Cuba has called for the US naval base in Guantanamo to be returned to its territory and wanted a UN torture inspector to visit the island.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque on Wednesday said that US President Barack Obama's decision to close within a year the "war on terror" prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay was positive but insufficient.

Cuba expects that Obama's decision to close down the Guantanamo prison camp "is followed by the decision to close down the base and return that territory to the Cubans," a base that the United States "really does not need for its security and defense,” Perez Roque said.

Perez Roque also said that the United Nations' torture investigator, Manfred Nowak, will be invited next week "so that he can visit our country during the course of the current year."

"Cuba is a country where over the past 50 years there has not been ... a single person that has gone missing. Nor has anyone been tortured, nor has there been a single extrajudicial execution," Perez Roque said.

The naval base at Guantanamo Bay has been in the US's hands since the end of the 1898 Spanish-American war, and following a 1902 measure imposed by the US authority in Cuba that ceded the base in perpetuity to the United States.

When the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959 the new government rejected the agreement. Washington has not budged.

SG/RE