Postcard from Havana: beisbol, sunglasses, and cream of mojito

Politico has an article by Edward-Isaac Dovere about President Obama's trip to Cuba:

The lobby of the Palace of the Revolution has the best wi-fi in town.
Jimmy Buffett crashed a get-together for all the reporters, White House aides, and members of Congress who had flown in, complaining that they wouldn’t let him sing the national anthem before the big Tampa Bay Rays-Cuban National Team exhibition game here. The next night, he got in a few songs during the big party thrown by Major League Baseball. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi danced her heart out. She knew all the lyrics.
At a bar in Old Havana, a waitress re-enacted the news conference held by Raúl Castro and President Barack Obama. She mimed taking her headset on and off. She shook one hand in the air. She shook them both. The bartender asked her to do it again.
Everyone wanted in on the action. Democratic Representative Kathy Castor, who represents Tampa, Florida and its environs, even showed up at the Gran Teatro ahead of Obama’s big bury-the-Cold-War speech to the Cuban people, with a tote bag full of Tampa Bay Rays caps.
By the end of the trip, those soaking up the atmosphere included Castro himself, who brought his whole family to the game, sat chummily shaking hands with Obama after the first hits (Obama in a casual white shirt and sunglasses, Castro in a blue blazer and dark shirt; photo, above) and later walked with the president across the tarmac to Air Force One, both men laughing.
Dictatorships tend to know how to do pageantry. But there wasn’t much on display in Cuba over Obama’s two days on the ground, suggesting the grudging way in which the Castro government approached this event.

Obama meets with Cuban dissidents by Nolan D. McCaskill
Usually, when the president of the United States lands in a place that’s not used to seeing him, the roads from the airport are lined with posters displaying his face, often clipped next to photos of the local president or prime minister. Not here. The White House spent hours that turned into days and then weeks explaining to the Cuban government that all the requests it was making and all the people it was saying had to be able to come, were totally normal, totally standard. All those planes with the rest of the delegation and support staff weren’t actually a covert invasion.
The two governments spent the two days of Obama’s visit in a locked sumo hold, circling around each other on issues of access, freedom, and what the trip was really going to represent. Castro and his aides kept trying to keep the whole thing on his terms. Obama and his aides kept pushing for more.
It wasn’t until Obama sat among the fifty thousand screaming fans at the baseball game that he was in front of any Cubans who did not work for the government, weren’t special invitees to the entrepreneurial summit he attended or his speech at the Gran Teatro, had not been among the selected dissidents he met at the American embassy just before the game, or were not among the many who lined the streets in clumps, watching his motorcade go by with the flashes on their smartphones lit up.
Standing outside the stadium midway through the game, clad in a bright blue Cuba jersey, celebrity chef José Andres, owner of the restaurants the Obamas frequent most often back in DC and here as part of the official delegation of entrepreneurs, compared the baseball game to that Springbok rugby game in South Africa that most people know from watching Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon in Invictus. The government was changing there, and it’s changing here, he said. There were people in prisons there, and there are people in prisons here. A sports game there seemed to wrap all the changes together and make them real, and that’s what this baseball game would perhaps do here.
“If you think about it, there are a lot of similarities,” he said.
Obama did not throw out the first pitch. This trip was complicated enough without having to worry about Obama getting a baseball over the plate with decent form.
But he and Castro, their showdown at the news conference behind them, did get in on one of the waves going around the stadium, while Obama’s youngest daughter, Sasha, caught in the frame, was clearly embarrassed, her hand over her shaking head.
She was not at the state dinner to watch her father bop his head to the Cuban band.
This raises the question of what a state dinner, at the White House, a sumptuous, Salahi-enticing, glamorous event, would look like in a Communist regime. The answer: chairs wrapped in mustard-color covers and tied with pale yellow bows around tables arranged in the same long hallway where Obama had reviewed the troops and The Star-Spangled Banner had been performed earlier in the day. This is the official seat of Cuban presidential power, and the dinner apparently embodied the Cubans’ idea of fancy, though, to an American eye, it was more like a mixture of a Rainforest Café and an aging community center: shiny black marble floors lined with green plants growing out of rock gardens. 

Obama defends attending baseball game in Cuba after Brussels attacks by Nolan D. McCaskill
The menu included shrimp mousse under kisch [sic] supreme with cream of mojito and golden cream soup flavored with Caney rum accompanied by slivers of ham.
“Let me put in this way,” said Representative Greg Meeks (a Democrat from New York) the next morning. “I have been in the facility before, but that was with Fidel Castro, and he gave us an eight-course full meal. The food was much better.”
There were no toasts. The dinner was suddenly over, Meeks said, when the two presidents finished and started heading for the door. “On the way out, President Raúl Castro came over to me and asked how my wife and family was. I’ve met him many times,” said Senator Patrick Leahy (a Democrat from Vermont), who’s been pushing for a Cuba reopening for twenty years. “President Obama said: ‘Come on Pat, don’t tie him up.’ I said, ‘He’s the one that started the conversation.’”
There was one person who didn’t appear: Fidel. He’s still alive, apparently, and in good enough shape to have met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was also in town.
If not for the White House machinations that created the first real news conference in the history of Cuba, including an extraordinary moment when Raúl Castro conferred with an aide on stage as Obama answered a reporter’s question, then turned to Castro and said, “Excuse me...”, there probably would have been more attention paid to Obama telling ABC’s David Muir that he would have been happy to have met with Fidel. That, though, was never really on the table.
Back in 2002, Representative Jim McGovern (a Democrat from Massachusetts) saw Fidel Castro at the opening of the renovated Ernest Hemingway house here. The first President Castro told McGovern that he’d met the famed author only once, at a fishing contest. All that Castro remembers saying to him: “Nice fish.”
There’s a picture of that moment over at the Floridita Bar a few blocks from where Obama delivered his big speech in Old Havana on Tuesday. There’s also a statue of Hemingway at the bar, though he’s not depicted drinking a daiquiri, which was invented there. McGovern said Fidel told him back then that he regretted not telling Hemingway how much he’d been inspired by For Whom the Bell Tolls. But, already 75, Fidel said he’d just reread The Old Man and the Sea and found new meaning in it.
Hemingway committed suicide the year after that fishing tournament meeting. “I made it a point then to never let anyone interesting leave the island without talking to them,” McGovern says Castro told him. Either Fidel broke his pledge, or he doesn’t find Obama interesting.
Meanwhile, his younger brother was left standing at the edge of the runway at José Martí International, watching Air Force One take off at the end of a visit that Obama had justifiably declared meant that the last of the Cold War was over, his own Cuba policy had worked, and Cuba was going to need to come to terms with it.
Raúl made one last wave as the plane rolled away.

Rico says he never thought he'd live to see it, but still hopes to get to Cuba with the fiancée one of these days...