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Castro's tip: Clinton-Obama
the winning ticket
Anthony Boadle
Reuters
Wednesday Aug 29, 2007
Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping Democratic candidates
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and win the U.S. presidential
election.
Clinton leads Obama in the race to be the Democratic nominee
for the November 2008 election, and Castro said they would make
a winning combination.
"The word today is that an apparently unbeatable ticket
could be Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate,"
he wrote in an editorial column on U.S. presidents published on
Tuesday by Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma.
At 81, Castro has outlasted nine U.S. presidents since his 1959
revolution turned Cuba into a thorn in Washington's side by building
a communist society about 90 miles offshore from the United States.
(Article continues below)
He said all U.S. presidential candidates seeking the "coveted"
electoral college votes of Florida have had to demand a democratic
government in Cuba to win the backing of the powerful Cuban exile
community.
Clinton and Obama, both senators, called for democratic change
in Cuba last week.
Castro has not appeared in public since intestinal illness forced
him to hand over power to his brother Raul Castro in July last
year.
He has turned to writing dozens of columns and essays, but rumors
that his health is worsening or that he may even be dead have
swirled through the Cuban exile community in Miami in the last
two weeks.
Castro's only reference to U.S. President George W. Bush in his
latest essay was to say that he "needed fraud" to win
Florida's electoral college votes and the presidency in the fiercely
contested election in 2000.
Castro said former President Bill Clinton was "really kind"
when he bumped into him and the two men shook hands at a U.N.
summit meeting in 2000. He also praised Clinton for sending elite
police to "rescue" shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez
from the home of his Miami relatives in 2000 to end an international
custody battle.
But even Clinton was forced to bow to Miami politics and tighten
the U.S. embargo against Cuba in 1996, using as a "pretext"
the shooting down of two small planes used by exile groups to
overfly Havana, Castro wrote.
He said his favorite U.S. president since 1959 was Jimmy Carter,
another Democrat, because he was not an "accomplice"
to efforts to violently overthrow the Cuban government.
Sixteen years after Dwight Eisenhower broke off diplomatic ties
with Cuba, Carter restored low-level relations in 1977 when interest
sections were opened in each country's capital.
Castro made no mention of Republican Cold War victor Ronald Reagan,
or of John F. Kennedy, whose Democratic administration launched
the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by CIA-trained Cuban exiles
in 1961.
One of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War came a year
later when Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev faced off
for 13 days over Soviet missiles that Castro allowed Moscow to
place in Cuba.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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