message is No 1 that we believe our engaging in direct diplomatic relations with the Cuban government being there, being able to interact with the people of Cuba, will in fact, help the people of Cuba,” he said. “It will shed light on what is happening.”
The Americans will press Cuba on human rights, the return of fugitives granted asylum and the claims of Americans whose property was nationalised after Fidel Castro came to power. However, the state department, which is refusing to release a complete list of invitees, later acknowledged that the event will not be exclusively composed of government dignitaries, as other private Cuban citizens – who are presumably supportive of the Castro government – will be in attendance.
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Cuban government officials are understood to have signaled they would not attend the ceremony if vocal critics of the government were in attendance. “The right thing to do would be to invite us and hear us out despite the fact that we don’t agree with the new US policy,” Antonio Rodiles, head of the dissident group Estado de SATS, told the Associated Press.
Florida senator Marco Rubio, a Republican presidential contender of Cuban descent and a leading critic of the detente with Cuba, said in a statement the embassy’s omission was “a slap in the face” to Cuba’s democracy activists. “Cuban dissidents are the legitimate representatives of the Cuban people and it is they who deserve America’s red carpet treatment, not Castro regime officials,” Rubio said.
In a speech y at the Foreign Policy Initiative, Rubio pledged to invite “Cuban dissidents, Iranian dissidents, Chinese dissidents, and freedom fighters from around the world to be honored guests at my inauguration.”
“President Obama has made no such effort to stand on the side of freedom,” Rubio added.
Although no flag has been raised at the US embassy in Havana, it formally opened last month, in tandem with the Cuban mission in Washington, heralding the formal restoration of diplomatic relations between in 54 years.
Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez flew to Washington to witness his country’s flag raised above the buildings that had for decades operated as an interests section, and later met at the state department with Kerry.
Friday’s event in Cuba is expected to involve a similar itinerary. Kerry, the first US secretary of state to visit the Caribbean island in more than 70 years, will be accompanied by dozens of diplomats, government officials, lawmakers and other VIPs. They will include the three marines who took down the US flag in 1961, when Washington’s diplomats were effectively expelled from the country by then president Fidel Castro.
Although imbued with symbolism, few expect Kerry’s trip to Havana to lead to progress on the the significant issues which still divide the countries, including the economic embargo which has suffocated the Cuban economy and the Guantánamo Bay naval facility, which the US uses to indefinitely detain terror suspects without due legal process.
Kerry is expected to meet with Rodríguez again in Havana, but there are no plans for him to meet the Cuban president Raúl Castro. US officials also hope that images of a US secretary of state walking freely around Havana – to the extent to which that can or will happen – will make for a potent image.
The negotiations that led to the two countries normalising diplomatic relations included an insistence, on the US side, to be able to travel around Cuba unimpeded.
“After 54 years of seeing zero progress, one of the things we negotiated is the ability of our diplomats to be able to meet with people in Cuba and not to be restrained,” Kerry said. “And I believe the people of Cuba benefit by the virtue of that presence and that ability.”
Nonetheless, both the Cuban government and state department will be tightly managing events in Havana over the next 24 hours.
The reception at the US chief of mission’s residence is expected to include dissidents, along with what a senior US official said would be “a broad swath of Cuban civil society” also including entrepreneurs, human rights activists and artists.
Journalists traveling with Kerry, however, will be excluded. “It was largely for space reasons,” the senior US official told reporters during a telephone briefing given on the condition of anonymity. “There’s nothing secret or high policy necessarily that will be going on in the event itself.”