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U.S., Cuba to sign agreement on restarting commercial flights (w/video)

 
Published Feb. 13, 2016

HAVANA — The United States and Cuba will sign an agreement next week to resume commercial air traffic for the first time in five decades, starting the clock on dozens of new flights operating daily by next fall, U.S. officials said Friday.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is scheduled to fly Tuesday to Havana to cement the deal. It would be the most significant development in U.S.-Cuba trade since Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced in late 2014 that they would begin normalizing ties after a half-century of opposition.

The Obama administration is eager to make rapid progress on building trade and diplomatic ties with Cuba before the president leaves office. The coming weeks are seen as particularly crucial to building momentum ahead of a trip he hopes to make to Havana by the end of March.

"This (agreement) provides for a very important, sizable increase in travel between the two countries, and that reinforces the president's objective" of building ties, said Thomas Engle, deputy assistant secretary of state for transportation affairs.

Under the deal, U.S. airlines can start bidding on routes for as many as 110 U.S.-Cuba flights a day — more than five times the current number. All flights operating today are charters.

The agreement allows 20 regular daily U.S. flights to Havana, in addition to the current 10 to 15 charter flights a day. The rest would be to other Cuban airports.

Nearly 160,000 U.S. leisure travelers flew to Cuba last year, along with hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans visiting family, mostly on expensive charter flights out of Florida.

Commercial flights could bring hundreds of thousands more U.S. travelers a year and make the travel process far easier, with features like online booking and 24-hour customer service that are largely absent in the charter industry.

U.S. visitors to Cuba will still have to qualify under one of the travel categories legally authorized by the U.S. government.