Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in Cuba Monday where he met with his counterpart, Raul Castro, and the Cuban president's older brother and predecessor, Fidel Castro.

Rouhani had said ahead of the one-day visit that he wanted to stop in Cuba, a "friendly and revolutionary country," on his way to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro made a rare public appearance as he turned 90 on Saturday in an island transformed from the one he led for half a century.

Dressed in a white track jacket, Castro sat between his brother and successor, Raul, and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, at a gala organized by a children's theater company, a live broadcast on local television showed.

Opposition leaders said Thursday they plan to present a slate of candidates for next year's legislative and local elections, an act of political defiance in communist-governed Cuba.

The move, technically illegal in this one-party state, comes the same year that President Raul Castro leaves office, a post he has held since February 2008.

Cubans eager to reach the United States will keep leaving the island despite a decision by several Central American countries to close their borders to them, some Cubans in Panama told AFP on Tuesday.

Panama this week became the latest country in the region to slam shut its door to Cubans without visas, following the same policy implemented first by Nicaragua in November then by Costa Rica in December.

The first U.S. cruise ship to travel to Cuba in half a century docked in Havana on Monday, marking a new milestone in the rapprochement between the old Cold War foes.

A crowd of onlookers waved Cuban flags and filmed with their cell phones as the Adonia, a Carnival cruiseliner, sailed into port in Havana after setting off Sunday from Miami, the heart of the Cuban diaspora in the United States.

Cuba's Fidel Castro signaled continued resistance to rapprochement between Washington and Havana, writing in an opinion piece on Monday that his country "has no need of gifts" from the United States.

The former president, 89, remained out of sight during last week's historic visit to the communist island by U.S. President Barack Obama which aimed to cement normalization.

U.S. President Barack Obama told Cubans in an unprecedented live television address Tuesday that he had come to the communist island to "bury" decades of Cold War conflict.

Speaking from Havana's ornate Gran Teatro on the last day of his historic visit -- the first by a U.S. leader in 88 years -- Obama compared the United States and Cuba to "two brothers that have been estranged."

U.S. President Barack Obama and his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro met Monday in Havana's Palace of the Revolution for groundbreaking talks on ending the decades-long standoff between the two neighbors.

Obama, meeting Castro for only the third time for formal talks, was the first U.S. president in Cuba since 1928.

Cuban dissidents called on U.S. President Barack Obama to tackle the Cuban government over repression and to urge "radical change" during his visit to Havana starting Sunday.

Activists on the island, which has been under Communist Party control for more than five decades, welcomed Obama's visit, the first by a sitting U.S. president in 88 years.

A group of 11 Cuban migrants landed by boat on an uninhabited island off Puerto Rico, U.S. border officials said Friday, warning of the dangers of "irregular travel at sea."

The 10 men and a woman, who can now claim U.S. residency, were rescued by park rangers after docking Thursday on the Puerto Rican island of Mona and were turned over to the US Coast Guard to be processed by immigration authorities.