President Obama Discusses With Cuba To Reestablish Diplomatic Relations

 President Obama Discusses With Cuba To Reestablish Diplomatic Relations 

BHR Hollywood Reports.........
A political standoff that spanned five decades and 10 presidents began to crumble Wednesday with President Barack Obama's move to normalize relations with Cuba.

The surprise announcement represented a dramatic turning point in more than five decades of hostility born in the depths of the Cold War and yet frozen in time long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Once a geopolitical flash point in a global struggle of ideology and power, Cuba obsessed American leaders of a different era, who sponsored covert schemes like the failed Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 aimed at toppling Fidel Castro, the charismatic revolutionary leader.

Mr. Castro

 A Soviet move to station nuclear missiles in Cuba led to a 13-day showdown in 1962 and the most perilous moment of the nuclear era.

In more recent years, the Cuban-American relationship faded in significance yet remained a thorn in the side of multiple presidents who waited for Mr. Castro’s demise and experienced false hope when he passed power to his brother, Raúl. Even today, Cuba remains a powerful touchstone in American politics, and critics characterized Mr. Obama’s diplomatic thaw as appeasement of the hemisphere’s leading dictatorship.

Judy Gross(Alan Gross Wife)

Mr. Obama has long expressed hope of transforming relations with the island nation, an aspiration that remained untenable as long as Cuba held Alan P. Gross, the American government contractor arrested in 2009 and sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban prison. In agreeing to free him, Cuba cleared the way for Mr. Obama to takea political risk with the last national election of his presidency behind him.

Mr. Gross traveled on an American government plane back to the United States late Wednesday morning, and the United States sent back three Cuban spies who had been in an American prison since 2001.

Alan Gross

American officials said the Cuban spies were swapped for a United States intelligence agent who had been in a Cuban prison for nearly 20 years, and said Mr. Gross was not technically part of the swap, but was released separately on “humanitarian grounds.”

In addition, the United States will ease restrictions on remittances, travel and banking relations, and Cuba will release 53 Cuban prisoners identified as political prisoners by the United States government.

 Although the decades-old American embargo on Cuba will remain in place for now, the president called for an “honest and serious debate about lifting” it, which would require an act of Congress.

I'm Moriah Trenyce This Is Your BHR Hollywood Reports