Barrack Obama to become first US president to visit Cuba

Barack Obama will become the first US president to visit Cuba in almost a century next month, a symbolic visit that will cast off one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.

The White House announced that Obama and First Lady Michele Obama will travel to the Communist-controlled island March 21-22.

“Next month, I’ll travel to Cuba to advance our progress and efforts that can improve the lives of the Cuban people,” the US leader said in one of a series of tweets.

The White House hopes that the trip will be a “Berlin Wall” moment, crowning what they say is one of the biggest foreign policy achievements of Obama’s presidency. The last American leader to visit the island while in office was Calvin Coolidge in 1928.

For



generations of Americans, Cuba has been synonymous with crisis and threat, from the disastrous CIA-backed invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, to the Missile Crisis the following year.

Since coming to office in 2009, Obama argued that engagement would bear more fruit than embargoes and isolation. In December 2014, Obama made a shock announcement that he and Raul Castro had been in secret talks on a rapprochement.

The pair met in April 2015 in Panama, making Obama the first sitting US president to meet a Cuban leader since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.

Diplomatic relations were restored in July, allowing the red, white and blue flags of Cold War foes to fly over Washington and Havana for the first time since 1961.