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Obama opens doors to Cuba

President Obama Delivers a Statement on Cuba

On December 17, 2014, President Obama delivered remarks on next steps he’s taking to chart a new course on U.S.-Cuba relations.

635544168742100143-GTY-460595078Obama opens doors to Cuba after 56 years

The deal was finalized when two Americans had returned home from Cuban prisons. One was Alan Gross, a Maryland man who spent more than five years in a Cuban prison after he was arrested while distributing communications equipment on the island while working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The second was described as an “intelligence asset” who had spent more than 20 years in Cuban prisons, according to three senior White House officials who were not authorized to speak publicly.

In exchange, three Cubans who had been convicted of espionage and other charges in the United States were sent home.

But the agreement will resonate far beyond Wednesday’s flights, as Secretary of State John Kerry prepares for his first trip to Cuba and both sides work out the long list of changes they have agreed to make.

“This is the biggest shift in U.S.-Cuba relations in 50 years,” said Ric Herrero, executive director of #CubaNow, which has advocated that empowering Cubans is the quickest way to a downfall of the Cuban regime.

The embargo has had little effect on Cuba’s regime, Obama said, and encouraging more engagement will help promote reform in the long run. He likened the move to normalization of relations with other communist nations like China and Vietnam, the latter a country “where we fought a war that claimed more Americans than any Cold War confrontation.”

The United States is now choosing “to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a better future,” Obama said, “for the Cuban people, for the American people, for our entire hemisphere and for the world.”

The U.S. and Cuba clashed repeatedly in the decades after the communist revolution, from reported U.S.-backed assassination plots targeting Castro to the placement of Russian missiles in Cuba that led to a near nuclear war in 1962. Successive presidents, Republican and Democratic, refused to change the economic embargo against Cuba.

As Obama spoke, Raúl Castro tempered expectations, saying, “This in no way means that the heart of the matter has been solved.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/12/17/obama-cuba-alan-gross-prisoner/20526497/

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