US flag to be raised outside embassy in Cuba

Fidel Castro repeats claim US owes Cuba "millions of dollars" just hours before John Kerry arrives for Havana ceremony.

 

Fidel Castro marked his 89th birthday on Thursday with a column demanding damages from the US [AP]

In a historic moment in US-Cuba relations, John Kerry will raise the Stars and Stripes over a restored American embassy in Havana, though the economic embargo legally remains in effect.
Three members of the US Marine Corps, now retired, who lowered the flag at the embassy in Cuba in 1961, will be back on Friday with the secretary of state to raise the Stars and Stripes once again.
"I'm gonna love seeing that flag go back up," Jim Tracy, 78, says in a video posted on the State Department website.

Tracy - who served in the Marines Corps for 30 years - was a master gunnery sergeant entrusted with lowering the flag at the embassy in Havana when the US severed relations with Cuba on January 4, 1961.
A huge crowd of Cubans had gathered outside the embassy seeking visas to leave the island, then in the throes of a communist revolution.
As Tracy, Corporal Mike East and Lance Corporal Larry Morris marched out of the embassy, the crowd parted and the American soldiers proceeded to bring down the flag, ceremoniously folding it up.
"It was a touching moment," said East, who is now 76. Cuba was his first posting as a member of the Marine Corps' embassy detachment.
On Friday, they will go back to Havana with Kerry to seal the renewal of diplomatic relations embarked on in December by US President Barack Obama and Cuba's President Raul Castro.

Raul Castro took over Cuba's presidency after the elder Castro, Fidel, suffered a health crisis in 2006.
Katherine Vargas, White House spokesperson, said the retired soldiers were being reunited "to raise the flag again tomorrow at the ceremonial opening of the US Embassy in Cuba".
The flag itself will not be the same one taken down 54 years ago, a State Department source said.

For his part, Fidel Castro marked his 89th birthday with a newspaper column on Thursday repeating assertions that the US owes socialist Cuba "numerous millions of dollars" for damages caused by its decades-long embargo.
Fidel Castro did not directly mention the restored relations, though he made several critical references to the US.
He said the US owes Cuba indemnifications "that rise to numerous millions of dollars" for damage caused by the embargo.
He also repeated his criticism of the US decision to stop swapping dollars for gold in 1971, a stand shared with some conservative economists.
He has said in the past that such a move left the dollar alone as the world's measure of value for currencies.
Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 following a revolution.
Relations with the US were broken in 1961 as he led Cuba rapidly into a socialist model allied with the Soviet Union.