Castro article criticises US environmental policies
Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro today criticised US environmental policies, emerging from months of silence on political matters during his long recuperation from intestinal surgery.
“Condemned to premature death by hunger and thirst more than 3 billion people of the world,” read the headline in Castro’s article in the Communist Party daily Granma, which asserted that US President George Bush’s support of using crops to produce ethanol for cars could deplete food stocks in developing nations.
“This isn’t an exaggerated number; it is actually cautious,” read the article signed by Castro and distributed via email to international correspondents by foreign ministry officials.
He wrote that during a meeting on Monday between the US president and American car manufacturers: “The sinister idea of converting food into combustibles was definitively established as the economic line of the foreign policy of the United States.”
The article was written in the same kind of apocalyptic style Castro traditionally has used when discussing the impact of US international policies on developing nations, and there was no reason to doubt that the ailing 80-year-old was its author.
As in some shorter messages signed by Castro in the eight months since he fell ill, the article did not seem aimed at dispelling rumours about his health, but rather at drawing attention to opinions on world affairs.
