WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The United States has issued licenses for passenger ferries to Cuba for the first time in more than 50 years since the United States and Cuba cut contacts in 1961, the US Treasury Department and Office of Foreign Assets Contol (OFAC) spokesperson Hagar Chemali told Sputnik.
“OFAC has issued certain specific licenses for passenger ferry service [between the United States and Cuba],” Chemali said on Tuesday.
The move comes amid the process of the relations’ restoration between Washington and Havana, announced by US President Barack Obama in the end of 2014.
“There is no general license authorizing passenger ferry service between the United States and Cuba. Specific licenses may be issued on a case-by-case basis,” the spokesperson explained.
Most recently, Obama announced that Cuba will be taken off the US state sponsors of terrorism list, a designation that Havana has pressed Washington to change in order to fully normalize relations between the countries.
Cuba in turn has provided written assurance to Washington that the country will no longer support terrorist groups, particularly those at war with the governments in Spain and Columbia, in order to get delisted as a state sponsor of terror.
US authorities have yet to lift the trade embargo against the island country that was imposed after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
