Patrick Manning has been visiting Latin American leaders to brief them on the summit

Host Prime Minister, Patrick Manning of Trinidad and Tobago, has admitted as much.

"Cuba is on everybody's lips," Mr Manning was quoted as saying by the French news Agency AFP after a meeting on 19 March in Brazil with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez raised the pre-conference rhetoric on Cuba the day before by saying he was preparing diplomatic "artillery" for the summit.

Mr Chavez suggested he will use the occasion to pressure the United States - and Presdient Obama - to drop a trade embargo it imposed on Cuba more than four decades ago.

Cuba is the only country in the hemisphere not invited to the April 17-19 summit of the Organisation of American States (OAS).

Kicked out

It was suspended from the organisation in 1962 after member nations said its communist system went against Inter-American principles.

Mr Chavez said the issue "has to be discussed" as it was wrong for Cuba to be excluded from the summit.

He added: "Cuba is Latin America. It's no longer the Cuba that was kicked out of the OAS by those governments subordinated to the Pentagon."

Mr Manning said that while Cuba was not part of the Trinidad summit, "I have no doubt it will happen soon. I can't tell you when."

	President Chavez has pledged to put the case for Cuba, a close ally

He said, however, that "we don't want to corner anybody" at the conference.

"I think there is a meeting of minds as to how best the question of Cuba should be handled," Mr Manning said, without elaborating.

The main focus of any discussions on Cuba in Port of Spain is likely to be the 47-year-old trade embargo.

Almost all Latin American and Caribbean governments support an end to blockade on Cuba that has crippled the island.

'Sociological perspective'

Washington last month passed legislation relaxing a number of travel and remittance restrictions on Cuba.

President Obama has said, however, that there will be no consideration of lifting the full embargo until Cuba's government makes a number of democratic moves.

The Caribbean Community (Caricom) has urged Mr Obama to go the whole distance -- so too has President Lula, who was the first Latin American leader to visit the Obama White House.

"There is nothing any more from the political perspective, from sociological perspective, from the humanitarian perspective that impedes the reestablishment of relations between the United States and Cuba," Mr Lula said in a speech after meeting Mr Obama.

The trend toward rapprochement with Havana continued in mid-March when both El Salvador and Costa Rica said they will re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba.

They were the only two Central American countries to maintain a diplomatic freeze on the communist nation.

Other topics such as energy security and the financial crisis will surely feature at the summit but any controversy will likely revolve around Cuba.

"We are preparing for this summit, getting our artillery ready ... I reckon the canons will heard from here," Mr Chavez said in Caracas.

The Obama administration has a great opportunity to begin modifying US policy before or during the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. A new US policy would not only increase US influence in Cuba, but it would also be the single most powerful way in which Obama could improve the US standing throughout the Western Hemisphere.

The United States can engage with China and Russia, not to mention North Korea and even Iran. Surely it ought to be able to do so with Cuba.

Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations (from Newsweek)

President Barack Obama's election offers a rare opportunity to give lie to the Castro brothers' depiction of a racist America, as if we were still stuck in 1960.
But Obama, whose administration is being pressured to make a big splash on Cuba at an upcoming conference in Trinidad and Tobago, should not be swayed to lift the embargo or give a green light to American tourists to party like it's 1959 in Havana.

Let's not forget why Bush imposed a tougher U.S. policy: Cuba's Black Spring, when the regime arrested 75 independent librarians, journalists and human-rights activists and handed most of them 20-year sentences. The regime's response to three black Cubans trying to take a ferry out of Havana Harbor was to kill them by firing squad. Case closed.

Myriam Marquez - columnist Miami Herald