HAVANA – Stepping into history, President Barack Obama opened an extraordinary visit to Cuba on Sunday, eager to push decades of acrimony deeper into the past and forge irreversible ties with America’s former adversary.
“This is a historic visit and a historic opportunity,” Obama said as he greeted staff of the new U.S. Embassy in Havana.
Air Force One touched down on a rainy, overcast day in the Cuban capital. The president was joined by his wife, Michelle Obama, and daughters, Malia and Sasha.
Obama was greeted by top Cuban officials – but not President Raul Castro. The Cuban leader frequently greets major world figures upon their arrival at Jose Marti International Airport, but was absent on the tarmac. Instead, he planned to greet Obama on Monday at the Palace of the Revolution.
Obama’s whirlwind trip is a crowning moment in his and Castro’s ambitious effort to restore normal relations between their countries. While deep differences persist, the economic and political relationship has changed rapidly in the 15 months since the leaders vowed a new beginning.
After greeting embassy staff, Obama and his family toured Old Havana by foot, despite a heavy downpour. They walked gingerly on the slippery wet stones in the square in front of the Havana Cathedral. A few hundred people gathered in the square erupted in applause and shouted Obama’s name as the first family stepped forward.
The Obamas then dined at a privately-owned restaurant in a bustling, working class neighborhood. Jubilant crowds surged toward the president’s heavily fortified motorcade as it inched through the San Cristobal restaurant.
For more than 50 years, Cuba was an unimaginable destination for a U.S. president, as well as most American citizens. The U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961 after Fidel Castro’s revolution sparked fears of communism spreading to the Western Hemisphere. Domestic politics in both countries contributed to the continued estrangement well after the Cold War ended.
“He wanted to come to Cuba with all his heart,” 79-year-old Odilia Collazo said in Spanish as she watched Obama’s arrival live on state television. “Let God will that this is good for all Cubans. It seems to me that Obama wants to do something good before he leaves.”
Ahead of Obama’s arrival, counter-protesters and police broke up an anti-government demonstration by the Ladies in White group, whose members were taken into custody by female police officers in a scene that plays out in Havana each Sunday. They’re typically detained briefly and then released.
Obama’s visit was highly anticipated in Cuba, where workers furiously cleaned up the streets in Old Havana and gave buildings a fresh coat of paint ahead of his arrival. American flags were raised alongside the Cuban colors in parts of the capital, an improbable image for those who have lived through a half-century of bitterness between the two countries.
Many Cubans stayed home in order to avoid extensive closures of main boulevards. The city’s seaside Malecon promenade was largely deserted Sunday morning except for a few cars, joggers, fishermen and pelicans.
The president’s schedule in Cuba is jam-packed, including an event with U.S. and Cuban entrepreneurs. But much of Obama’s visit was about appealing directly to the Cuban people and celebrating the island’s vibrant culture.
“I don’t think that the Cuban people are going to be bewitched by North American culture,” Gustavo Machin, Cuba’s deputy director of U.S. affairs, told The Associated Press. “We don’t fear ties with the United States.”
A highlight of Obama’s visit comes Tuesday when he joins Castro and a crowd of baseball-crazed Cubans for a game between the beloved national team and Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays. The president also planned a speech at the Grand Theater of Havana laying out his vision for greater freedoms and more economic opportunity in Cuba.
Two years after taking power in 2008, Castro launched economic and social reforms that appear slow-moving to many Cubans and foreigners, but are lasting and widespread within Cuban society. The changes have allowed hundreds of thousands of people to work in the private sector and have relaxed limits on cellphones, Internet and Cubans’ comfort with discussing their country’s problems in public, for example.
The Cuban government has been unyielding, however, on making changes to its single-party political system and to the strict limits on media, public speech, assembly and dissent.
Obama will spend some time talking with Cuban dissidents. The White House said such a meeting was a prerequisite for the visit. But there were no expectations that he would leave Cuba with significant pledges from the government to address Washington’s human rights concerns.
A major focus for Obama was pushing his Cuba policy to the point it will be all but impossible for the next president to reverse it. That includes highlighting new business deals by American companies, including hotel chains Starwood and Marriott and online lodging service Airbnb.
AP writers Josh Lederman and E. Eduardo Castillo contributed to this report.
For black Cubans, Obama is inspiration
HAVANA – Yolanda Mauri’s ancestors almost certainly came to Cuba in chains, laboring as slaves on an island of French coffee plantations and fields of Spanish sugarcane.
Her parents became their family’s first professionals, graduating with engineering degrees after Cuba’s 1959 revolution ended segregation. Mauri, 26, graduated from an elite technical university with a degree in computer programming.
Today, she struggles to patch together a living from poorly paid government work and freelance jobs like building websites. She feels the sting of racism in casual derogatory comments or a maître d’s refusal to seat her in an expensive restaurant.
For Mauri and hundreds of thousands of black Cubans, Barack Obama isn’t just the first U.S. leader to visit their country in nearly nine decades. He’s a black man whose rise to the world’s most powerful job is a source of pride and inspiration.
Obama’s March 20-22 visit has raised Cubans’ hopes that a new era in relations with the United States will bring an end to the U.S. trade embargo and improve life for everyone on the island. For Afro-Cubans in particular, the presidential trip carries a special charge, a hope that an African-American leader’s near-universal popularity among Cubans of all races will help end lingering prejudice and inequality.
“He’s black and in some moment of his life he must have realized that, as an African-American, he had to elevate his performance level because as a black person you have to work twice as hard to get the same result as a white,” Mauri said. “I identity a lot with him because of that.”
Cuba’s culture is a blend of African and Spanish influence. The island’s world-renowned music and dance traditions draw deeply from the cultures of the West Africans brought to the island as slaves. Its Santeria religion is a blend of Catholicism and the Yoruba practices of western Africa.
One of Fidel Castro’s first acts after overthrowing Cuba’s government was to declare an end to a regimen of segregation that mirrored unequal conditions for blacks in the United States. Afro-Cubans praise the country’s incorporation of anti-racism into its official ideology, and acknowledge that blacks Cubans have made dramatic advances thanks to the revolution.
But nearly 60 years later, Afro-Cubans are underrepresented in the ranks of Cuba’s political and economic elites and make up a disproportionate number of the urban and rural poor. Black Cubans have benefited less than their white counterparts from closer relations with the United States. Relatively few hold coveted, lucrative jobs serving foreign visitors.
Discriminatory hiring is particularly egregious in the elegant private restaurants where Cubans can earn more in a night in tips from tourists than the average monthly salary. There, as with many jobs in hospitality and tourism in Cuba, waiters, waitresses and bartenders are overwhelmingly white or light-skinned, mixed-race Cubans.
Cuba’s state ideology of race-blindness means there’s little official discussion of race, and few programs to help black Cubans overcome the legacy of slavery and segregation.
“People here look at blacks like they’re the worst, and since Obama’s black it’s like we have a bit more of status, here and over there,” said Rosa Lopez, who sells snacks in a public market in a working-class Havana neighborhood of La Lisa. “Having a black president of the United States gives us just a little more pride.”
Some black Cubans have taken to affectionately referring to Obama as “el negro,” “the black guy,” in enthusiastic conversation about the president’s pending arrival, and some of the most popular memorabilia for sale ahead of the trip are images of the president and first lady shown talking to each other with distinctively Afro-Cuban Spanish dialogue jokingly superimposed.
According to official figures, 10 percent of the population of 11 million identify as black. Another quarter identify themselves to census-takers as mixed-race, a racial class that also suffers social discrimination in Cuba, although often to lesser degrees.
In remarkably warm descriptions of his regard for the American president, Cuban President Raul Castro has specifically cited Obama’s personal background as a factor in the new U.S.-Cuban relationship, without talking directly about race.
“I admire his humble origins and I think that his way of thinking stems from those humble origins,” Castro said before holding a meeting with Obama at the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April 11.
For many in Cuba, of all races, Obama’s historic status as America’s first black president is inextricable from his history-making role in restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba and moving toward normalization.
“It was only an African-American man who’s been able to loosen things up,” said Orlando Vila, the 50-year-old chief of a self-employed crew of workman repairing a state-run warehouse in Old Havana. “He’s faced the realities of life and now people here are expecting a change, too.”
Correspondent Andrea Rodriguez contributed to this report.
