is a columnist for Newsday

HAVANA - The Cuban at the bar of the old Hotel Nacional didn't know golf, but like all Havana he was rooting for Tiger Woods.

Woods' winning putt at the U.S. Open moved the young comrade to high-five his newfound American friends sipping "Hemingways" at the landmark Mafia club.

Back when the PGA was barring nonwhites from the tour, the stately Nacional wouldn't book a room to the likes of Josephine Baker and Nat King Cole.

A bust of the black Cole adorns the lobby, and the museum walls are alive with portraits of white celebrity guests such as Frank Sinatra, mobster Meyer Lansky, and even Barbara Walters, whose father owned the Latin Quarter nightclubs.

Cubans here boast that their '59 revolution swept away the Mafia and reversed the pernicious race policies of the era of American dominance.

In toppling the regime of President Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro noisily ushered in the Marxist new Cuba under the vengeful, Cold War eye of the United States. Gone is the heavy American influence, save for the quaint pre-1960s Chevrolets, Studebakers, Buicks and Cadillacs.

Just as the bilingual CNN stations kept Cubans abreast of the U.S. Open, the media have fueled a frenzied tracking of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.

"To us it's a matter of life and death," said Arnaldo Coro Antich, commentator for Radio Havana. "We follow the elections every four years; the midterms also. The people here have formed their opinions about the candidates. I think it is very, very easy to have an opinion about John McCain," the journalist said, suggesting a dry hole of support. "I do think [Barack] Obama is a challenge. He's sort of a question mark."

Opinions varied among the dozen local journalists at the Havana Press Association. Running back decades, Juan Jacomino, of ESTI Prensa, said the high hopes Cubans held out for John F. Kennedy were dashed dramatically when the president staged the Bay of Pigs invasion.

President Bill Clinton also raised expectations, he said, but, yielding to pressure from anti-Castro Cubans in Miami did nothing to relieve sanctions. The newspaperman expressed no hope that U.S.-Cuban relations would be eased by Obama, or any other U.S. president.

The youth on the streets of this shabby-yet-splendid capital city voice a more gleeful optimism.

"If Obama is elected," said Humberto Balon, 29, "things will change for Cuba. Trade [with the U.S.] will open up; relations will improve." Other than intuition about Obama's "historic" run, however, the young, black Cuban offered no reason for his high expectation, shared by his friends.

Government movers and the intelligentsia take a more measured view. Josephina Vidal of the Cuban Foreign Ministry bristles at current U.S. policy that sets as condition for the normalization of relations, that Cuba fundamentally change its political and economic systems. "That's a nonstarter."

Obama, of course, has wiggled on the hook baited by his alleged willingness to talk with U.S.-declared pariah states.

Vidal speaks kindly of Obama's "historic run," but puts none of her "normalization" eggs in his basket. "We have to watch and see." Meanwhile, she cites a double standard in the strong U.S. relations with nondemocratic states with poor human rights records such as Saudi Arabia, "where women have no rights."

Retired President Castro recently offered a guarded assessment of Obama so as not to damage his chances. Accordingly, government officials here shy away from voicing overt optimism about the African American candidate other than to say his campaign is "historic." Black Cubans, however, openly embrace the first African American nominee, but are concerned that racism will lead white Americans to reject Obama - or worse.

Obama's candidacy suggests that the "U.S. paradigm of racism has started to weaken," said Digna Castaneda, the first black professor appointed, in 1965, to the University of Havana. "We have concerns about the possibility of assassination," said the historian, "because we have seen examples of this in America. The [campaign] will be very tough; some people will spare no effort in seeking to assassinate Obama. That is a problem to be solved by the American people."