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With President Obama beginning the process of normalizing relations with Cuba this week, many may envision soon soaking up the sun on a warm Cuban beach, sipping a refreshing rum drink.

In reality, that's not likely to happen for quite a while. But just the increased opportunity for travel between the two countries has those with longtime ties to Cuba already thinking about the possibilities it will bring.

Tom Popper is thinking about it. As president of the New York-based travel company, Insight Cuba, Popper has fought long and hard for an end to the U.S. ban on travel to Cuba, and he's seen his hopes rise and fall with the ebb and flow of Cuban-American relations over last couple of decades.

To say Obama's announcement Wednesday was a bit of a shock is an understatement.

"When I first heard the news on my way to the office that morning, I almost drove off the road," Popper says. "It's wonderful news for the U.S., for travelers, for business interests, for relations between the two countries."

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Popper sees a greater opportunity for educational and cultural exchanges between the two countries, but cautions that some restrictions, including the ban on tourist travel to Cuba, remain in place.

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Despite the ban, Eben Peck, head of government affairs for the American Society of Travel Agents, calls the agreement a step in the right direction.

"It's going to mean more business for our members who participate in the Cuba market, but the full benefits of freedom to travel to Cuba is not going to be felt until the travel ban is lifted in its entirety," Peck says.

Right now, only charter flights are allowed to fly between the U.S. and Cuba.

Cruise ship companies such as Carnival say Cuba presents some exciting possibilities, but note the country needs investments in docks and other infrastructure to accommodate big ships. A handful of international chains have hotels in Cuba, but far too few to handle large volumes of U.S. tourists.

A tourist takes pictures in Havana last week.. Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images

And here's something American travelers won't be able to find at all in Cuba: a Starbuck's.

"There's nothing like this in Cuba, and there actually won't be for a very, very long time," says Achy Obejas, a writer who was born in Cuba. "For there to be a Starbuck's or a McDonald's or any kind of American business of this nature, the embargo has to be lifted, and these new policy changes do not affect the embargo."

But Obejas says the agreement to begin to normalize relations is huge, because it finally starts the conversation about eventually ending the trade embargo, which she says is critical to Cuba's future.

The first step, she says, is making it easier to travel between the two countries — and Obejas should know: She's lived there for extended periods of time and has spent much of her adult life traveling back and forth.

"It is a bit of a nightmare," she says. "You need a license, you have to ask permission, you have to join a group, you have to do something. It's not like just getting on a plane and going to the Bahamas. You actually have to go through some, you know, B.S."

Along with freer travel to and from Cuba, banking restrictions will be eased, so American travelers, for the first time, will be able to use credit and debit cards in Cuba, and they won't have to carry large sums of cash. That could free American visitors to spend more, and it would help Cuban businesses.

But the best thing for Obejas: The country will begin to be normal. The easing of travel restrictions will reconnect families, create economic and educational opportunities and encourage those Cubans who do leave the island nation to go back, Obejas says.

"Cuba will cease to be special in about five or six years," she says. "It will be one more country in the Caribbean to which you can access, which sounds banal, but is actually wonderful, to not be an outlier, to not be this dark forbidden place."

On her next project, currently titled Stories Of My Teeth

It's a novel that I wrote in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. So for a series of months, maybe four or five months, I wrote sort of chapbooks, much in the early-20th-century style, that I sent to the factory. They were printed there and handed out amongst the workers. And they would read the pieces out loud and comment [on] them and criticize them. And all those session were recorded and then sent back to me here in New York. And then I would listen and write the next installment and so on. So it's a very different procedure.

I mean, I had no idea what I was gonna write about when I started writing. I wrote a first installment just to make initial contact with them. And the first time I heard them reading out loud, I was struck of course by the variety of voices and accents, and some very colloquial forms of saying things. And I started picking those forms up and bringing them into the novel.

I think — I mean, this novel would have been impossible without the collaboration of the workers. They weren't just listeners. They really helped me build it.

Read an excerpt of Sidewalks

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Kurdish fighters, supported by coalition warplanes, pushed into the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, days after breaking a siege of a mountain where ethnic Yazidis had been trapped for months by Islamist extremists.

Massoud Barzani, an Iraqi Kurdish leader claimed his peshmerga forces had already taken a "large area" of the town of Sinjar, which has been held since August by fighters of the so-called Islamic State.

NPR's Deborah Amos reports that breaking the months-long siege of Mount Sinjar "was the largest military operation in Iraq since the U.S. took a direct role, 8,000 Kurdish troops backed by U.S. air power."

Barzani, on a visit to the recently captured area on Sunday, praised God that his forces had "opened and controlled all the roads" to the mountain.

"The liberation of the center of Sinjar town was not part of our plans, but we have managed to take control of a large area of it," he was quoted by the BBC as saying.

"Most of the districts are under our control," Barzani told his troops. "We will crush the Islamic State."

The peshmerga launched the military operation last week and managed to first open up a corridor to Mount Sinjar, allowing thousands of Yazidis trapped there to escape.

Now, the fighters are pressing an offensive to retake the town itself. The Associated Press reports that as the battle continued to rage in the city on Sunday, where loud explosions and gunfire echoed from inside the town and coalition warplanes bombed ISIS positions.

Nabil Mohammed, a 28-year-old Kurdish fighter, said there were "snipers everywhere inside" the town.

"One of them fired a rocket-propelled grenade at us," he said. "I ran into a house and I was hit by a sniper's bullet in my thigh."

The AP quotes a spokesman for the Kurdish forces, Jabbar Yawar, as saying the fighters are still facing resistance from pockets of militants still inside the town and that it is "far from cleared." He declined to provide more details on the ongoing operation, the news agency said.

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President Obama tells CNN that he doesn't consider North Korea's hack of Sony Pictures an act of war, but instead a case of "cybervandalism." But, he stands by his criticism of the movie studio for pulling the satirical film The Interview because its plot angers Pyongyang.

"If we set a precedent in which a dictator in another country can disrupt through cyber, a company's distribution chain or its products, and as a consequence we start censoring ourselves, that's a problem," Obama told CNN's State of the Union this morning.

"And it's a problem not just for the entertainment industry, it's a problem for the news industry," he said. "CNN has done critical stories about North Korea. What happens if in fact there is a breach in CNN's cyberspace? Are we going to suddenly say, are we not going to report on North Korea?"

The film depicts comedy duo Seth Rogen and James Franco as journalists who score an interview with North Korea's reclusive leader, Kim Jong Un. In the film, the CIA recruits the pair to assassinate Kim.

The president's latest remarks on CNN follow a Friday news conference in which called Sony's decision to cancel the release of The Interview a mistake.

"Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I'm sympathetic to the concerns that they faced," Obama said. "Having said all that, yes I think they made a mistake."

Responding to the president's initial remarks, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton told NPR that the studio "did not capitulate" to hackers.

"We don't own movie theaters, and we require movie theater owners to be there for us to distribute our film," Lynton told NPR's All Things Considered.

"We very much wanted to keep the picture in release. When the movie theaters decided that they could not put our movie in their theaters, we had no choice at that point but to not have the movie come out on the 25th of December," he said. "This was not our decision."

On Saturday, North Korea denied its involvement in the cyberattack against Sony Pictures and said it wanted to help the United States investigate the breach. But the regime also threatened "serious" consequences if Washington declined the offer.

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