Cuban President Fidel Castro launched an immense anti-American protest on Friday with denunciations and ridicule of President Bush, saying the U.S. leader was fraudulently elected and trying to impose "world tyranny." The Cuban leader led a sea of Cubans past the U.S. diplomatic mission here on the oceanfront Malecon Boulevard in a demonstration organized by the communist government against new U.S. measures aimed at squeezing the island's economy and pushing out Castro. The crowd chanted "Free Cuba! Fascist Bush!"
Castro said the march was "an act of indignant protest and a denunciation of the brutal, merciless and cruel measures" announced last week by Bush to tighten the 44-year U.S. embargo on the island. The 77-year-old Castro, dressed in his usual soldier suit green military uniform and field cap, appeared to walk with difficulty, favoring a leg, as he led the march for about 800 yards, sometimes waving a small flag before getting into a waiting car and leaving. The measures included restrictions on money transfers and family visits, increased efforts to transmit anti-Castro television to Cuba and appointment of a coordinator to plan a transaction from socialism to capitalism. Castro said 1 million people showed up. The number could not be confirmed, but the turnout was well into the hundreds of thousands at least. Many protesters wore red shirts and waved small Cuban flags made of paper. "This country could be exterminated... erased from the face of the earth," Castro told the crowd. But he said it would never fall into "the humiliating condition of a neo-colony of the United States." He said that if conflict comes, Bush "will be thousands of kilometers away and I will be in the first line of defense, ready to die in defense of my people."
Castro accused the United States of fighting "wars of conquest to seize the markets and resources of the world" while Cuba, he said, was sending abroad thousands of doctors to save lives. He insisted that Bush had "no morality nor any right at all to speak of liberty, democracy and human rights" and he said of Bush's 2000 election victory, "all the world knows it was fraudulent." Posters portrayed the U.S. president wearing a Hitler mustache and accompanied by a Nazi swastika. In a relatively early fallout of the Iraqi prisoner scandal, posters carried photos of abused Iraqis overwritten with the words: "This would never happen in Cuba."
| Damn. I just blew stuff out my nose and I wasn't eating or drinking anything... |
|