Show caption Ground crew hold US and Cuban flags after JetBlue flight 387 lands at Abel Santamaría international airport in Santa Clara, Cuba. Photograph: Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters Cuba ‘A powerful moment’: first US-to-Cuba flight since 1961 is latest step in thaw JetBlue flight 387 gets festive send-off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, en route to Santa Clara, even as barriers remain for travel between the two countries Richard Luscombe in Fort Lauderdale, Florida @richlusc Thu 1 Sep 2016 04.03 EDT Share on Facebook

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To the lively beat of a salsa band, and with a water cannon send-off from airport fire trucks, the first commercial flight between the US and Cuba since 1961 took off from Florida on Wednesday, a symbolic next step in the new era of détente between the former cold war adversaries.

Among the passengers aboard JetBlue flight 387 from Fort Lauderdale to Santa Clara were many Cuban exiles returning to their homeland for the first time in years, and the US transport secretary, Anthony Foxx, headed for talks with his counterparts in Havana.

Wednesday’s historic flight, which took off 20 minutes late at 10.05am after a lengthy party at the departure gate, will eventually lead to 110 flights to and from Cuba daily from the US. Foxx said he was expecting to announce the first dates for Havana later in the day.

But for many of the passengers heading for the central Cuban city of Santa Clara on Wednesday, the journey was a celebration of the newfound personal freedoms the return of scheduled flights has brought, including the ability for travellers to book their own flights online at less than half the cost of the charter airlines who have been the mainstay of fractured travel links between the nations for the past 15 years.

Among the first passengers to board was Nimaris Niebla-González, with fiance Mario Martínez and their two daughters, Daniella, three, and Olivia, 10 months. As a young girl in Sagua La Grande, González always dreamed of one day getting married in the tiny village church near her family’s home, but gave up on the idea when she left Cuba for Florida as a teenager 13 years ago.

It will be a busy weeklong trip for González, a surgery nurse in Orlando. She will celebrate her 30th birthday tonight with her younger brother, whom she has not seen for 12 years, and on Thursday the couple will finally get their marriage ceremony in a Cuban church.

“I always wanted to get married in the church I grew up in, and our children will be baptised there on the same day, so it’s a very emotional time,” González said.

“The trip was sort of a birthday present, and for it to be on this flight today makes it more special.”

Nimaris Niebla-González with her fiance, Mario Martínez, and their two daughters, Daniella, 3, and Olivia, 10 months. Photograph: Richard Luscombe/The Guardian

Martínez, 28, was born in Santa Clara but moved to central Florida with his parents as a child and has not been able to go home to visit his grandmother since 2004. “It’s freedom for us in that we no longer have to go to agents where they charge $500 for a ticket,” he said.

“It’s good to see the relationship moving forward and travel opening up, but things in Cuba don’t change much.”

Jet Blue is one of a handful of US-based airlines who won approval from the state department to operate to and from Cuba earlier this year following the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the government in Havana. It also offers flights to Camaguey and Holguín and hopes to add daily flights to Havana shortly.

American Airlines, meanwhile, begins scheduled services from Miami, home to Florida’s largest concentration of Cuban Americans, on 7 September. The airlines hope to cash in on a surge in visitors to Cuba from the US, which grew to 161,000 in 2015, a 77% increase over the previous year according to government figures.

Yet although the skies are reopening for the first time since the US broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961, two years after Fidel Castro’s communist revolution, Barack Obama has been unable to persuade Congress to lift the decades-old trade embargo.

To the Cuban government’s chagrin, American citizens booking tickets must fall into one of 12 narrowly defined categories, including travel for religious, educational or cultural reasons.

“This process of establishing regular flights is a step although the restrictions of the blockade remain, which among other things impede US citizens from travelling to our country as tourists,” the Cuban foreign minister, Eduardo Rodríguez Padilla, told reporters on Monday at a press conference in Havana.

In an interview with the Guardian on Wednesday, Foxx said the Obama administration was working hard on continuing to bring down the barriers, a process announced publicly in December 2014 after months of secret talks with Cuban officials.

“Today is one of the most tangible examples of the president’s vision for restored diplomatic relations with Cuba,” Foxx said. “This is part of a larger objective we have right now to really nudge Cuba towards progress in the 21st century, economically, politically and on so many other fronts.”

Foxx said he planned to announce later on Wednesday the “slot allocations” to Havana for US airlines after a meeting with Rodríguez Padilla. “There are a few other areas we will explore on the transportation connections between the two countries and creating better access in the longer term.”

The restoration of air links follows the historic docking in Havana in May of the Carnival cruise ship Adonia, the first such voyage in five decades, carrying more than 700 passengers.

Passenger Julio César Valdés, also from Santa Clara, was looking forward to reuniting with his parents Teresa and Osnedo at his childhood home, and spending time with his 22-year-old sister.

“It’s a very emotional and wonderful day,” said Valdés, a medical assistant who lives in Jacksonville, Florida. “This is a new step in relations between the US and Cuba and I hope to see it progress further.”

Miami-based dentist Edelio González, 52, who has lived in south Florida for 36 years, said he has travelled regularly on charter flights to Santa Clara since 2001, but feels that today’s flight was “a powerful moment”.