Havana  - Cuba's government on Wednesday reiterated demands to the United States to return the territory of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to the island.

Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told journalists that US President Barack Obama's announcement to close down Guantanamo was "positive, but insufficient."

"We hope that the decision to close the Guantanamo detention camp will be followed by a decision to close down the naval base and return the territory to the Cuban people," Perez Roque said.

Havana  - Cuba plans to tender an official invitation next week to the UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Novak, to visit the island this year, Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Wednesday.

This move and others come in the context of the communist country's increased cooperation with global human rights organs.

Cuba is also set to ratify "in the coming days" the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Forced Disappearance, Perez Roque said at a press conference in Havana.

Moscow - Cuban President Raul Castro began a week-long visit to Moscow on Wednesday, the first by a Cuban leader since the fall of the Soviet Union as Russia moves to restore ties with its Cold War ally.

Cuba's revolutionary strongman Fidel Castro twice visited the Soviet capital at the peak of the Cold War.

But relations between the two countries cooled after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist island's main foreign sponsor, in
1991.

Moscow  - Cuban President Raul Castro is due in Moscow on Wednesday for a week-long visit, the Kremlin press service said Monday, in the latest sign of reviving relations between the Cold War allies.

President Dmitry Medvedev extended Castro the invitation while on a visit to Havana in November.

Many see Moscow's warming ties with the small communist island, long an arch-foe of the United States, as a snub of Washington in anger over US missile defence plans and post-war aide to Georgia.

Washington, Jan. 25 : Many Cuban-Americans are anticipating a change in policy toward their homeland during the tenure of the Barack Obama administration.

Obama has won more than one-third of Florida''s Cuban-American vote in November, a voter base that in the past has favored Republican presidential candidates by margins of more than 80 percent.