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Via NY Post: Fidel Castro — speaking out for the first time since President Obama’s historic visit to Cuba — blasted the US leader for trying to meddle in his country’s affairs.
In a letter titled “Brother Obama” and published Monday in El Granma, the official state newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, the island nation’s former president scoffed, “We don’t need the empire to give us any presents.”
Castro, 89, ripped Obama for assuming that Cuba trusted him when he said the US government is done trying to overthrow the Communist regime and that this will help the island move more quickly toward economic and political reform. “My modest suggestion is that he reflects and doesn’t try to develop theories about Cuban politics,” Castro said.
“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 food and material wealth that we need with the work and intelligence of our people.”
He even took a swipe at Obama’s relative youth. “Native populations do not exist at all in the minds of Obama. Nor does he say that racial discrimination was swept away by the Revolution; that retirement and salary of all Cubans were enacted by this before Mr. Barack Obama was 10 years old,” Castro said.
Obama had said in a speech that “it is time, now, for us to leave the past behind,” but the diehard Commie retorted, “I imagine that any one of us ran the risk of having a heart attack on hearing these words from the President of the United States.”
Castro ceded power to his brother Raul in 2008. Obama met with Raul last week, the first time a US president had been to Cuba since 1928. The newspaper that published Fidel’s letter takes its name from the yacht that Fidel and dozens of other rebels used to travel from Mexico to Cuba to launch their revolution in 1956.
DCG