OBAMA BURYING THE COLD WAR

President Obama made his intentions clear Tuesday in a speech aimed at the Cuban people, the Castro government and American critics of his foreign policy.

“I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he said in a speech at the Havana’s Grand Theater, the same building where President Calvin Coolidge spoke 88 years ago.

Mr. Obama (much like Coolidge in 1928) was optimistic about relations between Cuba and the United States, and said he wanted to put decades of acrimony and retribution behind.

“We are all Americans,“ he declared in Spanish to much applause.

President Obama is not the first American president to speak at the Gran Teatro de La Habana Alicia Alonso, the flamboyant baroque-revival theater that overlooks a park near near the old quarter of the Cuban capital.

President Calvin Coolidge gave a speech there in 1928 in which he declared Cuba “her own sovereign” and cited the country as an example of democratic stability for the region even as the Cuban president, Gerardo Machado, was becoming more autocratic.

The theater was designed by a Belgian architect and built by the American construction firm, Purdy & Hendersen, that also built the nearby Capitol. That building looks very much like the one in Washington, only a few feet taller.

There are other traces of the old ties between Cuba and the United States: The theater, which is the seat of Cuba’s National Ballet, is named for Alicia Alonso, the 94-year-old matriarch of Cuban dance who was also one of the founders, in 1940, of American Ballet Theater.

Alicia Alonso Takes Cuban Dance to the People (May 29, 1964)

These days, Cuba’s best ballerinas dance with top American companies.

Like many of Havana’s grandest buildings in Havana, the Gran Teatro once had another name and another owner. It had been known as the Galician Center, built with money from Cuba’s large Galician community from Spain. It was confiscated by Fidel Castro’s government after the 1959 revolution.

In 1898, la Compañia de Recuperaciónes Patrimoniales, a Spanish organization, said that it represents $1 billion worth of claims by previous owners of property in Cuba seized by the government. Claims in the United States are about double that amount.

Jason Poblete, a lawyer based in Alexandria, Va., who represents owners of confiscated Cuban properties, said that President Obama shouldn’t speak at the theater, advising the president to “pick a place that’s neutral - don’t do it someplace that was stolen from people who were never made whole for it.”

During President Obama’s visit to Cuba, Zaqueo Báez will be on lockdown.

You might have seen video of Mr. Báez on YouTube.

He is the Cuban opposition activist who rushed past the security cordon during Pope Francis’s visit to Havana in September, in an effort to tell the pope a thing or two about human rights in Cuba.

Mr. Báez made it to the popemobile, and Francis gently laid his hand on Mr. Báez’s head. The dissident then threw leaflets in the air, raised his arms in victory and was carried away by security forces.

“I told him, ‘Fidel Castro is a liar,’ ” Mr. Báez, 40, told me recently in an interview. “He said, ‘Yes, my little son, I already know it.’ ”

It was a daring move in a country where the government has a history of cracking down on political activism.

Mr. Báez served 55 days in jail and, in an effort to prevent an encore performance during Mr. Obama’s trip, he has spent the past few days at the Havana headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Cuba.

“There are state security agents, national police, patrol cars and uniformed officers parked outside, they do not let me leave,” he said. “If I try to go to the corner for a coffee, I will be arrested.”

Such tactics — and the dozens of arrests on Sunday at the weekly march of Ladies in White, a prominent dissident group, just hours before Mr. Obama landed — are expected to be raised on Tuesday during a meeting between Mr. Obama and Cuban dissidents at the American Embassy in Havana.

The invitees include the leader of Mr. Baez’s group, José Daniel Ferrer; a well-known blogger, Yoani Sánchez; and a Roman Catholic editor, Dagoberto Valdes Hernández.

“I have always been ready for dialogue with anyone, including the Cuban government,” Mr. Valdes said. “Despite that, they have considered me as a counterrevolutionary and dissident. I am a pro-democracy worker.”

The Cuban government considers the dissidents to be traitors and agents for the American government.

In November, 1,447 activists were arrested, the most in decades, according to the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, an independent organization.

Guillermo Fariñas, a Santa Clara dissident known for going on frequent hunger strikes, said he was arrested about 18 times last year.

“Yes, things have changed since relations were restored,” Mr. Fariñas told me. “Beatings have increased, threats have increased. Impunity has increased. Aggressiveness has increased.“

Cuba and the United States have long shared a passion for baseball. The game, invented in United States, was first played on the island in the mid-1860s.

That President Obama will be attending an exhibition game Tuesday in Havana between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team underscores that baseball is one issue the two countries can talk about safely.

Relatively safely.

Cuba has chafed at the scores of players, more than 300 by most counts, who have defected to play in the major leagues since the star pitcher René Arocha left the Cuban national team in 1991.

And American baseball officials have found forging ties with Cuba difficult and slow.

Still, Major League Baseball has applied to the United States Treasury Department for a license that would allow it to directly sign Cuban players.

And new regulations adopted by the Obama administration on the eve of the president’s visit could help smooth the way.