It had threatened to be an encounter fraught with tension but the Summit of the Americas was finally hailed as the beginning of a new era of relations between Washington and a Latin America alienated by his predecessor.

Even Venezuela’s fiery socialist President, Hugo Chávez, said that he felt "great optimism" for relations with the new occupant of the White House. Just a day earlier he had vowed to go to the summit with his full "artillery" at the ready.

Not even a boycott of the summit’s final declaration by members of the Alba bloc (Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas — Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Honduras and Dominica) in protest at Cuba’s absence from the summit could take the gloss off Mr Obama’s regional debut.

Latin American leaders were impressed with Mr Obama’s efforts to reach out to a region long neglected by George W. Bush and antagonised by decades of interventionism. The US President’s offer, in his opening speech on Friday night, of a "new beginning" in relations with Cuba, was viewed as a crucial first step towards healing divisions. In a closing press conference Mr Obama reassured leaders by saying that "there are no senior or junior partners in the Americas".

Cuba had looked set to dominate the summit, with Mr Obama’s counterparts demanding the removal of the 47-year embargo on the island and complaining that moves last week to lift travel and other restrictions did not go far enough. Offers of talks by both Washington and Havana and the promise of a resolution to revoke Cuba’s near half-century exclusion from the Organisation of American States appeased leaders and set the stage for a thawing of relations.

Mr Chávez, who famously nicknamed President Bush "Satan", told Mr Obama "I want to be your friend" during the pair’s first encounter on Friday. Mr Chávez heralded "the true start of a new history . . . in which the mechanisms of domination are over".

He later announced that the two governments had discussed the reinstatement of each others’ ambassadors. The American Ambassador to Caracas was thrown out last year over an alleged US plot against his close ally, President Morales of Bolivia, and the US reciprocated.

Even in his overtures to Mr Obama the voluble Venezuelan could not resist a dig at US foreign policy, presenting him with a book on the history of US exploitation of the region — The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano.

And during one of Saturday’s plenary sessions he congratulated his US counterpart for not taking off his simultaneous translation headset, a reference to the last - and disastrous - Summit of the Americas in Argentina where Mr Bush riled Latin American leaders by removing his headset halfway through a presidential meeting.

Behind the scenes there were signs of residual rancour between the two delegations as the respective security details scuffled on two occasions, according to sources present. One stand-off, shortly before the official photograph on Saturday, came when there was not sufficient space for both security details to accompany their leaders into the room. "It was pretty ugly. There was pushing and shoving", a source at the summit secretariat said. Trinidadian security broke up the confrontation, which also involved security from other delegations.

Not all leaders were convinced by Mr Obama’s performance. President Morales of Bolivia described himself as unimpressed, saying: "We have had 100 days and I have seen little change", while President Correa of Ecuador attacked the continued "arrogance" of US policy towards Cuba and the wider region.

The overriding sense among the 34 heads of state and delegations was of success. A Colombian minister told The Times of his relief that Cuba had not, after all, overshadowed the event.

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