John Kerry on an Official Visit to Cuba on Friday

This is the first visit in seven decades of a U.S. diplomat of his level, after Edward R. Stettinius was here in March 1945, under the administration of U.S. President Harry S. Truman.

According to an official note from the State Department, the delegation is composed of 19 personalities, including the Secretary of Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson; Assistant Secretary of the Department of Commerce, Bruce Andrews; Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Sarah Bloom Raskin; and Democrat senator and president pro tempore of the Senate, Patrick Leahy, who also attended the ceremony at the Cuban embassy in Washington for the hoisting of the national flag there after 54 years six months and 17 days of the breaking off of relations.

With the ceremony this Friday, August 14, at 10 a.m., concludes the first stage of rapprochement between the two countries, based on the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, after the historic announcements made by presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama on December 17.

Starting from July 20, the diplomatic missions adopted again the status of embassies, after working since 1977 as interest sections under international legal protection of the Swiss Confederation, the Federal Councillor of which, Didier Burkhalter, head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, will attend the ceremony in Havana.

Kerry, who had previously visited Cuba as president of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, has on his agenda a meeting with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez and, as happened in Washington last month, both of them will offer a joint press conference at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, in which they will tackle the progress of the bilateral agenda.

The reestablishment of diplomatic links opens a new process towards the normalization of bilateral relations, which the two governments have said will be long and complex due to the issues to be discussed and problems accumulated over five decades of distance.