Obama about to land in Cuba - Live Updates from the NYT blog

[flamingdem]

Last edited Sun Mar 20, 2016, 03:36 PM - Edit history (2)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/international/obama-in-cuba?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

** They'll land around 4:45 est

An air of jittery anticipation hangs over all of us — reporters, White House aides, Secret Service agents guarding the entourage — as we contemplate the history we are about to see made, and brace for the crush of news and logistical challenges we know are in store.

The first unexpected turn: The White House alerted reporters early Sunday that the president would depart about an hour ahead of schedule. Then there was the weather wrinkle: The rain prompted what the White House refers to as a “weather call,” forcing Mr. Obama to make his way to Andrews in a motorcade rather than on Marine One.

The terminal at Andrews, usually dominated by military personnel in camouflage uniforms, was instead packed to the gills with officials and several dozen members of Congress who are traveling with the president. The entourage resembles nothing so much as an overgrown high school class on a field trip the participants cannot quite believe they are getting the chance to take.

Some of them, including Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, and Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, are hitching a ride on Air Force One with the president, while most will join business leaders in another large government plane, also emblazoned “United States of America,” sitting beside Air Force One.

Just before 1:30 p.m., we gathered on the tarmac to watch the motorcade arrive. The president and Michelle Obama, the first lady, emerged from the limousine affectionately known as “The Beast,” and their daughters, Sasha and Malia, along with their grandmother Marian Robinson, joined them. The family bounded up the steps, and with a wave from Mr. Obama and the first lady, they were off for Havana.



Next:
Chatting With Cubans as They Wait

[riversedge]

1. On 1928 Trip to Cuba, Coolidge Confronted Criticism of American Arrogance

Thanks for links. lots of good informative articles at the link.....



http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/international/obama-in-cuba/coolidge-visit-to-cuba




President Calvin Coolidge, second from left, and his wife, Grace, second from right, with the President of Cuba General Gerardo Machado y Morales, right, and his wife, Elvira Machado, left, on the estate of President Machado in Havana on Jan. 19, 1928. Credit Associated Press
On 1928 Trip to Cuba, Coolidge Confronted Criticism of American Arrogance
2016-03-20T08:27:38-04:00 March 20, 2016 8:27 AM ET

Will cannons boom from Havana Harbor in salute of President Obama, and will thousands of colorfully dressed Cubans throng the streets of the capital on Sunday to shower him with roses?

That’s how they welcomed the last American president to visit the island while in office.

President Calvin Coolidge arrived in Cuba on Jan. 15, 1928, to address the sixth Pan-American Conference.

“A multitude of people cheered with the enthusiasm born of an intensive Latin nature,” The New York Times’s man in Havana, Richard V. Oulhan, wrote (somewhat patronizingly) at the time.

Coolidge Is Warmly Welcomed to Cuba; Goes to Palace Amid Shower of Roses

Coolidge responded with appreciative bows and waves. “His face was full of smiles,” Mr. Oulhan added.

It was Coolidge’s first foreign trip as president, and he traveled to Cuba aboard the American battleship Texas, part of “an impressive procession of America’s sea power.” But his public statements focused on the “peace and goodwill among the governments and peoples of the Western Hemisphere.” ...............................

[flamingdem]

2. The history is fascinating, here is Coolidge with Machado

who was President and check this out article, I was googling for an image of the roses and found this. I guess the roses are on the ground in that picture your posted.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/tdosxg/picture62559967/ALTERNATES/FREE_640/Coolidge%20and%20Machado%20in%20Cuba

His visit to Cuba — the last one by an American president — was nonetheless a festival of drunken debauchery, inebriated idiocy, salacious smuggling and even unnatural acts with Key lime pies. The full story didn’t emerge for 30 years, when a reporter finally spilled the beans on a tale with “elements of pageantry, drama, comedy and farce; of ponderous dignity and unseemly revelry; of silk-hatted diplomacy with a dash of dipsomania.”

Lest President Obama get the wrong idea of what’s expected of U.S. leaders when visiting Cuba, we should probably note at this point that President Coolidge himself did not partake (well, there was an incident with hookers that we’ll get back to, but mostly) of the depravity.

Though some Cubans thought they saw the president himself slinking through Havana’s back-alley dives, incongruously wearing a top hat, they were mistaken, victims of a practical-joke impression of Coolidge by an American reporter who resembled the president. And you thought the mainstream media was rough on presidents these days.

But we’re getting ahead of the story. Until Obama announced a couple of weeks ago that he was going to Cuba, practically nobody remembered Coolidge’s 1928 trip. Yet at the time, it was a big, big deal, and even had parallels to today. Coolidge, too, was a lame-duck president looking to cap his stay in the White House with a signature foreign-policy achievement.

In Coolidge’s case, he was trying to calm down growing Cuban unhappiness over high U.S. sugar tariffs that were crippling the island’s economy and to defuse widespread Latin American criticism of American military interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Hoping to assuage Latin leaders, Coolidge (who aside from a week’s honeymoon in Canada had never set foot outside the United States) decided to attend a meeting of the Pan American Union — an ancestor of the Organization of American States — in Havana in mid-January 1928.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article62559982.html#storylink=cpy