Cuban President Fidel Castro said on Friday he will outlast any Bush Administration plans to oust him and Cuba's one-party communist state will survive his death.
"The group of idiots that met in the White House will die of bitterness and frustration," the 77-year-old Cuban leader said in an address to school children celebrating the 10th birthday of Elian Gonzalez, the shipwrecked boy at the center of an international custody battle in 2000.
Top Bush aides met on Friday at the White House and decided tighter inspections of US citizens traveling to Cuba and a crackdown on illegal business with the Caribbean island to enforce four-decade-old sanctions aimed at undermining Castro.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, created in October by US President George W. Bush to foster a democratic transition on the island and headed by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Cuban-born Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, met for the first time on Friday at the White House with Bush's national security advisor Condoleezza Rice.
"This little meeting does not worry us ... they would be better off dedicating their time to drinking whiskey and smoking marijuana," Castro said, speaking to hundreds of school children.
"They hope that 15 minutes after my death the revolution will collapse. They don't know that this country has thousands of leaders," he added.
Castro, who overthrew a US-backed right-wing dictator in a 1959 guerrilla uprising, has outlasted the hostility of nine US presidents after building a Soviet-styled communist society140kms from the US.
Since he arrived in the White House, Bush has tightened the screws on Cuba, reducing travel there by academic and cultural exchange groups, and cracking down on Americans who visit the island without a special US Treasury Department permit.
Bush has vowed to veto efforts to amend trade sanctions, such as the lifting of travel restrictions advocated by business groups. Three years ago, US farmers and agribusiness companies successfully lobbied for an exception to the embargo allowing sales of food to Cuba.
Havana says Bush is pandering to a vocal community of anti-Castro exiles in Florida, a key state in his election and his re-election plans.
The Cuban leader, who gained political capital from the return to Cuba of Elian Gonzalez after US agents snatched him from exiled relatives in Miami in 2000, helped the boy blow out candles on a large white cake at his school in Cardenas, 130 kms east of Havana.
‘DO WHATEVER’: US Representative Nancy Pelosi said on MSNBC the decision was up to Joe Biden, but her lack of a full statement backing him is likely to send a signal The re-election campaign of US President Joe Biden on Wednesday hit new trouble as US Representative Nancy Pelosi said merely “it’s up to the president to decide” if he should stay in the race, celebrity donor George Clooney said he should not run, and Democratic senators and lawmakers expressed fresh fear about his ability to challenge former US president Donald Trump. Late in the evening, US Senator Peter Welch called on Biden to withdraw from the election, becoming the first Senate Democrat to do so. Welch said he is worried because “the stakes could not be higher.” The sudden flurry of pronouncements, despite
‘STARWARS’: The weapons would make South Korea the first country to deploy and operate laser weapons, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration said South Korea is to deploy laser weapons to shoot down North Korean drones this year, becoming the world’s first country to deploy and operate such weapons in the military, the country’s arms procurement agency said yesterday. South Korea has called its laser program the “StarWars project.” The drone-zapping laser weapons that the South Korean military has developed with Hanwha Aerospace are effective and cheap, with each shot costing 2,000 won (US$1.45), and also quiet and “invisible,” the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) said in a statement. “Our country is becoming the first country in the world to deploy and operate laser weapons, and
US ELECTIONS: US President Joe Biden mistakenly introduced Ukrainian President Zelenskiy as Russian President Vladimir Putin at a NATO summit on Thursday US President Joe Biden vowed he would remain in this year presidential race, but two critical mistakes in the span of two hours deepened concerns about his mental acuity that threaten his campaign. Biden, 81, saw the culmination of this week’s NATO summit as a chance to reassure allies who for two weeks had fretted about his abilities following his first debate performance against former US president Donald Trump. Over a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and a nearly hour-long news conference, he spoke confidently on a range of complex issues from the tax code and trade policy to
The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump by a shooter at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed. US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election. The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist