Postcard from Havana: Beisbol, sunglasses and cream of mojito

Jimmy Buffett crashed a get-together for all the reporters, White House aides and members of Congress who flew in, complaining about how they wouldn’t let him sing the national anthem at the big Tampa Bay Rays-Cuba National Team exhibition game here Tuesday. The next night he got a few songs in at the big party Major League Baseball put together. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi danced her heart out. She knew all the words.

At a bar in old Havana on Monday night, a waitress reenacted the press conference between 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. Rep. Kathy Castor, who represents Tampa, 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 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 at the first set of hits — Obama in a causal white shirt and sunglasses, Castro in a blue blazer and dark shirt — then walked him down the tarmac to Air Force One, both laughing.

Dictatorships tend to know how to do pageantry. But there wasn’t much on display here in Cuba over Obama’s two days on the ground, suggesting the grudging way in which the Castro government approached this trip.

Usually when the president lands in a place that’s not used to seeing him, the roads out of the airport are filled with posters with his face on them, often clipped next to photos of the local president or prime minister. Not here. The White House spent hours into days into weeks explaining to the Cuban government that all the requests they were making and all of the people they were saying had to be able to come in 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 48 hours of Obama’s visit in a locked sumo hold, circling around each other on access, freedom, 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 55,000 people screaming at the baseball game that he was in front of any Cubans who didn’t work for the government, weren’t special invitees to the entrepreneurial summit he attended or his speech at the Gran Teatro, hadn’t been among the selected dissidents he met with at the American Embassy just before the game, or weren’t among the many who lined the streets in clumps, watching his motorcade go by with the flashes lit up on their smart phones.

Standing outside the stadium midway through the game, wearing a bright blue Cuba jersey, celebrity Chef José Andres — owner of the restaurants the Obamas frequent most back in D.C., and here again 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 Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon showing off their Afrikaans accents. 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 was maybe going to do here.

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 in decent form.

But he and Castro, their showdown at Monday’s press conference behind them, did get in on one of the waves going around the stadium — with Obama’s younger daughter Sasha, caught in the frame, 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 playing.

This raises the question of what a state dinner — the sumptuous, Salahi-enticing, most glamorous event back at the White House—looks 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 played earlier in the day. This is official seat of presidential power, and this is apparently their idea of fancy, though more the American idea of a Rainforest Café mixed with an aging community center: shiny black marble floors, lined with green plants growing out of rock gardens.

The menu included “Shrimp mousse under kisch supreme with cream of mojito” and “golden cream soup flavored with Caney rum accompanied by slivers of ham.”

“Uh…Let me put in this way,” said Rep. Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.) the next morning. “I have been in the facility before, but 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 Castro came over to me and asked how my wife and family was. I’ve met him many times,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who’s been pushing a Cuba reopening for 20 years. “President Obama, said, ‘Come on Pat, don’t tie him up.’ I said, ‘He’s the one that started the conversation.’”

He’s still alive, apparently, and in good enough shape to have met with Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro who was also in town on Monday.

If not for the White House and Obama machinations that created what was the first ever real press conference in the history of Cuba — an extraordinary moment that included the president talking with an aide on stage while Obama answered until the president turned to him and said, “Excuse me…” — there probably would have been more attention to the president telling ABC’s David Muir that he’d have been happy to meet with Fidel.

Back in 2002, when Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) saw Fidel Castro at the opening of the renovated Hemingway House here, the original Cuban dictator told him that he’d met the author only once. They were 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 drinking a daiquiri, which was invented there.

McGovern says that Fidel Castro told him back then that he regretted not telling Hemingway how much he’d been inspired by “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” But already then 75, he said he’d just reread “The Old Man and the Sea,” and found new meaning in it.

Hemingway committed suicide shortly after that meeting at the fishing tournament.

“I made it a point then to never let anyone interesting leave the island without talking to them,” McGovern says Castro told him.

Meanwhile, his little brother was left Tuesday evening standing at the edge of the runway at José Marti 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.

In Another Historic Visit, Obama Heads To Argentina

March 22, 2016

President Barack Obama leaves Cuba and flies to Argentina today. The trip has been billed as an opportunity to expand economic and political relations between the two countries, but it also coincides with the 40th anniversary of the military coup that set off what’s known as Argentina’s Dirty War.

Obama’s schedule in Buenos Aires includes a visit to the memorial for victims of the Dirty War. He is also set to announce the declassification of documents that will shed light on the United States’ role during that period.

What's next, off to Brazil to rescue the Olympics?

Rudy Giuliani

It’s outrageous that the President of the United States is not in the Situation Room right now planning on how to destroy ISIS… This was an attack on one of our allies. We belong to NATO. And an attack on a NATO ally, in case the president ever read the treaty, is an attack on the United States of America. He has an obligation to defend that country. It’s just like an attack on us. I don’t know if he’s ever read the treaty. The president’s knowledge of history is quite questionable. And, what’s he doing? He’s sitting with a dictator watching a baseball game while innocent people are being killed in a war!… So far his strategy hasn’t been working, right? …The man has no conception of the NATO Treaty and what it entails…

…I know what they think of him in Europe. They don’t think we have a president. In Poland they don’t think we have a president!…

…Go tell those people who are dead in Brussels just how well Obama’s policies are working.

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