THE US embassy in Cuba reopened yesterday after 54 years as Fidel Castro called for Washington to pay reparations for its criminal blockade.

The anthems of both nations were played as the US flag was hoisted over the embassy on Havana’s Malecon seafront.

John Kerry became the first US secretary of state to visit Cuba since 1945 as he led a high-level delegation to Havana to attend the ceremony.

They included Deputy Secretary of Commerce Bruce Andrews and members of both houses of Congress.

The host delegation was headed by Josefina Vidal, general director of the Cuban Foreign Ministry’s US office.

Prominent Cuban counter-revolutionaries who Washington has lionised over the years were pointedly not invited.

But officials said that Mr Kerry would meet dissidents privately later.

Tellingly, Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour Tom Malinowski accompanied him to Havana.

Mr Kerry said his government “strongly favoured” lifting the blockade, but that it depended on an Act of the US Congress.

Cuba and the US restored diplomatic relations on July 20

with the reopening of the Cuban embassy in Washington.

The raising of the Cuban flag over the US capital symbolised an enormous victory for the Caribbean nation’s revolution over the six decades of Washington’s economic blockade, attempted invasion and sponsorship of terrorism.

In the latest of his “reflections” articles published by Communist Party newspaper Granma, revolutionary leader Mr Castro said: “Cuba is owed compensation equivalent to damages, which have reached many millions of dollars, as our country has reported throughout our interventions in the United Nations with irrefutable arguments and facts.”

A day before the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war, Mr Castro recalled the huge sacrifices of the Soviet and Chinese people in the struggle to defeat fascism, as well as the horror of the unnecessary atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The comandante vowed: “To advance goodwill and peace among all the countries of this hemisphere and the many peoples who are part of the human family, we will never stop struggling for peace and the wellbeing of all human beings, for every inhabitant on the planet regardless of skin colour or national origin.”