Havana  - A collisi

Havana - "Viva España," cheered Norberto Luis Diaz, the first Cuban to get a Spanish passport under a new law that grants citizenship to descendants of former exiles.

Diaz, a 38-year-old cardiologist, will to travel to Spain on Sunday, spending a few days in Madrid and then Valencia, where he even has a job offer.

Diaz got his passport on Thursday under the new Law of Historical Memory, which allows the children and grandchildren of Spaniards who fled the country during the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Franco dictatorship to apply for citizenship.

Havana  - US President Barack Obama's policies on Cuba are only focused on Cuban-Americans, at the expense of residents of the island nation, ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said Friday.

In an article criticizing Obama, Castro said that "sooner rather than later, Obama's politics are losing their virginity."

"The almost 12 million Cubans inhabiting the island do not interest him," he said.

Havana  - Cuba has declared the birthplace of brothers Fidel and Raul Castro a "national monument," state media reported.

The rural home of the Castros near the village of Biran in Holguin province in south-eastern Cuba was given the distinction because of its "extraordinary historical value," news reports said Tuesday.

Havana - The number of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in Cuba is decreasing and now stands at 205, even as the Cuban government has increased "political and social repression" in the form of "short-lived arbitrary arrests," a dissident human rights organization said Monday.

Havana  - Ailing Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro says he believes new US President Barack Obama has good intentions, but there were still a number of open questions.

Castro also didn't miss the opportunity to rub in that Cuba's half-century-old communist regime has now survived 10 US presidents, despite more than four decades of the US economic embargo.

In fact, with his inauguration on Tuesday, Obama became the eleventh president in the Castro family's list.