NEW YORK POST

Obama planning historic visit to Cuba in March

February 18, 2016 | 12:00am

President Obama is planning a historic visit to Cuba next month in a move to help normalize trade and tourism relations with the island nation.

The diplomatic stop to Cuba, the first by a sitting US president in nearly nine decades, will be one leg of a Latin America trip that will be announced by the White House on Thursday.

Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro said in late 2014 that they would begin normalizing ties more than 50 years after the United States imposed a full embargo on Cuba.

The Obama administration is eager to make rapid progress on building trade and diplomatic ties with Cuba before the president leaves office next year.

On Tuesday, the two governments signed a deal that would allow commercial air travel between the United States and Cuba for the first time in more than five decades.

The move will allow dozens of new daily flights to bring hundreds of thousands more American travelers a year to the island as early as this fall.

In addition to the Obama visit, a regional delegation from Washington will be traveling to Cuba later this week to explore future economic development in and cultural relationships with the Communist nation.

The delegation will meet with Cuban government officials about economic opportunities for regional businesses in Havana.

In addition, the delegation will visit primary and secondary schools to learn lessons on how literacy, graduation and retention rates remain consistently high there.

The last sitting US president to visit Cuba was Calvin Coolidge, who went to Havana in January 1928 to give a speech to the Sixth International Conference of American States.

Diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba were destroyed in 1959 after the Cuban revolution when Fidel Castro nationalized American businesses and hiked taxes on US imports.

In a disastrous military excursion, President John F. Kennedy in 1961 sent a platoon of CIA-trained Cuban exiles into the Bay of Pigs to start a revolution on the island. Every member of the paramilitary group was either captured or killed in a matter of days.

The failed invasion led Cuba to developing stronger ties with the Soviet Union.

In 1962, Kennedy announced a full embargo against Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis — involving the deployment of Soviet missiles a mere 90 miles from Florida — brought the world to the brink of nuclear war later that year.