Obama planning historic trip to Cuba to cement warmer ties

Barack Obama, the U.S. president, is planning an historic visit to Cuba next month, which will make him the first serving United States president to step foot on the island in almost nine decades.

The report cited a government source who said Obama will make the visit within the next month. The two countries reestablished diplomatic ties and reopened embassies in each other’s capital last summer.

A flurry of U.S.-Cuba events this week, plus Cuba’s recent return of a U.S. Hellfire missile that it said was mistakenly shipped to Havana from Paris in 2014, gave impetus to the possibility that an Obama trip to Cuba was in the works.

Citing administration officials, ABC News reported that the trip would be formally announced on Thursday.

No sitting US president has visited Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. Cuba is still a touchy subject with many Americans, including older Cuban emigres in South Florida, and the embargo has been a long-standing litmus test in Republican presidential politics.

Opponents of easing relations with Cuba were quick to object to Obama’s planned trip.

An administration official said it was hard to tell whether the increased arrests were because more Cubans now felt moved to demonstrate against the government.

Both Mr. Cruz and Mr. Rubio said the president was not meeting that standard and said Mr. Obama should be demanding more concessions from Cuba. All flights now operating between the two countries are charters.

“I believe the roads we have started to walk on is the right one”, Malmierca Díaz said after a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But Obama, facing steadfast opposition to normalized relations from Republicans and some Democrats, has been unable to deliver on Cuba’s biggest request: the lifting of the US economic embargo on Cuba.

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.

President Obama urges the Congress to extend unemployment benefits during a specch at the White House’s Rose Garden on Monday, July, 19, 2010.

Former President Jimmy Carter visited in March 2011.

“What I said to the Cuban government is” If we clearly see the progress on the liberties of ordinary Cubans, I’d love to go over there to put these in light progress “, he declared in December with Yahoo!