Hello, Barry

“THIS country will rock when he arrives,” predicts Leo, a taxi driver in Havana. He is not talking about Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, who will perform in the city on March 25th for an audience of perhaps 400,000 fans. He means Barack Obama, who four days earlier will become the first sitting United States president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. When Leo was 14 years old, in the 1980s, his teacher ordered him and his classmates to throw eggs and shout abuse outside the home of a schoolmate whose family had emigrated to the United States. “Now, thank God, the hate is over,” he says.

Mr Obama’s trip is a symbolic culmination of a process of rapprochement that he and Raúl Castro, Cuba’s president, began in December 2014. Since then the United States has eased the half-century-old trade and travel embargo on Cuba, removed the country from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and restored diplomatic relations, cut in 1961. On March 15th America’s government eased restrictions further, allowing Americans to travel to Cuba on their own for “educational” purposes and Cubans to be paid salaries in the United States. Mr Obama argues that such interchange will do more to hasten the liberalisation of Cuba’s repressive socialist regime than continuing to isolate it.