Obama lands in Cuba
Dan Roberts in Havana
Sunday 20 March 2016 16.46 ED
... the official party ranging from the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team and expectant business executives, to some of the congressional leaders who helped broker the December 2014 deal to normalise relations is scattered in hotels where the cost of rooms first doubled, then trebled to $600 a night, as the scale of the windfall became clear ...
Obama is doing this not for Cubas sake, but the USs sake, because this had become an embarrassment for the US a major obstacle in the relationship with Latin America ...
The relative lack of backlash to Obamas overtures came as a surprise even to White House officials, but a long-running poll by Florida International University has charted a steady decline in support for the deep freeze on diplomacy, particularly among younger Cuban Americans. The younger generation has largely arrived or grown up in the US concerned about economic, not political, issues and primarily wish to see the country of their parents prosper again ...
... opposition in Congress remains fierce. White House officials say another reason for going to Havana well before Obama leaves office, next January, is to try to prevent the rapprochement from going the way of other failed reconciliations ...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/20/barack-obama-cuba-visit-us-politics-shift-public-opinion-diplomacy