Havana — On Monday, the first full day of President Obama’s historic visit to Cuba, the professor of my class on Cuban-United States relations, a woman in her 40s, wheeled a TV into our classroom in the José Martí building at the University of Havana, the set looking like it dated from the 1970s.
“This is too big a deal for us to miss for class,” she said in Spanish, turning on the old machine. Within seconds a fuzzy screen lit up showing the image of Mr. Obama. He was in La Plaza de la Revolución, and the American national anthem was playing.
We had been waiting for this day for weeks.
In February, when the president made the surprise announcement that he planned to make an official visit to Cuba, the first sitting president to do so since Calvin Coolidge, Havana was in shock. No one could believe that the visit was happening, and everyone wanted to talk about what it signified.
And I, as an American college student spending a semester abroad in Cuba, at the University of Havana, was a natural person to ask.
The normally silent and stern taxi drivers in their 1950s cars suddenly were eager to discuss everything concerning Mr. Obama and United States-Cuban relations “What do you think of the embargo?” “How should we deal with Guantánamo?” “Socialism verses capitalism?” “What do you think?”
This city itself was going through a rapid transformation that was impossible to miss.
Within days of the announcement, scaffolding appeared across the city, climbing up almost every major building to assist workers repainting. Sidewalks, previously crumbling, were suddenly being efficiently resurfaced. In short, Havana was being Obama-fied.
The landscape was not the only thing changing. Although debates over capitalism versus socialism occur on a daily basis between ourselves and the Cuban students, our casual discussions became more intense with Mr. Obama’s visit approaching.
“How do you pay for college if it is not free?” a Cuban student would inquire, shocked to learn of the student debt many of us were incurring for a higher education.
“What about health care?” another would ask, explaining that Cubans pay only for medications.
On the day of his actual visit, hearing my national anthem blasting across one of the most significant revolutionary places in Cuba solicited a strange feeling of overwhelming pride in my country, and complete disbelief that this was actually happening in the one I was visiting. As my professor sat staring at the television screen in her own astonishment, I looked around at my handful of American peers, and we knew what we had to do.
We decided to Obama chase.
We ran to the main street, caught a taxi speeding by us and piled in. The driver immediately knew what we wanted.
As was expected, after trying three different routes, we got nowhere close to the president, though we did get a brief glimpse of the tail end of his motorcade in Old Havana, the shiny black modern cars a sharp contrast to the vintage vehicles that typically travel the city roads.
Finally defeated, we retreated to the house we are staying in to watch his news conference with President Raúl Castro on our own fuzzy TV. We were riveted, as were the Cubans working in the house.
Although Mr. Obama’s speech was dubbed into very fast Spanish and ended with an incredibly awkward handshake between him and Mr. Castro, we felt pretty content with what we had seen. But many of our Cuban friends wanted more.
Bryan Campbell Romero, a 20-year-old studying philosophy, attended Mr. Obama’s speech Tuesday to the Cuban people. Before, he said, he was “scared Obama’s visit, like that of Jimmy Carter or Pope Francis, was going to be too friendly and legitimize the Cuban government.” In the end, he said he was happy to see Mr. Obama use words like “democracy” and “human rights.”
In Cuba, he told me: “people are scared of those words. We are taught from a young age that there is one way to run a country. Obama made it clear that there is another option.”
It wasn’t all positive feedback. Some American and Cuban students thought it was hypocritical of Mr. Obama to speak of democracy and human rights when the United States has so many of its own issues.
Yet, the biggest takeaway for Cubans was relief that these conversations were finally happening. Cuba was being brought back onto the world stage, and they felt more than ready to be there.
Waking up Wednesday, knowing Mr. Obama had left, I still felt happy. Not only was I pumped that my morning commute would no longer take triple the time because of cleanup construction and presidential motorcades, but I also believed that the impact of this visit was just beginning.
