How long will it take for O’Hare to Havana Marti becomes a daily flight?

President Barack Obama announced his intentions to restore relations between the United States and Cuba and diplomats from the two countries have already had their first sit-downs in hopes of the eventual reopening of an embassy in Havana

And it was on Thursday that a bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate – with co-sponsorship of Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. – that would ease the restrictions that prevent U.S. citizens from being able to travel to the Caribbean island nation for personal reasons.

YET I’M NOT deluded enough to believe that the past half century of hostilities between the two nations is at an end, nor that I’ll be able to spend a wad of cash on Cuban-made cigars as a gift (I personally find cigar smoke to be repulsive) for anyone anytime soon.

Even though I have been long of the belief that a restoration of relations between the United States and Cuba makes only too much sense for both nations, and that the only reasons for maintaining the tensions is the ideological hang-ups whose time has long passed.

There are many Midwestern agriculture interests and other companies that would love to do business with Cuban interests – their financial bottom line would stand to benefit from easing the restrictions placed by our government out of the belief that they would cause the economic downfall of the regime maintained by the Castro brothers.

They haven’t; not really!

CUBA IS AN economically strapped nation; but the hardships have done nothing but feed into the propaganda that places blame on the United States for the poverty endured by many Cuban natives.

Or at least those Cubans who haven’t managed to slip out of the country and into the United States, where they now put up with myriad restrictions on what they can send “back home” to their relatives remaining on the island.

Currently, the only travel back and forth between the two nations is for people with special purposes, and there are limits on the amount of money they can spend on such trips.

So it is with all that in mind that I find the Freedom to Travel to Cuba act to be refreshing. It was introduced in the Senate, with Durbin being one of eight sponsors – four each from the Democratic and Republican caucuses.

A SIMILAR BILL is expected to be introduced next week in the House of Representatives, according to the Washington Post, which also reports that the bill would not do away with the trade embargo that has been in place for 50-plus years.

And with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, saying the Republican House majority has no intention of lifting that embargo anytime soon, it means the full restoration of relations truly is decades away.

It definitely will not be something that occurs during the Obama Administration. Heck, I’m coming up on 50 years of age, and I wonder if I will still be alive to see the days when I can theoretically catch a flight out of O’Hare and go straight to Jose Marti International Airport for a Caribbean vacation.

Or perhaps the day when the Cuban government, with an embassy in Washington, D.C., may also decide it needs a presence in the form of a Chicago consulate. Heck, if the mainland China government can have a consulate (at 1 E. Erie St. in the upscale River North neighborhood), why can’t Cuba?

I’M NOT SAYING I’m intending to be on the first regular flight out. But it always just seemed odd that a government that is able to get along with the bulk of the rest of the world remains a pariah to the United States.

Particularly when about the only thing most of us know about Cubans for real is all the quality ballplayers who have slipped into this country to play professionally here – including Chicago White Sox slugger Jose Abreu, who could wind up being the ultimate nightmare of Chicago Cubs fans if his hitting leads the White Sox to another championship before the Cubs can achieve anything!

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'Chicagoland' ratings that bad? Missing airplane overtakes documentary

I haven't commented on the 'Chicagoland' documentary being broadcast in eight parts by CNN because I've hardly seen it.

Will I forevermore be 'Part Two'-less?

I watched the initial part the day it was broadcast, but missed the second part when it aired Thursday night of last week because I had to work. Earning a living struck me as being more important at that particular moment.

BUT HEY, THIS is the 21st Century. These cable channels air programs over and over and over. Particularly something like this documentary, which CNN is making a big deal of.

It should have been no problem for me to catch a repeat airing some time during the weekend. In fact, it was scheduled to be a rerun both Saturday and Sunday nights, along with early Sunday and Monday mornings.

Believe it or not, I tuned in each and every time -- only to find out that it got pre-empted every single time. The latest trivial details of that airplane that went missing somewhere over the Indian Ocean were put on live every time.

Now before some of you get offended that I characterized it as "trivial details," keep in mind that I say so because we still don't really know what happened there in that incident that caused an airplane, its crew and passengers to suddenly vanish.

FROM WHAT I gather, officials now suspect that the pilots themselves were "in on it," so to speak. But what "it" is, we don't know.

So I really don't feel any more educated about that incident. And I still haven't seen Part Two of the documentary series -- which from the little blurb I read is supposed to continue the tales we in Chicago are all too familiar with.

You know -- 2013 was a particularly violent year, particularly in select South and West side neighborhoods, while there are those who think Rahm Emanuel is Satan incarnate for those inner-city neighborhood schools that were closed.

Although it seems that the most recent Chicago Black Hawks Stanley Cup championship was thrown into the mix in Part Two -- giving us a few moments of happiness while enduring an arrogant mayor and senseless violence.

THEN AGAIN, I also suspect that those people who most got into the whole hockey championship thing were the ones who were least affected by either urban violence or school closings.

I know that the reports indicated the ratings weren't so good for that first part of 'Chicagoland.' They were considered disappointing -- although better than the ratings that most CNN-aired documentary programs get.

Could it be that CNN has that little faith in this series that they're cutting their losses? Why keep re-airing a program that will only be watched by the random few like I who managed to miss it Thursday night?

Even the latest non-details that only slightly advance the missing airplane story were considered more interesting!

THERE MAY BE a few people out there asking why I don't just turn to my laptop computer and the CNN website to watch a program. Part of it is that I don't want to.

I'd rather watch a program on my television screen (26 inches), compared to that (16 inches) of my laptop. I really don't comprehend those people who think that a smartphone's dinky screen is at all suitable for watching anything on video -- not even some self-shot video of one's friends in some way acting stupid.

But there's also the fact that when I go to the website to try to find it, all I can find are little samples and snippets. Which is probably the only practical way to handle video off a television screen.

Definitely not ideal for viewing an hour-long program.

SO WHAT DO I think of 'Chicagoland?' By and large, I feel like it is telling me a story I already know -- because I (and many of you, I presume) have been following it in detail. It's not adding much of anything new to the mix.

I suspect most of those people complaining about it are the ones who want a program that indicts the reputation of Emanuel, and that anything that isn't super-critical will be considered a "whitewash" by them.

Such a review of what is happening in Chicago might be intriguing if it were helping to spread the story amongst more people.

Yet the fact that the ratings have been sub-par, and that it is becoming something not easily watched, makes me wonder if it's failing on those grounds, too.

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