Cubama: President Obama was greeted in old Havana yesterday with chants of “USA ! USA!” The president was not met at José Martí airport by Cuban president Raul Castro, a demonstration of deliberately restrained enthusiasm.

Obama is scheduled to meet with Castro, as well as Cuban dissidents. He has to tread a fine line, like Castro, and avoid being too friendly toward Cuba’s government. But tomorrow, in a country where baseball is the national passion, Obama and Castro are scheduled to attend a game between the Cuban national team and the Tampa Bay Rays.

Part of the agenda is a meeting between Cuban and American business leaders. Both Raul Castro and Obama have loosened commerce. Obama may not be able to fully restore normal relations while he’s in office, but it appears to be his aim to make it impossible for the next president to reverse course.

Spring Snow: it’s the second day of spring, but snow is expected from Long Island to Rhode Island, Cape Cod and Boston. Four to eight inches of snow is expected in some areas.

World: North Korea has fired five more short range missiles into the sea in defiance of new economic sanctions slapped on the country over previous missile firings — Elephants trampled through a village in eastern India, killing five people. Such incidents are becoming more common as people encroach on the elephants’ living space — Yet another suspect has been identified in the Paris terror attacks. Investigators say DNA evidence has them hunting for a man named 24-year-old Najim Laachraoui.

Get ‘Em Out: While bloviating presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump say they would deport all 11.3 million illegal immigrants in the US, a new report says that doing the job in two years would cost at least $400 billion, reduce the labor force by 10.3 million people, and reduce the gross domestic product by $1 trillion.

The report by the American Action Network says that to round up all illegal immigrants, giving them due process, and deporting them, would require the US to “monumentally expand” each stage of the process. The system would have to operate at 11 times its current capacity, and that’s including the assumption that 20 percent of illegal immigrants would leave voluntarily.

Some requirements of a two-year effort, according to AAN:

– Increase number of agents to catch immigrants from 4,844 positions to 90,582.

– Increase detention facility beds from 34,000 to 348,831

– Operate 17,296 chartered flights and 30,701 bus trips each year.

Casting Call: One of the latest controversies about race in America doesn’t involve a police shooting, but the casting of a movie. All kinds of critics from Internet wags to National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates have weighed in on the upcoming movie Nina featuring the light-skinned Afro-Latina actress Zoe Saldana as the singer Nina Simone.

Makeup artists darkened Saldana’s skin and broadened her nose for the part. Coates writes in The Atlantic that “neither the term blackface nor brownface is entirely appropriate here. We are not so much talking about deliberate mockery as something much more insidious.”

Much of Simone’s music came from the pain of being black in America, and from having classically African facial features considered unattractive. Only weeks after Oscar awards in which no black actors were nominated, Coates writes, “While it is hard for all women in Hollywood, it is particularly hard for black women, and even harder for black women who share the dark skin, broad nose and full lips of Nina Simone.”

And he says, “There is something deeply shameful—and hurtful—in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic.”

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