HAVANA, Cuba (AP) — At midday on December 17, 2014, the sound of church bells echoed in Havana as presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced that the United States and Cuba would reestablish diplomatic relations and end nearly 6 decades of hostility.

Five years later, it feels almost as if that historic moment never happened, Cubans said in interviews in the capital yesterday.

President Donald Trump has spent roughly as much time undoing detente as Obama spent constructing it, and relations between the two countries are at one of their lowest points since the end of the Cold War.

Trump has cut back US visits to Cuba — barring cruise ships, flights to most cities and unguided educational trips — the most popular form of American travel to Cuba. The US Embassy in Havana has been reduced to skeleton staffing after diplomats reported a string of health problems which source remains a mystery.

The closure of the embassy’s visa section, and end of special five-year visas for Cubans this year, means travel to the US has become near-impossible for many Cubans who used to fly regularly to South Florida to see family and buy supplies for businesses.

The Cuban economy is stagnant, with tourism numbers flat and aid from Venezuela far below its historic peak as Cuba’s oil-rich chief ally fights through its own long crisis. In 2014, Obama and Castro’s announcement felt like the end of a dark era for Cuba and the start of something positive and new, people said in Havana.

Now, the two years of detente under Obama feel like a temporary break in a long history of tension and struggle that has no end in sight, they said.

“There was hope, thinking that there would be an opening with Obama,” said Alfredo Piñera, a 37-year-old construction worker.

“And with Trump, it’s like a child’s dream, gone up in smoke.” Piñera works in Mexico and returns to Cuba regularly to see his wife and sons, ages 16, 11, and 9. He said he hoped that the end of hostilities with the U.S. would bring a better life for him, his family and the entire country.

“I felt good,” he said.

“There was hope for improvement, for change in this country – economically, politically, socially.”

He said he and his family were surviving in the hard times, which were far from the depths of the post-Soviet “Special Period” of the 1990s. But he said the optimism they felt five years ago had suffered a heavy blow.

“All of those hopes that so many Cubans had went crashing to the round,” said Piñera as he sat on a kerb connecting his phone to a public Wi-Fi access point outside the baseball stadium where Obama and Castro watched an exhibition game during the US president’s historic 2016 visit to Havana.

The Cuban Government celebrated yesterday as the anniversary of the return of three of five Cuban agents arrested as they carried out infiltration of anti-Castro emigre groups.

The swap of the agents for US contractor Alan Gross and a jailed spy was an essential precursor to the re-establishment of relations, but the larger context was barely mentioned in Cuban State media yesterday.