The arrival of Air Force One at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana on Sunday will mark the beginning of a historic three-day trip in which President Obama will attempt to write a new chapter in U.S.-Cuban relations.
But for pure spectacle, even Obama will find it hard to top the last visit to Cuba by an American president.
In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge sailed into Havana aboard the U.S.S. Texas, parking the World War I-era battleship at the exact spot where the U.S.S. Maine was sunk during the Spanish-American war 30 years before.
One reporter accompanying the delegation, Beverly Smith Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote 30 years later that the sound of Cuban artillery saluting the arriving president — and the U.S. battleship returning the gesture — made her believe momentarily that the Maine incident was repeating itself.
Talk about a dramatic entrance.
Though there are some historical parallels — Obama will give a speech to the Cuban people in the same Cuban theater where Coolidge addressed the Pan American Conference — White House officials stressed that Obama's trip will set a decidedly different tone.
"Calvin Coolidge traveled there on a battleship, so the optic will be quite different from the get-go here," said Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. While Coolidge brought an entourage doffed in long tails and top hats to mingle with Havana's high society, Obama plans to meet with entrepreneurs and dissidents and take in a baseball game.
Coolidge's visit to Havana was the only foreign trip of his presidency and — until Sunday — the only trip of a sitting U.S. president to Cuba. U.S. newspapers of the day were enthralled, calling the welcome shown to Coolidge "the greatest demonstration ever seen in Havana."
After disembarking from the battleship, Coolidge entered the city over a rose-strewn road to the National Palace. The famously reticent Coolidge "was given an ovation remarkable even for these people of spontaneously expressed sentiments," the Associated Press reported.
Coolidge, in his own way, returned the affection. "No citizen of any of the Americas could come to the Queen of the Islands of the West Indies without experiencing an emotion of gratitude and reverence," he told the Pan American Conference the next day.
