HAVANA — Dozens of uniformed and plainclothes police watch silently every Sunday morning as white-clad dissidents file into Mass at Santa Rita Church in a leafy Havana neighborhood of mansions overlooking the Florida Straits.

The officers stand by until the women shout “Freedom!” and try to sit on the street outside the church. The protesters are whisked off to police stations and empty schools, held for hours, released and driven home, to return the following week.

The well-practiced choreography of protest has become a feature of Sunday mornings in Cuba. Nearly 9,000 times last year, Communist authorities briefly arrested dissidents in shows of force that have become a flashpoint in the U.S. debate about President Barack Obama’s three-day trip to the island this month.

Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, both sons of Cuban emigres, say the crackdown on demonstrations in Cuba shows that President Raul Castro has no intention of responding to Obama’s outreach with greater freedom for the Cuban people.

The Obama administration acknowledges that Castro has been slow to respond but says that’s not the point. After decades of U.S. efforts to foment democracy by backing Cuban dissidents and their demands for swift political change, the president’s trip will showcase a 180-degree turn in U.S. policy toward the island.

The United States is wagering that re-forging links between the U.S. and Cuba will do more to change Cuba’s single-party government and centrally planned economy than a half-century of confrontation. The U.S. is now trying to nourish an increasingly independent Cuban middle class that will someday successfully demand more rights from its government. It’s a strategy that will almost certainly take years, even decades, to prove a failure or success.

“The fact of the matter is we don’t have any expectation that Cuba is going to transform its political system in the near term,” said deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, one of the architects of Obama’s Cuba policy. “Even if we got 10 dissidents out of prison, so what? What’s going to bring change is having Cubans have more control over their own lives.”

The Cuban government appears highly aware of the U.S. strategy, and highly resistant. It published an essay-length editorial about Obama’s visit across three pages of the Communist Party newspaper Granma on Wednesday declaring that “profound conceptual differences about political models, democracy and the exercise of human rights, social justice, international relations, peace and stability will persist between the United States and Cuba.”

While Obama’s agenda is still being worked out, it includes plans for a private meeting with dissidents. The focus of his trip will almost certainly be elsewhere, however. After punching a series of holes in the trade embargo on Cuba, the Obama administration is preparing to do away with some of the most important remaining limits on U.S. travel to Cuba and business with the island. During his March 20-22 visit, the president plans to make history by attending a Major League Baseball exhibition game, meeting with Raul Castro and addressing Cubans live on state television.

Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas whose father left Cuba, calls Obama’s policy a mistake.