US President Obama confirms he will visit Cuba next month

Obama also said past year that he would like to visit Cuba before leaving office in January 2017.

In a four-tweet message, Obama said he is making the trip in March “to advance progress” he says the United States has already made in the 14 months since he announced normalized relations with Cuba. But Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who traveled to Havana with Secretary of State John Kerry a year ago for the U.S. Embassy’s re-opening, cheered the announcement.

Obama’s visit will come in the heat of a contentious presidential campaign back in the USA, and just a week after the Florida primary.

The President aims to continue to “chart a new course” for U.S.- Cuban relations by connecting U.S. and Cuban citizens through travel, commerce and access to information, according to Earnest. Still, while Obama has long expressed an interest in visiting Cuba, White House officials had said the visit wouldn’t occur unless and until the conditions were right.

U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with dissidents when he makes a historic visit to Cuba next month, the White House said on Thursday, but Republicans complained that the trip would only lend legitimacy to the island’s Communist government.

– President Obama (@POTUS)We still have differences with the Cuban government that I will raise directly.

Cuba and Major League Baseball are discussing holding an exhibition game between the Cuban national team and Tampa Bay Rays in Havana on March 22, raising the possibility that Obama could throw the ceremonial first pitch at the first appearance by a Major League team in baseball-mad Cuba since 1999.

“This will be a very different kind of visit”, the White House said.

Two candidates in the Republican race, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, are conservative sons of Cuban immigrants and foreign policy hawks.

From Cuba, Obama would travel to Argentina on March 23 and 24. Told of Obama’s intention to visit, he added, “Probably not going to invite me”.

And, really, when the historical assessments are made, opening up relations with Cuba will be considered a significant accomplishment on the Obama administration.

The visit was first reported Wednesday by ABC News.

On Tuesday the two nations signed an agreement to restore scheduled commercial air service for the first time in decades, as early as later this year.

Hundreds of thousands more Americans are expected to visit Cuba per year under the deal, which cleared the way for the U.S. Department of Transportation to open bidding by American air carriers on as many as 110 flights a day.

The last sitting president to visit the island was Calvin Coolidge, who addressed the Pan-American Conference of Western Hemisphere leaders in Havana in 1928.