Obama and Jagger fly in, but fears grow over who profits as Cuba starts to party

Obama and Jagger fly in, but fears grow over who profits as Cuba starts to party

The arrival of the US president (and the Stones) this month marks a further step to reopening the island for business. But many fear this new openness could also be a draw for drug cartels

Ed Vulliamy
Saturday 12 March 2016 19.04 EST

Stockade Cuba – isolated for generations by a US embargo and fidelity to communism – finds itself suddenly at the centre of the Americas, thanks in part to circumstance but mainly to the craft, guile and luck of its president, Raúl Castro, brother of the revolution’s founding father, Fidel.

US secretary of state John Kerry was in Havana last week for the first time since reopening his government’s embassy here last year, now preparing for the imminent and historic visit of Barack Obama for two days on 21 March, the first by a US president since Calvin Coolidge inaugurated the pan-American congress here in 1928. President Dwight Eisenhower severed diplomatic and trade relations in 1961.

And to cap the string of illustrious visitors who have come through Havana recently – since a tour of the island by Pope Francis last year – the Rolling Stones arrive on Good Friday, two days after Obama’s departure, for a free open-air concert at the Sports City stadium. This event more than anything pronounces once-fortress Cuba wide open to the world.

The concert organiser, Osmani López Castro of the Cuban Music Institute, says he expects 400,000 people to hear the Stones and reports that half the island’s security forces will be on duty. “We’re creating conditions so that everyone who wants can enjoy the historic spectacle in a good environment,” he said. On a different diplomatic level, Raúl Castro has for four years hosted – and acted as guarantor for – epic peace talks in Havana in the hope of bringing an end to the war between the Colombian government and the world’s longest-running insurgency by the Marxist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Farc, which has raged since 1964 and dates back to violence that erupted in 1948, causing the largest internal displacement of people in the world. Since 2012, peace negotiators have been holed up in a hotel in Havana as Castro’s guests to try to end the war.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/13/cuba-hopes-for-a-new-dawn