http://lobelog.com/cuba-hope-and-change/#more-33555

Cuba: Hope and Change?      

by John Feffer
There are a number of no-go zones in the world for Barack Obama these days.
Damascus is enemy territory. Most of Iraq and Afghanistan are too dangerous. Pyongyang has never hosted a sitting U.S. president, and Kim Jong-Eun frankly prefers Americans with better jump shots. We now have a nuclear deal with Iran, but there are no trips of reconciliation to Tehran on the White House calendar. Relations with Moscow are frosty, and don’t expect a trip any time soon to Ankara either. Oh, and it would probably be a bad idea for the president to show up at a Trump rally as well.
But this week, President Obama is in Havana, and the greeting crowds have been enraptured. Such a trip was inconceivable back in 2008, when Obama was running for president. But as he enters his last year in office, the president is determined to make his détente with Cuba irreversible. He does after all face quite a few people who oppose his effort to end the half-century of enmity between the two countries.
For instance, even though the United States and Cuba formally reestablished diplomatic relations last July, Congress is dead-set against lifting the economic embargo against the island that has been in place since 1960 and that, according to an International Trade Commission study in 2001, costs the U.S. economy $1.2 billion a year (not to mention what it costs Cuba). Politicians like Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who was born in Cuba, have dug in their heals. Not surprisingly, she was not enthusiastic about Obama’s trip to Havana. “A visit by President Obama more than one year after his unilateral concessions to the regime will only legitimize the Castros’ repressive behavior,” she wrote in a letter in February.
Outside of Congress, a vocal group of anti-engagement Cubans continue to press for regime change on the island and partner with right-wing dissidents inside Cuba itself. These are the “Platistas,” named after “an amendment to the Cuban constitution authored by US senator Orville Platt giving the United States the legal right to intervene in the country’s internal affairs,” as Sam Farber describes it in a valuable piece at Jacobin. The Platistas have lots of gringo allies, and it’s not just crusty old Republicans. Plenty of Cold War liberals, like The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, have similarly Jurassic viewpoints.http://lobelog.com/cuba-hope-and-change/#more-33555