WASHINGTON -- The United States and Cuba will announce an agreement today to reopen embassies in each other's capitals, formally restoring diplomatic relations more than a half-century after they were ruptured, administration officials said.
The agreement represents the most tangible outcome to date of President Barack Obama's decision to reach out to the island nation and end its decades of isolation. Obama declared in December that he wanted to resume ties with Havana, and the two sides have spent the past six months in negotiations to work out details of the new embassies.
Obama will announce plans to reopen the embassies in the Rose Garden this morning, the officials said. Secretary of State John Kerry will also discuss the plans in Vienna, where he is negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran, said the officials, who insisted on anonymity in advance of the formal announcement.
Kerry plans to travel to Havana for the actual opening of the embassy later in July, they said.
President Dwight Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961 just before leaving office in response to increased tensions with the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. A trade embargo imposed by Eisenhower was then toughened by his successors, and the two neighbors have spent more than 50 years at odds.
The United States already has a limited diplomatic outpost in Havana, called an interests section, in the same seven-story building that served as the U.S. Embassy until 1961. After so many years as a small presence in a hostile country, the building is worn down. The State Department has said it would need $6.6 million to retrofit it to make it suitable as an embassy.
Some Republicans who oppose the outreach to Cuba, calling it the appeasement of a dictatorial government, have been working to bar any financing for such work. The Republican-majority Senate also could try to block the confirmation of a new ambassador to Cuba once Obama makes a nomination.
Obama and Castro will exchange letters on the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, and the State Department will send Congress the required 15 days' notice before upgrading the U.S. interests section into an embassy, one U.S. official said.
The United States has a career diplomat running the interests section, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who could serve as the acting ambassador pending a permanent appointment, officials said. DeLaurentis, who holds the rank of ambassador, has served at the United Nations, as a deputy assistant secretary of state and in Havana as the political-economic section chief.
Cuba has an interests section in Washington that could be upgraded. In May, Cuba announced that its banking services for that office had been restored, a precondition to reopening a full embassy.
In recent weeks, Cuba also repaved the driveway, repainted the fence and erected a large flagpole on the front lawn to await the formal raising of its flag.
The reopening of embassies would remove Cuba from a dwindling list of countries completely ostracized by the United States. The only other nations with which Washington has no diplomatic relations are Bhutan, Iran and North Korea although there are other countries with which it has relations but no embassies.
Obama has made the detente with Cuba a central foreign-policy goal of his final two years in office, along with a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from some economic sanctions. While campaigning for president in 2008, he said the United States needed to reach out to its enemies.
Critics argue that Obama is too eager to accommodate countries that do not share American interests or values. By reopening diplomatic relations with Havana, they say, Obama will be empowering the government run by Castro's brother, President Raul Castro, without obtaining any assurances of democratic changes or improvements to human rights.
In a letter to Kerry in June, after the administration removed Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism, Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and presidential candidate whose parents are from Cuba, vowed to oppose the confirmation of any ambassador until issues like human rights, fugitive terrorists and billions of dollars of outstanding claims were resolved.
Word of the embassy reopenings Tuesday night brought renewed criticism from another U.S. lawmaker who is among those opposed to normalizing ties with Cuba's communist regime, citing its poor record on human rights.
"Not surprisingly, this administration has shown that politics trump policy in its decision-making process," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida who was born in Havana. "Opening the American embassy in Cuba will do nothing to help the Cuban people and is just another trivial attempt for President Obama to go legacy shopping."
Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the opening of embassies was part of the administration's "common sense approach to Cuba." However, he called for Cuba to recognize that it is out of step with the international community on human rights.
"Arrests and detentions of dissidents must cease and genuine political pluralism is long overdue," Cardin said in a statement.
Cuban and U.S. officials have been negotiating for six months over the diplomatic implications of opening embassies.
U.S. negotiators demanded assurances that U.S. diplomats at an embassy in Havana would be able to move freely around the country and speak with anyone, including opponents of the Cuban government. Cuban officials, who have frequently accused the United States of working to undermine the government by aiding dissidents, had resisted the request.
Proponents called the establishment of embassies a vital phase in the thaw, one that should be followed by Congress easing travel and commercial restrictions against Havana.
"Opening embassies in Washington and Havana is an important step toward the day when Americans can make their own decisions on where they travel, and our businesses can compete with the rest of the world," said James Williams, the president of Engage Cuba, a nonprofit advocacy group pressing for an end to the embargo.
Information for this article was contributed by Peter Baker and Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times; by Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and David Lerman of Bloomberg News; and by Julie Pace of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/01/2015