Following the exchange of Alan Gross and the Cuban 5 3, (More on that in a subsequent post) Obama has announced that the US and Cuba will be establishing formal diplomatic relations:

President Obama on Wednesday ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century as he vowed to “cut loose the shackles of the past” and sweep aside one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.

The surprise announcement came at the end of 18 months of secret talks that produced a prisoner swap negotiated with the help of Pope Francis and concluded by a telephone call between Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro. The historic deal broke an enduring stalemate between two countries divided by just 90 miles of water but oceans of mistrust and hostility dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill and the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis.

“We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” Mr. Obama said in a nationally televised statement from the White House. The deal, he added, will “begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas” and move beyond a “rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”

We must also thank the Super-Pope for helping this along:

Pope Francis encouraged the talks with letters to Mr. Obama and Mr. Castro and had the Vatican host a meeting in October to finalize the terms of the deal. Mr. Obama spoke with Mr. Castro by telephone on Tuesday to seal the agreement in a call that lasted more than 45 minutes, the first direct substantive contact between the leaders of the two countries in more than 50 years.

I am liking this Pope more and more.

Of course, the dead enders and political cowards, like Senators Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio, are having a hissy fit over all this, but both as a matter of policy and a matter of politics, they are simply wrong.

This policy has been in place for longer than I’ve been alive, and it has never worked.

The fact that it is also a hearty f%$# you to the most radical elements of the Cuban emigre community, the nut-jobs who gave us the Elian Gonzalez cluster f%$#.

BTW, if you really hate the Castro regime, we need to let the banksters in to destroy the regime.

The CIA never could, but the crooks that we coddle on Wall Street can overthrow the Castros.