Yasel Bernitz, center, and others disagree with President Obama’s plans for a new Cuba policy as they gather outside a restaurant in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami.

Dec. 17, 2014 Yasel Bernitz, center, and others disagree with President Obama’s plans for a new Cuba policy as they gather outside a restaurant in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Supporters and opponents of Obama’s decision to normalize relationships with Cuba face off in Miami and Washington.

Supporters and opponents of President Obama’s decision to normalize relationships with Cuba face off in Miami and Washington.

Supporters and opponents of President Obama’s decision to normalize relationships with Cuba face off in Miami and Washington.

They were lining up Thursday midday for the flights to Cuba. This is normal. This is Miami International Airport in the second decade of the 21st century. The departure board showed World Atlantic at 12:15 p.m., Falcon Air at 1 p.m., American Airlines at 2 p.m., all to Havana, all nonstop and all “On Time.”

It’s not exactly a shuttle situation: The passengers have to show up at the airport as much as four hours before their departures. They move glacially toward the check-in counter, pushing carts laden with shrink-wrapped gifts, flat-screen TVs, and other consumer goods that are scarce on the island. You can get to Cuba if you have patience, the right passport or a U.S. government-sanctioned reason for going.

In the long line Thursday at Concourse G there was no one complaining about the diplomatic thaw between the United States and Cuba that was announced a day earlier by President Obama.

“It’s good. It’s good for the two countries. And the people, too,” said Julio Arjona, 47, a telephone repairman traveling to see his family in Cuba.

Politically this city has been, since the early 1960s, a powder keg of anti-Castro sentiment, and there has been much verbal fury unleashed on Obama since his announcement. But so far, masses of protesters haven’t materialized. The biggest change in U.S. policy toward Cuba in half a century has not yet incited organized outrage at the level in which people start pouring onto Calle Ocho.

Students in the streets of Havana celebrate the announcement by Cuban and American leaders to improve relations. (Reuters)

Something has changed here over the years — and one of those changes is visible at the airport. There are thousands of people in Miami now who came to the United States only in recent years, and who maintain close ties with Cuba. They are often younger and less ideological than the exile generation. They are more likely to want to see the embargo lifted, to help boost the standard of living among the people they visit regularly.

“It’s really bad over there. You know how here, we have supermarkets, we have aisles and aisles of food. Over there, they have one little rack of food. Technology is virtually nonexistent,” said Rodrigo Martinez, 28, who teaches second grade in Miami and who was in line for the Sun Country flight to Holguin, on his way to visit his father.

Five years ago, Obama loosened restrictions on travel to Cuba for people with Cuban passports. Previously, they could go only once every three years. Now they could go every day if they wished.

People can also go on humanitarian missions, and for journalism, and to serve religious causes. All told there are 12 categories of people allowed to fly to the island, said David Nesslein, the chief executive of Havana Air.

He said the diplomatic thaw will probably push that number higher, though he is unclear on what immediate changes there might be on travel restrictions.

“As soon as the president spoke, my e-mail just got bombed. Everybody asking me, ‘When can I go?’ I just don’t have a specific answer,” Nesslein said.

Cuban American political leaders have denounced Obama’s moves, calling him a betrayer and the appeaser in chief. The Senate is shifting to Republican control and is expected to vigorously oppose the lifting of the 54-year-old embargo. Here in Miami, the anti-Castro community remains politically strong.

A difficult history between U.S. and Cuba More than 50 years after the U.S.-imposed embargo, President Obama has announced an effort to normalize ties with Cuba.

(Kennedy Elliott, Julie Tate and Swati Sharma/Staff reports)

But ideas about U.S. policy toward Cuba, and the best strategy for bringing democracy to the island, are more diverse and nuanced than they were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.

A Florida International University poll of Cuban Americans conducted earlier this year showed that a majority favored ending the embargo against the island country. More than 2 in 3 favored restoring diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba.

“Gradually there’s been a change in attitude across the board,” said Francisco Mora, 50, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at FIU. Mora, whose parents fled Cuba in 1961, served in the Obama administration in the Department of Defense.

“My own family members used to be very hard line and have increasingly moderated themselves over the last few years,” Mora said.

“We want to represent a change of consciousness in the Cuban community. We want to inject some new voices into that stagnant atmosphere,” said Jorge Parellada, 24, a student at FIU who, with three fellow students, showed up Thursday at the Versailles restaurant (“The World’s Most Famous Cuban Restaurant”) to join in what has been a running conversation, protest and media scramble in front of the takeout window that faces Calle Ocho.

Frank de Varona, 71, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion, stood a few feet away, denouncing the Obama move as a travesty. His boat was sunk and he was imprisoned by the Castro regime before being released more than a year later, going into exile in Miami. His views haven’t changed, but Miami has, he said, because of the influx of people who are not here as political exiles but merely to have a better standard of living.

“You have a lot of people who have come from Cuba recently. They lived in communism for 20, 30, 40 years. Some of them even like Castro. They come here for economic reasons,” de Varona said.

Since Obama’s midday Wednesday announcement, Versailles has been the go-to place for anyone wishing to engage the media. But the crowds have always been small, rarely spilling onto the sidewalk, much less into the street. This has been in striking contrast with the throngs that clogged the streets during the Elian Gonzalez controversy 15 years ago, when Cuban Americans were infuriated that the Justice Department, under then-President Bill Clinton, had intervened in a custody case and was forcibly repatriating the boy to Cuba.

Most of the people giving interviews were decidedly hostile to the diplomatic thaw. Yurihe Goicoechea, 32, who came to the United States from Cuba at 18, said, “We do not negotiate with terrorists. Never. At all. The Cuban government will have more money to oppress the Cuban people. I support the embargo.”

Away from the TV lights, Enrique Acosta, 52, who came in 1991, and Armando Sotolongo, 65, here since age 9, talked about Fidel Castro, the man who never seems to die.

Sotolongo remembers that his family originally supported Castro, but then realized he was a communist.

“When they came down from the mountains, my father said, ‘It doesn’t look good. We’ve got to get out,’ ” Sotolongo said.

That was more than five decades ago, and Fidel is still there, an old and frail man who ceded his power to younger brother Raul. Why doesn’t Fidel die?

“We believe he has some kind of relationship with the demon. The devil,” Sotolongo said.

“He don’t die,” Acosta said.

“He don’t die,” Sotolongo echoed.

“Or maybe he died a long time ago and we don’t know,” Acosta said.

Alice Crites contributed to this report.