On March 21 President Obama made a historic three-day visit to Cuba. It was as daring and as far reaching as President Nixon’s historic visit to China which inaugurated a new chapter -- China-US relationship.

The visit was very much expected after the resumption of diplomatic ties a year ago. Both countries have been studiously working to make the visit a success. In a sign of conciliation, the Cuban government smoothed the Obama itinerary without micromanaging the visit. At Havana’s grandly restored theatre, Obama spoke in world-historical terms when he said, "Havana is only 90 miles from Florida, but to get here, we had to travel a great distance, over barriers of history and ideology, barriers of pain and separation".

Obama described the new turn in the US-Cuba relation as the coming together of two estranged brothers. These balmy words coming from a black US President were music to the ears of Cuba’s black population which constitutes a majority. The importance of the visit could be gauged from the fact that Obama’s is the first visit by a US president in almost a century. Even when Cuba was the US vassal before the revolution of 1959, US presidents rarely ventured there. The last US president to visit Cuba was Calvin Coolidge in 1928. So the historical importance of this visit cannot be over-emphasised.

During the visit, President Obama, against the expectation of pro-democracy activists, was conciliatory towards the regime, quietly pushing for economic liberalisation reforms in Cuba. (His visit was preceded by a large delegation of the US businessmen.) The working assumption here is that economic liberalisation will itself pave way for political reforms rather than the other way round. Yet the issue of political reforms was not far from the surface.

This came out quite clearly in the joint press conference where Raul Castro, the Cuban president, was quizzed about the state of human rights and political prisoners in Cuba. The Cuban president, in turn, criticised US’s own squalid record on human rights and pledged that if a list of political prisoners were provided to him he would release them.

Cuba and the US have had a historically troubled relationship. Cuba was for long treated as the US backyard with the last US-blessed Cuban dictator Batista forced out of power by an unlikely revolution brought about by Fidel Castro and his guerillas in 1959. Since then, Cuba has been a thorn in the side of successive administrations in the US. Moreover, because of Cuba’s communist government, the country was pitched right at the heart of Cold War politics. The US and Russia almost came within a whisker of starting a nuclear war over Cuba in 1962.

The CIA, too, is alleged to have masterminded countless number of assassination attempts on the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Such provocations did not help improve bilateral relations. Obama sees his visit as the most definitive turn away from the dynamics of the Cold War that froze US-Cuban relations. President Obama was quite forthright on this when he said: "I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas".

President Obama, sensitive to Cuba’s perception of US as a colonial master, went to great lengths to emphasise that the US acknowledged its role in treating Cuba as a colony and respects Cuban people’s heroic struggle to remain independent.

On the whole, Obama’s Cuba visit is being seen as a huge success. This foreign policy success comes hard at the heels of Obama’s another foreign policy success on Iran notched against the vehement opposition of the Republican Party and Israel-allied lobbying groups. As President Obama nears his second term, he is focusing more and more on major foreign policy issues with a view to securing his legacy.

Both Iran and Cuba successes are part of the legacy project. On Cuba, Obama was crystal clear when pledged to reset US-Cuban relations on his election in 2008. However, bogged down in the US domestic politics by the obstructionist Republican Party, Obama did not venture boldly on the Cuban front in his first term. In contrast, Obama has been active on foreign policy form in his second term. This began with behind the scene contacts between the US and Cuba early on in his second term.

Yet this opening was resisted by the powerful Cuban exile community. The Miami-based Cuban exiles are a powerful lobbying group within the Republican Party. Two republican presidential aspirants, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, are of Cuban descent. Historically, this powerful exile community has prevented a resumption of normal ties between the two countries. The group was behind the imposition of long-standing US embargo which came into effect in 1960, which was further tightened over the coming decades.

The group was also behind the Bay of Pigs episode which almost escalated into full-scale nuclear war between the US and the USSR. This state of diplomatic freeze lasted until 2014 when Obama administration resumed diplomatic ties with Cuba in a bold move.

President Obama’s visit takes the normalisation process forward by a giant leap. Having come this far, President Obama appealed to the US Congress to lift the much-resented US embargo imposed in 1960 which went well with his Cuban audience. Lifting the embargo will not be a smooth sailing since powerful special interests are already arrayed against Obama on his Cuban opening as is the case with Iranian demarche.

Marco Rubio, the dropped-out Republican presidential aspirant, and Ted Cruz, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, have already signalled opposition to the Cuban diplomatic opening. In contrast, Obama feels the hands of history and vision on his shoulders. He said as much during the visit when he told the audience in Havana that "I know the history, but I refuse to be trapped by it".

In this sense, Obama has shown great courage and vision on two major foreign policy headaches of successive US administration while his opponents remain trapped in the furnace of past history. He has a hell of a job at hand during the remaining days of presidency to consolidate and entrench his two major foreign policy successes.