For the first time in 54 years the American flag was raised in Cuba, signifying a possible change in relations with the U.S. and Cuba.
Just outside the recently reopened U.S. Embassy in Havana, the American flag was raised to a cheering crowd, signifying the latest development from highly-criticized talks between U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro, according to USA Today.
John Kerry presided over the ceremony as the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit the country in 70 years.
"The time is now to reach out to one another as two peoples who are no longer enemies or rivals but neighbors," said Kerry,
Kerry also presided over the Cuban Embassy's ceremony in Washington.
But feelings from the past may not be totally vanquished as the former Cuban leader Fidel Castro criticized the U.S. for not lifting its trade embargo, and went on to say in an open letter that the US owed Cuba millions of dollars from decades of lost trade, according to the BBC.
Presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban emigrants who fled Castro's communist Cuba, slammed the Obama admistration today for bringing "legitimacy to a state sponsor of terror,"
"We must guarantee that the United States stands on the side of the Cuban people, not their oppressors," Rubio said.
In a sense of historic irony, three of the very same Marines who lowered the Embassy flag in 1961 were on hand to raise it again, Larry Morris, Mike East and Jim Tracy, according to NBC News.
