From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

Bob Carfield is away this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, after more than 50 years of frozen diplomatic ties,

the U.S. reopened its embassy in Havana,

and the Cuban flag was raised over their new embassy in D.C.

Secretary of State John Kerry was there.

This is the first visit to the Department of State by a Cuban foreign minister since 1958.

We are not the best of friends. Not while the trade embargo persists,

not while the Guantanamo Bay prison remains open,

not while Cuba jails dissidents and restricts Internet access.

But the Obama administration's actions on Cuba are nonetheless historic and a long time coming.

In fact, Tim Padgett, America's editor at WLRN in Miami, says the path to normalization would have remained impassable, were it not for a certain story that made headlines 15 years ago.

Elian was just five when a smuggler's boat headed to the United States, flipped over, and killed his mother.

He was found clinging to an inner tube and handed over to relatives in South Florida.

More than 100 U.S. immigration agents, some with guns drawn, forcibly removed Ilihan

from the little Havana home of his great-uncle Lazzaro Gonzalez in a lightning pre-dawn raid.

The story of the adorable Cuban boy caught in a political tug of war,

transfixed U.S. audiences for seven months.

For Tim Padgett, who covered the Elion Gonzalez saga for Time magazine,

it was all-encompassing.

My son, too, was five or six years old,

and I remember coming home one night a little late from covering this

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