HAVANA (Reuters) – President Barack Obama‘s easing of the US trade embargo against Cuba has awakened long-frustrated hopes for change in US-Cuba relations but also uncertainty about whether the two governments are too locked into old positions to end 50 years of enmity.

Obama said he wants to “recast” relations with the communist government and Cuban President Raul Castro responded that he was willing to discuss “everything” with the United States, but translating words into action will be difficult, analysts said.

Their skepticism is shared by Cubans, who say they long for an end to the bitter stalemate, yet do not want to get their hopes too high.

“I hope Obama can radically change things but I am not so optimistic,” said economist Maritza Ramos, 44.

“I think the wishes we all have to see improvement in relations are greater than the real possibilities. Nobody knows, after so many years of conflict,” she said while waiting for a bus in the Cuban capital Havana.

The Cubans’ reserve rests in part on the fact they have been down this road before, when relations that went sour after Fidel Castro took power in a 1959 revolution thawed during the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Both periods ended badly when Fidel Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans to flee to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and in 1996 when Cuban fighter jets shot down two planes off the Cuban coast piloted by anti-Castro exiles.

The two incidents led to suspicions about the seriousness of Cuba’s oft-stated demands for the lifting of the US embargo, which it blames for many of the island’s problems,

Cuban leaders deny allegations that the embargo gives them political cover, pointing out that the trade ban is US policy, not Cuban.
Their problem is that the United States has always insisted that the embargo will be lifted only when Cuba makes political and economic changes that are anathema to Cuban leadership.

Obama did the same thing last week when he granted Cuban Americans the right to freely travel to Cuba and send money to relatives there, and eased restrictions on US telecommunications companies, all supposedly in the name of furthering change in Cuba.

Speaking to reporters at the weekend Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, he pegged further US steps to Cuban advances on human rights and political prisoners.