Washington - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised president-elect Barack Obama for his victory and said Wednesday the United States has taken an "extraordinary step" by electing the first African American to the White House.

"One of the great things about representing this country is that it continues to surprise. It continues to renew itself. It continues to beat all odds and expectations," Rice said in a brief appearance before reporters.

Caracas - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez congratulated US president-elect Barack Obama Wednesday on his "historic" win and said the time had come for the two countries to establish new relations.

Chavez emphasized Caracas' will to "build, on the basis of absolute respect for sovereignty, a constructive bilateral agenda for the welfare of the Venezuelan and the US people," according to a statement issued by the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry.

"The historic election of an African American to lead the most powerful nation in the world is symptomatic of a changing era that has been conceived in South America and could be knocking on the doors of the United States," he said.

Bogota - Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on Wednesday congratulated US president-elect Barack Obama on his election victory, and said he was sure that the two countries would continue to cooperate.

Uribe, widely regarded as US President George W Bush's main ally in Latin America, said his government's main interest in further cooperation lay in the fights against drug trafficking and terrorism.

Brasilia  - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Wednesday described Democratic candidate Barack Obama's victory as an "extraordinary event" and asked the US president-elect to lift the decades-old embargo on communist Cuba.

Lula said Obama's historic rise underlined the democratic aspects of US society. "It could only happen in a democratic regime in which society expresses itself."

Governments and leaders around the globe were overwhelmingly positive Wednesday to the election of Barack Obama as the next US president, but it was clear that they also had high expectations of him in repairing America's damaged standing in the world.

The president-elect - the first African-American ever to be elected to the highest office in 232 years of US constitutional history - was being offered plenty of free advice on issues ranging from foreign affairs to the environment to the economy.

Vienna - Eastern European leaders lapped up Barack Obama's pledge of a "new dawn" of US leadership and heaped praise on the president-elect, although some questioned his toughness toward Russia.

From the Baltics to Bulgaria, the ex-communist area that provided some of President George W Bush's most loyal European allies looked for even closer ties under Obama - minus the us-against-them tension of the last eight years.

"Barack Obama now faces immense tasks, and I place hopes on his youthful energy," Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said Wednesday.