News of Trump's widening lead hit hard in Cuba, which has spent the last two years negotiating normalization with the United States after more than 50 years of Cold War hostility.
Normalisation has set off a tourism boom in Cuba and visits by hundreds of executives from the US and dozens of other nations newly interested in doing business on the island. Trump has promised to reverse Obama's opening with Cuba unless President Raul Castro agrees to more political freedom on the island, a concession considered a virtual impossibility.
Speaking of Cuba's leaders, Communist Party member and noted economist and political scientist Esteban Morales told the Telesur network that "they must be worried because I think this represents a new chapter."
Carlos Alzugaray, a political scientist and retired Cuban diplomat, said a Trump victory could, however, please some hard-liners in the Cuban leadership who worried that Cuba was moving too close to the United States too quickly.
"The little we've advanced, if he reverses it, it hurts us," taxi driver Oriel Iglesias Garcia said. "You know tourism will go down. If Donald Trump wins and turns everything back it's really bad for us."
