Obama starts Cuba visit

US President Barack Obama flew to Cuba yesterday to bury the hatchet in a more than half-century-long Cold War conflict, but the arrest of dozens of dissidents just as his plane took off underlined the delicacy of the mission.

Abandoning generations of US attempts to cut Cuba from the outside world, the US president, First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters left Andrews Air Force Base for the short flight to Havana where they were spending three days.

It was not only the first visit by a sitting US president since Fidel Castro's guerrillas overthrew the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, but the first since President Calvin Coolidge came 88 years ago.

Seeking to leave a historic foreign policy mark in his final year in office, Obama was due to see old town Havana late yesterday, hold talks with Cuban President Raul Castro today and attend a baseball game before leaving tomorrow. He is not scheduled to meet retired president Fidel Castro, 89.

For Cubans dreaming of escaping isolation and reinvigorating their threadbare economy, the visit has created huge excitement.

"A president of the United States in Cuba arriving in Havana on his Air Force One," wrote popular Cuban writer Leonardo Padura on the Cafefuerte blog.

"Never in my dreams or nightmares could we have imagined that we'd see such a thing."

Dissidents called for "radical change" on the eve of the visit, but the Castro government warned that lectures on democracy would be "absolutely off the table."

Obama will meet members of Cuba's beleaguered opposition and on Tuesday will give a speech at the National Theater carried live on Cuban television.

The United States spent decades trying to topple Cuba's communist government. Washington attempted economic strangulation, the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and CIA assassination plots against Fidel Castro -- including the legendary, but unproven story of sending him an exploding cigar.

Although a decades-long US economic embargo remains in place -- and can only be removed by the Republican-controlled Congress -- large cracks in the sanctions regime are appearing. Earlier, US group Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide it had signed three hotel deals in Cuba, a first for any hospitality company since the revolution of 1959.