Barack Obama makes historic visit to Cuba

Americans can now travel to Cuba. It’s still technically illegal to go as a tourist; however, a January 2015 policy change made by former President Barack Obama has loosened restrictions, making it possible for Americans to vacation on the island. I was in Cuba recently for a story about the underground internet there and found the island intoxicatingly beautiful and charming. This short video is a montage of what I saw, followed by instructions on how to visit the island as an American.

On Tuesday, during President Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba — the first by a sitting president since Calvin Coolidge in 1928 — amid a series of formal acts of statesmanship, the president did something a little less formal: the wave.

Here’s Obama and his family doing the wave with Cuban leader Raúl Castro at a baseball game in Havana:

On Monday morning, we heard something many thought impossible just two years ago: a Cuban government band playing the American national anthem.

President Barack Obama had arrived in Cuba the night before, the first official visit of a US president since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. In many ways, it represents the culmination of Obama’s approach to the island: a concerted effort to break down the decades-old US embargo and move toward normal relations.

The United States and Cuba have taken major steps to end their 50 years of hostility, and some researchers think Americans could reap an unexpected benefit: better access to Cuban medical innovations.

“The US may be the world leader in basic cancer research, biotechnology, and treatment,” explained Marga Gual Soler, who studies science diplomacy. “But Cuba has built a universal, free, and public health care system, [and] has the highest number of medical doctors per capita in the world, a robust biotechnology industry developed with very low resources, and guaranteed access to drugs and advanced diagnostics for the population.”

President Barack Obama is the first American president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years. And his historic visit is leading to some memorable photos — like this shot of Air Force One flying over cars that have been on the streets since before the Cuban revolution in 1959.

Even in the rain, crowds of Cubans waited by the side of the road to greet the president’s motorcade as it passed by. A recent poll by the Washington Post, Univision Noticias, and Fusion found Obama is very popular in Cuba — he has an approval rating of 80 percent, much higher than either Fidel Castro, Cuba’s longtime leader, or Raúl Castro, Cuba’s current president.

It’s still technically illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba as tourists. But that hasn’t stopped US companies from snatching up hotels they can market to visiting Americans.

Starwood Resorts announced over the weekend that it will refurbish and manage two hotels in the Cuban capital, Havana. And Airbnb, which last year claimed the right to represent all private residences on the island, just announced it will open up all its listings beginning April 2.

A little over a year after the US and Cuba revealed their historic deal to take major steps toward ending their 50-plus years of hostility, which they had negotiated in secret, President Obama is in Cuba — the first president to visit since 1928.

This is a huge moment for Cuba, for President Obama, and for the US-Cuba relationship. But you might reasonably be wondering why this is happening now. How did things get so bad between the US and Cuba in the first place, and why has that lasted for such a long time? What is actually changing now, and what does it mean for the two countries? What follows is a guide to your most basic questions about the US and Cuba.

President Barack Obama will travel to Cuba in March, the strongest gesture yet to show that the two countries seek to normalize ties after nearly 60 years of official hostility.

The White House is expected to make the announcement later today, as top officials from the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments meet with their Cuban counterparts in Washington, DC, to cement more business ties between the two nations. Obama will be the first sitting president to visit the island nation in 88 years, after Calvin Coolidge visited in 1928.

On Tuesday morning, the US and Cuba signed a civil aviation agreement in Havana, marking the first time since the Cuba embargo was put in place half a century ago that Americans will be able to fly to the island on commercial airlines.

It’s a huge breakthrough in President Barack Obama’s push to normalize diplomatic relations between the two countries, but it’s also an enormous opportunity for Americans who are now thinking of making Cuba their next vacation spot.

It’s the holiday season, which means you’ve probably headed out of town. Or perhaps you’re prepping for an upcoming trip, or contemplating when and where you might take your next one.

If so, Cuba might come to mind: One year after President Barack Obama announced he had begun the process of normalizing relations after half a century of official hostility, travel to the island nation has become easier than ever.

On his worst days, Rafa, a Cuban taxi driver, makes $60 from all his rides. A doctor in Cuba makes around $45 in a month. The colossal disparity between these two salaries is one of the many perplexing realities of the Cuban economy. Watch why the Cuban economy is so upside down:

Beginning in May 2016, Carnival will offer travel to Cuba from Miami, steering “socially good” ships to the island nation of revived American affection. Just don’t call Carnival’s new offering, fathom, a “cruise.” This is a “cultural exchange voyage,” which costs $2,990 per person, not including alcohol, according to Carnival’s site:

Carnival isn’t breaking significant industry ground outside of the locale of interest (and its own investment, which may pressure competitors to offer similar options). It will operate under expanded, but well-exploited, travel allowance. For decades, US-based companies offered humanitarian, educational trips to Cuba during the 50-year US economic embargo.

Alan Gross is an American aid worker who was imprisoned in Cuba for about five years on charges of undermining the Cuban government — and now he’ll be at the State of the Union speech as one of First Lady Michelle Obama’s guests. Gross’ December release was secured as part of President Obama’s historic deal aimed at eventually normalizing relations with the Cuban government.

Here’s what you need to know about Gross — and why securing his freedom was so important for Obama’s plan to improve American-Cuban relations.

The US has started normalizing diplomacy with Cuba, but it will take an act of congress to end the embargo. Here are seven reasons why it should.

President Obama’s plan to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba won’t end America’s decades-long embargo on Cuba, but it will reduce it, and it is an historic first step toward ending the 50-year-old embargo and the US-Cuba enmity behind it.

Here’s the thing about the embargo: it is, without a doubt, an utterly failed policy at every level. Its goals were to topple Cuba’s government or at least improve its behavior; even after many decades, it did neither, but instead has succeeded at hurting ordinary Cubans — and worse. Here are seven reasons why the embargo is outdated, counterproductive, and well past its expiration date.

The US government’s hardline attitude toward Cuba has spanned more than half a century, far outlasting the end of the Cold War. It has persisted even though there’s plenty of evidence that it’s a terrible idea.

This is partly because the politics of the embargo in the US have long been dominated by a certain generation of politically influential Cuban emigrants, who fled the country to escape the Fidel Castro regime and passionately feel the US shouldn’t do anything that might legitimize the Cuban government.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later. But the US embargo on Cuba has stood strong for more than two decades since — despite a consensus among many foreign policy experts that it was outdated and failed to achieve its aims.

The answer for why the embargo has persisted comes down, in many ways, to politics. Yes, US foreign policy does not tend to be friendly to authoritarian communist governments like Castro’s, and the Castro regime has continued to be particularly bad on human rights and political freedoms. But the main reason America’s Cuba policy has remained so unmoved is that the domestic politics have favored it. And those domestic politics are driven by the extremely strong preferences of a politically active Cuban-American exile community concentrated in the electorally crucial swing state of Florida.

It seemed clear from President Obama’s statement that he wants to end the embargo against Cuba. But the US-Cuba deal doesn’t do that. Why? Because the president doesn’t have the power to do that.

At least, not in theory.

The Obama administration announced today that, as part of its huge new deal with Cuba, it’s relaxing travel restrictions on Americans who want to visit. We know what your next question is, and we’ve answered it:

Sorry, beach bums.

Good news, cigar smokers: one of the terms of the big new US-Cuba deal is that American visitors to the island will be allowed to bring back up to $100 in alcohol and tobacco products. Previously, that was forbidden. For decades now, the ban on imports from Cuba has given its cigars a certain cachet in the United States, but it’s worth asking: are they really that much better than ones from, say, Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic?

The answer is that formal cigar experts tend to rank Cubans very highly in blind taste tests. Cigar snobs really do prefer the taste of Cubans, even when they don’t know they’re Cubans.

The cruel, ridiculous failure of America’s embargo of Cuba combined with the oft-malign role US foreign policy has played elsewhere in Latin America sometimes leads critics of American foreign policy to romanticize the Cuban regime. That’s a mistake. Despite the serious flaws of the embargo, anti-Castro activists are right to say that the regime is a major abuser of human rights.

According to Freedom House, Cuba has the most restrictive press censorship in the Western Hemisphere and is the only country rated “not free” in the Americas. All official media is owned by the state and controlled by the government. Dissident bloggers are regularly arrested. According to Amnesty International, protestors are regularly arrested and detained without trial. The Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba says there were over 6,000 arbitrary detentions of human rights activists in 2013.

But what’s missing from the agreement is huge: the embargo. America’s broad embargo against Cuba remains an unwise reaction to the Cold War that should long ago have been lifted. Sadly, it will survive this deal. But perhaps not for long.

The most important sentence in President Obama’s statement was this one: “I look forward to engaging Congress in an honest debate on lifting this embargo.”

The historic deal to begin normalizing relations between the US and Cuba, after 50-plus years of hostility, is being credited primarily to President Obama and Raul Castro, Cuba’s current de facto leader and the brother of Fidel. That is with good reason: Obama has been working on this issue throughout much of his presidency and Castro is taking a significant risk by allowing wider Internet access into Cuba as part of the deal.

But there are two actors that quietly played a major role in this: Canada and Pope Francis.

President Obama is making a statement about the developing deal between the US and Cuba at noon. Here is the livestream:

The world woke up on Wednesday morning to the surprising news that the US and Cuba are in talks to normalize relations. That raises the prospect of an end to the US embargo of Cuba, the longest-running joke in American foreign policy, and something that can’t come to an end a moment too soon. Designed over 50 years ago to somehow try to starve the Cuban population into overthrowing the Castro regime, it has failed, disastrously, and somehow allowed Cuban Communism to outlive its Soviet sponsor by a generation.

But even though everyone in the American government knows the embargo is stupid — and has known this for years — powerful domestic political incentives have prevented meaningful change.