According to US press reports, the State Department has asked President Obama to remove Cuba from his list of 'state sponsors of terrorism,' itself a step on the way to a normalisation of relations between the countries and a massive diminution of sanctions.

CNN seems to have published the story first, having spoken to two federal officials. John Kerry, the Secretary of State, attributed the initiative to the fact that President Kennedy's reaction (which non-Americans believe was rather hysterical) to the revolution in Cuba in the 1960s and its aftermath has failed. Kerry's words were: "the President (Obama) has courageously decided to change a policy that hasn’t worked and to move us down a different path."

Obama was going to the Summit of the Americas in Panama when he told reporters that the State Department had ceased reviewing Cuba’s placement on the US list of 'state sponsors of terrorism', but that a formal recommendation to take it off the list was still pending. Politico.com quotes him as saying to reporters in Jamaica: “I won’t make a formal announcement today about what those recommendations are until I have them.”