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.
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