The United States and Cuba will announce the opening of embassies on Wednesday, a senior administration official confirmed.
“We will formally announce tomorrow that the United States and Cuba have reached an agreement to re-establish formal diplomatic relations and open embassies in each other’s capitals,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry will address the topic Wednesday morning, the official said.
Cuba is expected to make a similar announcement in Havana on Wednesday.
Mr. Obama announced late last year that his administration would re-establish diplomatic ties with the Communist regime. The two countries broke off relations in 1961, during the Cold War.
In April, Mr. Obama notified Congress that he was removing Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, another step toward establishing relations. He said Cuba “has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding 6-month period,” and has offered “assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.”
Opponents in Congress objected to that move, with Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, describing the action as “nothing short of a miscarriage of justice borne out of political motivations not rooted in reality.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican who is running for president, said the decision “sends a chilling message to our enemies abroad that this White House is no longer serious about calling terrorism by its proper name.”
In a statement Tuesday, Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen said opening a U.S. embassy in Cuba “will do nothing to help the Cuban people and is just another trivial attempt for President Obama to go legacy shopping.”
The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee applauded the embassy opening, calling it part of the administration’s “common sense approach” on Cuba. But Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland also called on the Castro regime, which has held power for more than a half-century, to stop its human-rights violations.
“Arrests and detentions of dissidents must cease and genuine political pluralism is long overdue,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Obama met in April with Cuban President Raul Castro at a summit of Latin American countries, the first time leaders of the two countries had met in more than 50 years. Mr. Castro insisted on Cuba’s removal from the terrorism sponsor list as a condition of reopening embassies.
The re-establishing of embassies is one of the last steps in the full diplomatic thaw that Mr. Obama launched in December. The U.S. also has eased certain travel restrictions to Cuba.
Some business interests are leading a push in Congress to lift the U.S. embargo against the island nation. Some lawmakers in both parties have expressed support for repealing the embargo, but many in the GOP say the renewed relations won’t spur democracy in Cuba.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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