Barack Obama plans to visit Cuba next month in what would be the first trip to the island by a sitting US president in nearly 90 years.
A US official confirmed that Mr Obama would travel to Cuba in March, just 15 months after his landmark decision to normalise relations with the island after five decades of hostility and diplomatic estrangement between the US and the regimes of Fidel and Raúl Castro. The last sitting US president to visit Havana was Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
The proposed visit, first reported by ABC News, came under immediate attack from several Republican presidential contenders, including the two Cuban-American senators running for the White House.