CUBA: Mexican president offers goat

BY KAREN FLETCHER

HAVANA — It's every host's nightmare: US President George Bush refuses
to come if Cuban President Fidel Castro is there, and there will be the
usual pack of terrorists and hired assassins who try to murder Castro whenever
he goes to a party.

But Castro is a popular guy in some important circles, and he wants
to come and give an important speech. He says he's not afraid of Bush,
or the assassins. If you don't invite Castro you look like a spineless
apologist for the US government. What do you do?

Faced with just this dilemma as the host of the March 18-22 UN-sponsored
International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexican
President Vincente Fox rang Castro on March 19 in a panic and begged him
to keep his attendance at the conference as short as possible and “not
to attack the United States or President Bush”.

For the sake of friendly relations with Mexico, Castro promised to make
himself scarce after lunch on the first day and to limit himself to outlining
the reasons for Cuba's opposition to the Monterrey “consensus”, “with all
due respect”.

“You don't need to have any doubts that I know how to tell the truth
politely and with the proper elegance”, Castro assured Fox.

Somewhat mollified, Fox turned to easier things:

“Listen, Fidel, there's still that invitation for you to accompany me
to lunch at about 1 or 1.30pm. Then, after lunch you could leave.”

“Provided you don't offer me turkey with chilli sauce and lots of food
because I don't like to fly on a full stomach”, Castro replied.

“No, we have goat, which is very tasty”, said Fox.

“You are offering goat?”

“Yes, sir, excellent.”

“Good, very good,” said Castro.

In the event, Castro never partook of the promised goat. Instead, after
his speech on March 21, in which he politely laid bare the lack of any
real commitment on the part of the rich countries to finance development
in the poor countries, Castro had a late lunch at his hotel with Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez, before flying out of Monterrey shortly after Bush
arrived at 5pm.

“We lunched on Mexican tortillas and fried beans, which I found more
delicious than the goat”, he told a press conference in Havana on April
22, during he played a tape-recording of his March 19 conversation with
Fox.

On the day Castro departed from Monterrey, Fox's treacherous foreign
minister Jorge Castaneda was busily telling the press that Mexico did not
understand why Castro was leaving so early!

At the April 22 press conference, Castro said he had not done revealed
what had happened in Monterrey earlier because he didn't want to embarrass
Fox, but Castaneda's lies about the reasons for his quick departure needed
to be publicly exposed.

Castaneda also played a key part in provoking the incident at the Mexican
embassy in Havana in February, when a bunch of Cuban hooligans hijacked
a bus and drove it into the embassy compound. The day before the incident,
Castaneda had made ambiguous comments from Miami about Mexico's doors being
open “to all Cubans” — comments that were repeated hourly by the Miami-based
anti-Cuban Radio Marti.

Castaneda had also taken the lead for the US in its desperate efforts
to win Latin American support for a resolution criticising Cuba in the
UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. With first the Czech Republic and
then Peru refusing to sponsor the resolution (and the US unable to do so
since last year it lost its seat on the 53-member commission), Washington
went on the hunt was on for a proxy.

Uruguay received the tap on the shoulder and, with US State Department
official Simon Henshaw on one side and Castaneda on the other, the Uruguayan
representative was successfully shepherded through the process. Henshaw
even sat in Uruguay's seat in the commission prior to the presentation
of the resolution!

Addressing the one-million-strong May Day rally in Havana, Castro said
that each and every one of the seven Latin American countries (Argentina,
Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay) that had voted
for the resolution on April 19 were far from guaranteeing their citizens
healthy and decent lives.

He illustrated this claim with some telling statistics — in capitalist
Latin America, the illiteracy rate is 11.7%, while in post-capitalist Cuba
it is 0.2%, and 100% of Cuban children attend elementary school; the region’s
mortality rate is 32 per 1000 live births, while in Cuba it is 6.2 per
1000. Latin America as a whole has 160 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants,
Cuba has 590.

Castro wondered out loud whether the death squads, illegal executions,
tortures, disappearances and murders, bribery, embezzlement and outright
theft of public funds in the capitalist countries of Latin America were
not the most eloquent proof that democracy and human rights are in short
supply in those countries.

In his 50-minute speech, Castro also affirmed that Cuba has not and
will not dip its flag to the “hegemonic superpower that dictates orders
to its bootlickers”.

From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.

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From GLW issue 491