Freed: Alan Gross speaks at a news conference at his lawyer's office in Washington. Photo: AP

Washington: Marco and his friend clambered into a homemade raft in Matanzas, Cuba, at 9pm on March 28, 1993, desperate to escape Fidel Castro's regime.

The two soon became lost and they did not wash up on US soil, 180 kilometres away, until April 3.

It was dark and he was terrified, and he says, almost hallucinating from thirst. His friend told him to stay in the raft, thinking they had washed back ashore in Cuba, but he ran around to the front of a house on the beach.

Welcome news: People cheer for the "Cuban Five" - Cuban spies who were released after 18 months of secret talks facilitated by the Vatican and Canada, between US President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro. Photo: Reuters

He saw a light on a doorbell and knew he was safe. No one in Cuba has lit doorbells.

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A tall blonde cop who came to the door soon after, he told Fairfax Media this month, looked like a god to him.

On hearing US President Barack Obama's announcement on Tuesday that he intended to normalise relations with Cuba after more than 50 years of blockade, he says he was not that surprised.

US President Barack Obama announces his intention to normalise relations with Cuba.

"I think he is looking at history so no one will forget his name," said Marco, who does not want his surname used. "Someone was going to do it sometime."

However sanguine Marco's response, the move stunned much of the United States, prompting protest and celebration in Miami's Little Havana neighbourhood and mixed reactions in the capital.

With little warning Mr Obama and his Cuban counterpart addressed their nations at noon, using language that would have been unthinkable just hours earlier.

By the time they had finished speaking they had all but closed one of the last chapters of the Cold War.

"It does not serve America's interests or the Cuban people to try to push Cuba towards collapse," Mr Obama said from the White House. "Even if that worked - and it hasn't for 50 years - we know from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos," he said of the 50-year embargo the US has maintained against Cuba.

Cuban President Raul Castro told his people in a televised statement, "This decision of President Obama deserves the respect and acknowledgement of our people.

"The progress attained in the interchange shows it is possible to find solutions to many problems. As we have repeated we should learn the art of coexistence in a civilised manner with our differences."

The sudden breakthrough in relations was, of course, the result of months of painstaking secret negotiations, and prompted in part by shifting geopolitical realities.

After the Soviet Union collapsed Cuba turned to Venezuela to prop up its moribund economy, but the collapse in oil prices that has crippled the Russian economy has also wrought havoc on Venezuela's.

For his part Mr Obama had long declared that he believed the embargo had not only failed to force change in Cuba, but also had provided its leadership with a propaganda weapon and forced it closer to rivals to America.

He noted that America had long ago established relations with Cold War communist enemies China and Vietnam.

Further he believed that the embargo was a liability in the US relationship with Central and South American nations.

The elevation of the first Latin American pope, Francis, was also significant. For years the Cuban regime had been slowly lifting its restrictions of the Catholic Church in Cuba, and he urged the two nations to overcome their differences.

The Argentinian pontiff sent "warm congratulations" to the former arch-foes for their "historic decision ... to establish diplomatic relations, with the aim of overcoming, in the interest of the citizens of both countries, the difficulties which have marked their recent history".

In his speech Mr Obama thanked both the Vatican and the Canadian government, which hosted talks, for their roles.

But before the US and Cuba could begin negotiating over the resumption of diplomatic ties, it had Cold War disputes to address. The US had imprisoned three Cuban agents for espionage against Cuban exile groups in Florida in 1998, while Cuba had detained and imprisoned an American contractor of USAID, Alan Gross, who it accused of spying in 2009.

What many Americans did not know until Mr Obama's address though, was that in addition to Mr Gross the US was also negotiating over its own agent, an unnamed Cuban national who provided information about the Florida spy ring. He or she was, according to Mr Obama, imprisoned for nearly two decades and was "one of the most important intelligence agents that the United
 States has ever had in Cuba."

Talks began last year and it was eventually agreed that Cuba would release Mr Gross and the two nations would swap their agents. All are home today.

The deal was finalised in a 45-minute conversation between Mr Obama and Mr Castro on Tuesday, the first such presidential talks since the Cuban revolution of 1958.

Mr Obama has announced three key changes: that he had instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to begin talks with Cuba with a view to opening an embassy in the coming months; that the US would reconsider Cuba's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism; and that the US would further relax regulations against commerce and travel between the two nations.

Mr Obama acknowledged he could not abolish the economic embargo without congressional support, and he intends to pursue that. Whether he will win it is not certain.

Republicans hold both the House and the incoming Senate, and though its allies in agriculture and business want to see the embargo lifted, many in the 11-million strong Cuban American exile community in the US are violently opposed to it.

Many remember relatives who lost their livelihoods when Cuban businesses were nationalised without compensation during the revolution, or who lost their lives or freedom fighting the regime since.

Even though polls suggest Cuban Americans – especially younger generations - support normalisation by a small majority, it is a fact of American politics that power lies in the intensity of support an issue generates, not the breadth.

Those who want the embargo maintained are willing to raise money and go to the polls on that issue alone.

Their power was reflected in congressional responses to the announcement on Wednesday. The Speaker of the House, John Boehner, a Republican, said relations with a communist nation "should not be revisited". The incoming Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, another Republican, told the Associated Press he would defer to Marco Rubio, a Cuban American of Florida with presidential ambitions.

Mr Rubio's opposition was more typical of Cuban American Republicans.

"Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama's naiveté during his final two years in office," he said.

"America will be less safe as a result of the President's change in policy. When America is unwilling to advocate for individual liberty and freedom of political expression 90 miles [144 kilometres] from our shores, it represents a terrible setback for the hopes of all oppressed people around the globe."

The outgoing Democratic Senator from New Jersey, Bob Menendez, the outgoing chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee also strongly opposed the move.

"President Obama's actions have vindicated the brutal behaviour of the Cuban government," he said in a statement.

Back in Miami, Marco does not believe political opposition will make any difference.

Though the embargo has not been lifted, the change has come, as it was always going to.

"Some time, you have to forget the past," he says.

with AFP