Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Cuba -Fidel Castro to Obama: Don't need your presents

Mar 29 2016 : The Times of India (Chennai)
Fidel Castro to Obama: Don't need your presents
Havana:
AP


Fidel Castro responded on Monday to President Barack Obama's historic trip to Cuba with a bristling letter recounting the history of US aggression against Cuba, writing that “we don't need the empire to give us any presents.“The 1,500-word letter in state media titled `Brother Obama' was Castro's first response to the president's three-day visit last week, in which the American president said he had come to bury the two countries' history of Cold War hostility .Obama did not meet with the 89-year-old Fidel Castro on the trip but met several times with his 84-year-old brother Raul Castro, the Cuban president.
Fidel Castro writes of Obama: “My modest suggestion is that he reflects and doesn't try to develop theories about Cuban politics.“ He goes over crucial sections of Obama's speech line by line, engaging in an ex-post-facto dialogue with the US president with pointed critiques of perceived slights and insults, including Obama's failure to give credit to indigenous Cubans and Castro's prohibition of racial segregation after coming to power in 1959.
The focus on US-Cuba business ties appears to have rankled Castro, who nationalised US firms in 1959 and established the communist system into which his brother is introducing gradual market-based reforms. “No one should pretend that the people of this noble and selfless country will renounce its glory and its rights,“ he wrote. “We are capable of producing the material wealth that we need with with work and intelligence of our people.“

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