Reuters (with additional material by AFP). 9 March 2002. Castro says
U.S. should ask "forgiveness" of Cuba.
HAVANA -- Cuban President Fidel Castro has lambasted the U.S.-led war on
terrorism as hypocritical and said Washington should ask forgiveness for
four decades of hostile actions since the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
"The government of the United States should ask Cuba for forgiveness for
the thousands of acts of aggression, sabotage and terrorism committed
against our country for 43 years," Castro said in a speech on Friday
night.
Castro spoke to an audience of about 5,000 gathered at the Karl Marx
theater to decorate the mothers and wives of five Cubans condemned as
spies in the United States.
Castro was speaking at a ceremony to honor the mothers and wives of five
Cubans jailed in Florida on spy-related charges but hailed here as
heroes unjustly punished for protecting their nation from anti-Castro
violence planned on U.S. soil.
"Our heroes will have to be freed. The enormous injustice committed
against them will be known by the whole world ... men who defended their
people from death by seeking information on terrorism," he said of the
five, convicted last year for infiltrating Cuban American groups and a
U.S. military base.
Castro said Washington's declared new war on terrorism following the
Sept. 11 attacks was two-faced.
"The U.S. government will never have the moral authority to combat
terrorism while it continues to use such practices against nations like
Cuba and to support massive, repugnant and brutal massacres like those
carried out by its ally Israel against the Palestinian people," Castro
said.
"It should renounce its policy of world domination, stop intervening in
other countries, respect the United Nations' authority and comply with
international treaties it signed."
The U.S list of seven nations alleged to sponsor terrorism was ''the
height of arrogance," Castro added.
"They have the cynicism to mention Cuba among those countries, when
thousands of Cubans have died as victims of terrorism from the U.S. and
not one U.S. citizen has suffered the least scratch nor has one screw
even been affected by any action of such a nature by Cuba."
In a long list of grievances against Washington, Castro said Cuba was
owed an apology for its economic embargo, whose banning of food and
medicine were ''acts of genocide."
Castro also listed violence allegedly planned by anti-communist Cuban
Americans including a 1976 bomb that killed 73 people on a Cuban plane
and 1997 explosions at tourism installations; assassination plots
against himself; biological "wars" on people, animals and plants; and
the "illegal and arbitrary" U.S. occupation of the Guantanamo Bay Naval
base.
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