The Star-Spangled Banner Flies over U.S. Embassy in Havana

The Stars and Stripes rose Friday over the newly opened U.S. Embassy for the first time in 54 years, making a symbolically charged victory lap for the Obama administration’s new policy of engagement with Cuba.

Some waking as early as 6 a.m., hundreds of Cubans gathered outside the embassy for what they universally called a historic day. Cuban TV carried the event live, broadcasting flattering biographical facts about Secretary of State John Kerry and interviews with Cubans who praised detente with the U.S. as a necessary and positive step for their country.

Cuban dissidents were not invited to the embassy ceremony, avoiding tensions with Cuban officials who typically boycott events attended by the country’s small political opposition. The State Department said it had limited space at what it called a government-to-government event, and invited dissidents to a separate afternoon flag-raising at the home of the embassy’s chief of mission.

Giant Cuban flags hung from the balconies of nearby apartment buildings and people gathered at windows with a view of the embassy.

“I wouldn’t want to miss it,” Marcos Rodriguez, 28, said as he waited outside the embassy. He said he and thousands of others on the island were hoping the opening with the U.S. will bring “social and economic benefits for all Cubans.”

High-ranking Cuban officials, U.S. business executives and Cuban-Americans who pushed for warming with Cuba gathered inside the former U.S. Interests Section, newly emblazoned with the letters “Embassy of the United States of America.”

Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco, who read a poem at Obama’s second inauguration, was to read a new work before three Marines who lowered the flag at the embassy’s closing in 1961 return to raise the Stars and Stripes again.