HAVANA: With his visit, US President Barack Obama is to bury the hatchet in a more than half-century-long Cold War conflict that turned the communist island and its giant neighbor into bitter enemies.

Reversing generations of US attempts to cut Cuba from the outside world, Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters are arriving in Havana for a three-day trip.

It won’t just be the first visit by a sitting US president since Fidel Castro’s guerrillas overthrew the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, but the first since President Calvin Coolidge came 88 years ago.

Obama, seeking to leave a historic foreign policy mark in his final year in office, is due to see old town Havana, hold talks with Cuban President Raul Castro on Monday, and attend a baseball game before leaving Tuesday.

For Cubans dreaming of escaping isolation and reinvigorating their threadbare economy, the visit has created huge excitement.

Havana’s old town is crawling with painters sprucing up the picturesque neighborhood. The Stars and Stripes — so long the enemy flag — fluttered from numerous buildings.

Early Sunday cleaners swept the narrow, cobbled streets where Obama was due to stroll later and police, both uniformed and plainclothes, were out in large numbers.

“A president of the United States in Cuba arriving in Havana on his Air Force One,” wrote popular Cuban writer Leonardo Padura on the Cafefuerte blog. “Never in my dreams or nightmares could we have imagined that we’d see such a thing.”

On the eve of his visit, Obama cracked jokes with one of the communist country’s most loved comedians, Panfilo, in a three and a half minute video sketch released online and later broadcast on Cuban television — fortunately, since most Cubans do not have Internet.