Obama lands in Cuba as first US president to visit in nearly a century

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/20/barack-obama-cuba-visit-us-politics-shift-public-opinion-diplomacy
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“There is a lot of talk that the purpose of opening up the relationship is to bring about change in Cuba, I don’t think that’s the case,” said Kevin Casas-Zamora, a director of the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank in Washington DC, and a former vice-president of Costa Rica.
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“Obama is doing this not for Cuba’s sake, but the US’s sake, because this had become an embarrassment for the US – a major obstacle in the relationship with Latin America.”

The sense that US politicians are like lost Japanese soldiers, stumbling from the jungle to discover the war ended decades ago, was compounded last week, when one of the fiercest critics of Obama’s strategy, Florida senator Marco Rubio, was thrashed in the state’s Republican presidential primary by a much more relaxed Donald Trump. Rubio, a Cuban American who called for more sanctions on Havana, dropped out of the race after losing his native state.

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Nice pics and video at link

Though complicated by other factors, Rubio’s defeat in all of Florida’s 67 counties, except his home town of Miami, is partly confirmation of what opinion polls have been suggesting for some time: that antipathy toward Havana’s communist government among Cuban Americans in the state is no longer a decisive electoral issue, as it once was.