Maria Julua Mayoral, Pedro de la Hoz & Jose de la Osa, Havana
Cuban President Fidel Castro has challenged US President George Bush, the CIA, the 33 US intelligence agencies, the thousands of banks in the world and the "servants" of Forbes magazine — which claims that Castro has a fortune of US$900 million — to prove that he has even one dollar in an overseas account.
"If they can prove that I have one single dollar, I will resign from all my responsibilities and the duties I am carrying out; they won't need any more plans or transitions", the revolutionary leader said emphatically.
"Why would I want money, if I'm soon to be 80 and I didn't want it before?" Castro asked, adding that during his life he had never abandoned his principles.
He calculated that it would take about 1000 suitcases to carry around that amount of money. "Who took them? On what airplane? Who carried them, who escorted them? How could I be taking out money for so many years?"
"It's simply an insult", he said, accusing them of wanting to make him look like one of the thieves that they nursed. "Where is Mobuto's money? Where is the Somoza family's money?" Castro said that in the US, there are hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars stolen via US banks. "There they are: bring out the lists, publish them."
Castro said what was much more horrible than painting him as a thief was making him seem to be betraying the dead — those who died in the Moncada attack, aboard the Granma, in the Sierra Maestra, in the Escambray, in the Bay of Pigs, on internationalist missions or defending Cuba from terrorist attacks.
The president added that what the Forbes "bandits" should publish is his Olympic record, throughout history, of being the person whom the most powerful empire on Earth has tried to assassinate the most times.
Referring to the thousands of patients who have benefitted from Operation Miracle — a program providing Latin Americans with restorative eye surgery — Castro asked what those people would think when they read the newspapers talking about his alleged personal wealth. "It is a campaign to make me look like a thief", he said, adding that it had a goal: to destroy Cuba, to make Castro look like a crook so that nobody will acknowledge anything that is done to benefit others, even though we are a country that has some 25,000 health professionals working free of charge in a large number of countries. "And that is because we have human capital, and we certainly can rely on $100 billion in human capital."
Reading what had been published by several media agencies echoing the libel printed by Forbes, Castro noted that while deliberate lies were being published, nothing has been said about the almost 20,000 Latin American medical students studying in Cuba, or the fact that this country will be educating almost 100,000 doctors over the coming years.
[Abridged from the May 16 Granma.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 31, 2006.
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