Americans are flat-out prohibited from freely traveling to Cuba like Europeans and Canadians. You can’t just plop down on a golden-sand beach and drink mojitos all day. And individual people-to-people education trips, one of the main ways that Americans previously could visit Cuba, have been scratched. That said, there are 12 categories of travel that still allow Americans to travel to Cuba, including family visits, and group people-to-people travel (including religious and educational trips). 

Before that can be answered, it’s important to distinguish between companies and individuals. American companies that had their assets seized—from Citibank to Hilton Hotels—have long registered their losses with the appropriate authorities. Some, such as Bacardi Rum, have successfully sued—and won—for trademark violations. But what of individuals, the people who lost their homes, their companies, their interests?

It was this adherence to his ideals that stood out, conviction without pragmatism becomes stagnation. And Cuba, under his care, stagnated. Admirers in the United States are quick to point to the public education system and national healthcare as achievements of his revolution. These admirers, however, have never been to a Cuban clinic or spent a day at a Cuban high school. Cubans have to wait months for a prescription medication and years for surgery.

First, in many ways, the president’s initiative to normalize relations with Cuba isn’t so much ending their isolation as ending ours. Cuba has enjoyed good and growing relations with our neighbors across the hemisphere for years. In recent years, those countries have threatened to exclude the U.S. from hemispheric meetings if we continued to demand Cuba’s exclusion. We have sought to isolate Cuba for over 50 years; we ended up isolating ourselves.

Six months after the United States and Cuba resumed full diplomatic relations, the expectation that the resumption of ties would encourage changes in Cuban society has not been met. On the contrary, the Raúl Castro’s regime has increased arbitrary arrests of dissidents and brutal attacks on the Ladies in White, a pacifist group of wives and mothers of the arrested who march through the streets dressed in white and in silence, dampening hopes of the exhausted Cuban nation that change would finally arrive.

A stroll through Old Havana is enough to convince anyone that the entrepreneurial spirit that is fast-transforming this city into a nation of shopkeepers is in full swing. This isn’t to say that corporate America is about to descend on this island nation of 12 million people. Raúl Castro’s reforms place sharp restrictions on capitalism: one can work for one’s self, but only the state can hire more than two employees. 

Unexpected jolts can quickly unravel authoritarian regimes.  Maybe 2015 will see Cubans responding en masse to the more flexible policy adopted by the Obama Administration, massing in the streets and forcing a showdown with the Castro regime.  If they succeed in breaking the back of the communist system, how might a new democratically elected government start to put things right?

Obama pointed to the obvious when he said the old policies, meaning containment and subversion, didn’t “make sense.” More Cubans are travelling to wherever they can get a visa, political dissent and expression is more open than ever, and there are more private-owned businesses and farms in Cuba. While Cuba is still officially a one party-state, Cuban leaders have repeatedly made clear they are committed to real reforms. 

Just over a year after the Cuban government permitted the first sale of real estate between private parties, a housing boom is emerging in Havana. Fueled by an influx of foreign capital, much of it from Mexico, for Cuban exiles the boom is proving to be a major draw. It also comes amid signs that the Castro regime, which has ruled Cuba since 1959, may be nearing its end. Since November of 2011, when the country saw its first real estate deal in half a century, there has been a sustained rise in housing prices, particularly in Havana. 

In Cuba change is in the air. But such change should not be read as an end to the revolution. “The United States and the exile community are dead wrong if they think that regime change will take place at any time in the near future,” said Julio Diaz Vazquez, a professor at the Center for Investigations of the International Economy at the University of Havana. Whether one talks to government and Communist Party officials, university professors, or simply to people on the street, it is clear that in Cuba, socialism is very much alive and well.