Castro likens Bush to 19th century imperialist monarch
AFP | October 29, 2007
Cuban leader Fidel Castro compared US President George W. Bush to the king of a 19th century colonial power, in an article published on Sunday.
Reacting to Bush's calling out the independence slogan "Viva Cuba Libre " Long Live Free Cuba in a speech Wednesday, Castro branded Bush a "fake" freedom-fighter in calling for Cuba's liberation 139 years after the Caribbean island launched its war for independence from royalist Spain.
"I never imagined I would hear the phrase 139 years afterwards from the mouth of a United States president," Castro wrote in the article published in Cuban media.
"It is like a king of the time, or his regent, proclaiming "Long Live Free Cuba."
Castro, 81, instead paid homage to mid-19th century US president Abraham Lincoln for abolishing slavery and compared Lincoln to Che Guevara, the hero of the 1959 Castro revolution.
Sidelined by ailments from the country's presidency for 15 months, Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, who has assumed his duties in the meantime, were the target of Bush's Washington State Department speech Wednesday.
Bush called on the international community to back Cuba's pro-democracy movements and scolded countries that do business with Havana, saying they were enriching a brutal elite.
"The socialist paradise is a tropical Gulag," Bush said in a reference to former Soviet prison camps for political dissidents.
