Cubans brace for worst as Trump takes aim at Obama opening

MARIEL, Cuba (AP) — Church bells rang out and Cubans strung American flags from their windows when President Barack Obama announced in December 2014 that the U.S. would stop trying to push Cuba toward collapse.

Obama’s new policy of engagement unleashed a flood of American visitors, pumping cash into Cuba’s nascent private sector, even as the centrally planned economy hit its first recession in nearly a quarter century.

Many Cubans did better. But most lives remained a grinding daily struggle. Jubilation faded to resignation.

President Donald Trump on Friday is expected to give America’s Cuba policy its second 180-degree spin in three years during an appearance in Miami, reviving the Cold War goal of starving Cuba’s communist system of cash while inciting the population to overthrow it. On the table: cutbacks on U.S. travel to Cuba and a ban on doing business with the military-linked conglomerate that controls much of the Cuban economy.

Ordinary Cubans are bracing for the worst. Across the island, people of all ages, professions and political beliefs expect rising tensions, fewer American visitors and a harder time seeing relatives in the U.S. And while some Cuban exiles in South Florida are celebrating, others question the wisdom of undoing a policy that had started showing results by increasing the number of Cubans economically independent of the government.

In 1980, some 125,000 Cubans fled the port of Mariel on boats to the U.S. in the largest single exodus of refugees in modern Cuban history.

Today, the city 30 miles west of Havana is home to the county’s main cargo facility, where freighters unload containers of supplies for the country’s booming tourism industry.