The United States and Cuba have agreed to restore diplomatic relations. The surprise move will end a 50-year U.S. embargo that had failed to accomplish any of its stated objectives but had created additional hardship on the Cuban people and gave the authoritarian government in Havana an easy excuse for its own failings.

This step is long overdue and could bring about the long-sought liberalization of the island 150 km off the Florida coast.

The breakthrough followed 18 months of secret talks, facilitated and assisted by Canada and Pope Francis. The final piece of the deal was a prisoner exchange: Cuba released Alan Gross, an elderly American subcontracting for the U.S. Agency for International Development who had been imprisoned in Cuba since 2009 for importing banned technology and trying to establish clandestine Internet service for Cuban Jews, and an unnamed "intelligence asset" who spied for the U.S. and had been imprisoned for nearly 20 years. In return, the U.S. freed three Cuban intelligence agents it had imprisoned as a result of information supplied by that intelligence asset.