Cython is definitely the way to go, unless you anticipate writing Java wrappers, in which case SWIG may be preferable.
I recommend using the runcython command line utility, it makes the process of using Cython extremely easy. If you need to pass structured data to C++, take a look at Google's protobuf library, it's very convenient.
Here is a minimal examples I made that uses both tools:
https://github.com/nicodjimenez/python2cpp
Hope it can be a useful starting point.
