The United States Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker is in Cuba, where she will engage in two days of talks regarding the U.S. embargo over the island nation.

The BBC reports that Pritzker is set to meet with Cuban trade and foreign ministers on Wednesday.

Pritzker, a hotel heiress who was instrumental in helping her family expand their Hyatt empire, will be discussing recent measures approved by the U.S. to loosen strictures of an embargo, which has been in place since 1960.

Last December, U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raúl Castro announced that they were restoring diplomatic relations between their nations.

The official presidential statement concerning the policy shift emphasized the magnitude of the changes in U.S.-Cuban relations, saying, “In the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years, we will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.”

In his State of the Union address delivered in January, Obama spoke of ending a policy that he deemed as long past its expiration date. 

Obama said, ”When what you’re doing doesn’t work for fifty years, it’s time to try something new. Our shift in Cuba policy has the potential to end a legacy of mistrust in our hemisphere; removes a phony excuse for restrictions in Cuba; stands up for democratic values; and extends the hand of friendship to the Cuban people.”

Obama, of course, still faces much opposition from the Republican majority in Congress. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has been particularly vocal about his opposition to easing relations between the U.S. and the communist nation.

After Obama announced his administarion's new approach toward Cuba, Rubio called Obama's sense of foreign policy naïve and even “willfully ignorant of the way the world truly works.”

As quoted in Newsweek, Rubio warned, “This Congress is not going to lift the embargo.”