Washington – President Barack Obama has spoken to Cuban President Raul Castro about normalized full diplomatic relations between the longtime foes.
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Senior administration officials say the two leaders spoke by phone Tuesday for more than 45 minutes. It’s the first substantive conversation between U.S. and Cuban leaders since 1961.
The call follows more than a year of secret discussions between the U.S. and Cuban officials. The talks happened in Canada and the Vatican and included personal involvement by Pope Francis.
Obama will discuss the opening of relations with Cuba from the White House Wednesday. The officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of Obama’s announcement.
The president fell for Cuba’s blackmail. Cuba should pay a price for holding an innocent American for five years. Alan Gross, a USAID development subcontractor,was serving a 15 year sentence in Cuba for giving a laptop and a satellite telephone to a small Cuban Jewish group on the island. He asked the Cuban government to let him visit his very ill mother. General Raul Castro denied his request, and Gross’s mother died without seeing him. Other foreigners, including Americans, have given laptops, flash drives, and telephones to Cubans, but none have gone to prison. Cuba continues to support terrorists.
This president is hurting America more than any American before him. He needs to go soon. Before you know it, Hamas will be his best friend.
In 1960, while visiting NY International Airport/Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy International Airport /JFK), by bicycle, I stopped along the roadway, when I heard a plane passing by one of the overhead ramps. It was a four engine propeller plane, which stated “Cubana Airlines”. I still have the slide which I took of that Cuban airliner. It used to regularly fly between Havana and NYC. Over the last fifty four years, I often wondered how many years it would be before, both Americans and Cubans could freely travel between our country and Cuba. The continued economic and diplomatic boycott, over five decades in length, made no sense. If we could recognize communist China in 1979, and recognize communist Vietnam in 1995, then we should recognize communist Cuba. There are other countries with horrible human rights records, whom we deal with all of the time, namely Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Myanmar, Egypt, Libya, Russia, etc. Cruise ships should now be able to stop in Havana, as they do throughout the Caribbean. American tourists should be able to visit Cuba, and ride in vintage 1950’s American cars!