Will the new U.S. embassy in Havana have an ambassador?

In January 1961, President Eisenhower formally severed diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, shuttering the U.S. embassy in Havana. Earlier today, President Obama announced that later this summer, embassies would reopen in Washington and Havana, marking the formal reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. And though the embassies won’t open until after a 15 day congressional review period, there’s little (if anything) the Hill can do to stop this process.

Perhaps more than anything else, raising the American flag over the U.S. embassy in Havana is deeply symbolic, marking the start of a new phase for the United States and Cuba. The normalization process that the two countries began just over six months ago has, in large part, been building to this announcement.

But it’s important that we temper this promise with a dose of reality.

The embassies are an important step, but they are not the endgame. Rather, they’re the start of the second phase in the countries’ difficult work to build a productive bilateral relationship.

Phase one was intense. On December 17, Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced that the normalization process was underway. In the following months, we saw a brand-new set of regulations outlining how and under what terms U.S. citizens and businesses could interact with their Cuban counterparts. We saw the two presidents meet in person at April’s Summit of the Americas in Panama, with Castro "absolving" Obama of the Cold-War legacy that had long weighed down bilateral ties. We saw Cuba’s removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

And now, we have the promises of embassies in both capitals by the end of the summer.

It’s not necessarily smooth sailing from here, even on the diplomatic front. President Obama’s announcement promised that this all came out of careful negotiation, but we have yet to hear the specifics on embassy personnel, freedom of travel and expression for embassy staff in Cuba, and more. And in the past, these have been tricky issues.

There’s another real challenge, too: the embassies also mark the essential exhaustion of President Obama’s powers to push toward normalization without further legislative action. That poses a big risk. U.S.-Cuba policy normalization gaining many new supporters in the GOP, but it’s still deeply polarizing with many on the Hill, so congressional action toward normalization is, for many, a tough sell. And as long as that’s true, the embargo will remain in place—and Havana will be empowered to call Washington out for failing to lift it.

Still, there’s a real need to keep up momentum and maintain the steady flow of visible change.

On one hand, setting a formal framework—through, for example, bilateral dialogues along the U.S.-Brazil model—would help publically establish the agenda for bilateral issues. Less controversial issues, as well as difficult issues like human rights, unresolved expropriations of property, extradition, and Cuba's ongoing role in Venezuela would all benefit from a formal structure for the ongoing U.S.-Cuba discussion.

And on the other hand, there could be real potential in initiatives based on cultural diplomacy. In 1987 during the Reagan Administration, Billy Joel’s Glasnost Tour in the Soviet Union helped to foster understanding and create space for demands from Russians for greater opening toward the United States. Major League Baseball conducting spring training in Cuba or Taylor Swift playing Havana could be the modern equivalent, bringing Cuban hearts and minds on board with the pace of the changing relationship.

Whatever develops, this relationship will remain a controversial one. The embargo is still in place here in the United States, and freedoms of expression and dissent are still strictly limited in Cuba. Those are big sticking points—and certainly ones that anti-reform advocates in Cuba and the United States alike will continue to cite as proof that President Obama's approach is naive.

Still, the embassies are an important step—and one that shows more than ever that U.S.-Cuba policy reform is the way forward for the two countries, as long as they can continue to define the next step for their relationship.

So what’s next? Could President Obama nominate a U.S. ambassador to Cuba? Stay tuned.

Carl Meacham is director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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