Obama in Cuba: 'I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas'

HAVANA — President Barack Obama stood here Tuesday morning looking straight across the Gran Teatro at Raúl Castro, calling for a new direction for the Cuban people and government as he declared, “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.”

Weaving in many Spanish phrases and references to famed Cuban nationalist José Marti — whose monument Obama visited on Monday — Obama built the speech around his own life: The Cuban revolution occurred the year his father came to the United States from Kenya, he was born the year of the Bay of Pigs, and his lifetime spanned years of broken relations between the two countries.


But as he invoked Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and the entrepreneurial Cuban-American community that he credited with building Miami, Obama said that he also represented the change that he’s brought, as well as the potential of democracy, standing on the stage as an African-American son of a single parent who’s president of the United States.

And he ended the speech with the slogan he made famous in his 2008 campaign: “Si se puede.”

There are so many connections, Obama said, noting that the exhibition baseball game that he’ll attend later Tuesday afternoon is at the same field where Jackie Robinson played before making his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson’s widow and family joined Obama on Air Force One for the flight into Havana on Sunday.

“Todos somos Americanos,” Obama said, adding later: “For all of the politics, people are people and Cubans are Cubans."

Castro arrived in the theater shortly before Obama took the stage, smiling at the applause that broke out and encouraging people to take their seats. Several times, he pointed to the stage, urging people to look there, and not at him.

Obama, though, kept much of the focus on Castro.

“Even if we lifted the embargo, Cubans would not realize their potential without continued change here in Cuba,” Obama said. "I believe in the Cuban people."

Though Obama was greeted with heavy applause when he first entered the theater, the lines about the Castro regime were met with stony silence from the Cubans in the audience. The applause came only from the American guests in the balconies and the congressional delegation, a bipartisan group of 42 that is the largest of Obama’s presidency.

As for Castro, he remained mostly expressionless as he listened to the speech through headphones, clapping only when Obama called on Congress to end the embargo, and when he mentioned Mandela. When Obama began expounding on Cubans' need for more rights, Castro turned to speak with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla seated beside him.

Obama said he knew that many hardliners back in America wanted him to give a speech about tearing down the barriers of the present, alluding to the famous Ronald Reagan speech about the Berlin Wall. But he argued that resetting relations with an authoritarian regime that once harbored nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the U.S. was the right thing to do: “What the United States was doing was not working. We have to have the courage to acknowledge that truth. A policy of isolation designed for the Cold War made little sense in the 21st century.”

And rather than dwelling on the past, Obama instead told the stories of several Cubans, saying he’s more interested in the future.

“I’m appealing to the young people of Cuba who will lift something up, build something new,” Obama said.

The American system of politics and economics isn’t perfect, Obama said, but it’s better than what’s here in Cuba.

“I’m not saying there aren’t problems. But democracy is how we solve them,” he said, warning, “There are some tough fights. It’s often frustrating. You can see that in the election going on back home."

For all his reservations about the 2016 race, though, Obama urged the Cubans to think more broadly about the promise of what that represented: two Cuban-American candidates running on the Republican against a woman and a Democratic socialist, all to see which one will succeed a black man. He didn’t mention or refer to Donald Trump.

The Cuban people, Obama said, should believe in what he does: “un futuro de esperanza” — a future of hope.

The crowd applauded for Obama as he finished. But then after he left the stage, Castro stood again and began waving to the crowd, holding his hands tight together.

"Raúl!" many of them cheered.

Nolan McCaskill contributed.