Obama urges 'meaningful actions' from Cuba on rights

Barack Obama with Chilean president - © AFP Saul Loeb

AFP

SANTIAGO (AFP) - US President Barack Obama on Monday urged Cuba to extend greater freedoms to its citizens, in a sweeping speech on Latin America delivered in Santiago, Chile.

"Cuban authorities must take meaningful actions to respect the basic rights of the Cuban people -- not because the United States insists on it, but because the people of Cuba deserve it," Obama said in an address here on the second leg of a Latin America tour.

Obama said the United States had taken measures to improve the long strained relations between Havana and Washington, including relaxing some decades-old economic sanctions.

NATO is 'mafia' and Obama a 'snake charmer': Castro

India Report

HAVANA: NATO is a "military mafia," the war in Afghanistan is "genocidal" and US President Barack Obama deserves the prize for the "best snake charmer" who ever lived, Cuba's Fidel Castro has said. 

In an article published on Tuesday in response to the Western alliance's weekend summit in Portugal, the former Cuban leader called NATO an "aggressive institution" that ignored "billions of persons suffering from poverty, underdevelopment, shortages of food, housing, health, education and jobs." 

Castro, 84, communism's most visible living figure, led Cuba from the 1959 Revolution until he stepped down for health reasons in 2006, handing over the presidency to his brother Raul. 

Castro called NATO (short for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) "a bird of prey sitting in the lap of the Yankee empire," that was used by the United States to wage "the genocidal Afghanistan war." 

He brushed off ambitious plans unveiled at the Lisbon summit that would have Western leaders press Kabul to take over security by 2014, predicting they would eventually "hand over power to the Afghan resistance, in defeat." 

The United States is "going through a difficult phase as the result of its war exploits" and using its "enormous media resources to maintain, dupe and confuse world public opinion," Castro said. 

"Obama already admitted that his promise to withdraw US soldiers from Afghanistan may be postponed... After the Nobel Prize, we would have to award him with the prize for 'the best snake charmer' that has ever existed."

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Fidel Castro: Osama bin Laden Worked for CIA

Chris McGreal 
The Guardian
August 28, 2010

Fidel Castro reveals what many of us have known for years — Osama bin Laden was a prized CIA asset.

Editor’s note: The Guardian dismisses Osama’s link to the CIA as a conspiracy theory. There is, however, an avalanche of facts pointing to Bin Laden’s relationship with the CIA, although the corporate media has consistently ignored it since September 11, 2001. See the resources below.

Fidel Castro has more reason than most to believe conspiracy theories involving dark forces in Washington. After all, the CIA tried to blow his head off with an exploding cigar.

But the ageing Cuban revolutionary may have gone too far for all but the most ardent believer in the reach and competence of America’s intelligence agency. He has claimed that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of the CIA and that President George Bush summoned up the al-Qaida leader whenever he needed to increase the fear quotient. The former Cuban president said he knows it because he has read WikiLeaks.

Castro told a visiting Lithuanian writer, who is known as a font of intriguing conspiracy theories about plots for world domination, that Bin Laden was working for the White House.

Read entire article

Resources:

MSNBC: Bin Laden’s, CIA roots. How We Created Our Own Terror
Bin Laden and the CIA 
Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban 
How the CIA created Osama bin Laden 
CIA admits faking Osama bin Laden 9/11 confession video 
Wikileaks: CIA lied about Osama bin Laden 
Whistleblower: Bin Laden was US proxy until 9/11 
CIA: Osama Helped Bush in ’04 
Osama bin Laden’s Bush family Business Connections 
“Intelligence Asset” Osama bin Laden supports Bush Re-election

There's Still Hope for the World

There's Still Hope for the World Fidel Praises Global Research by Fidel Castro Ruz Global Research, August 1, 2010 Cuba Debate For 57 years, two generations of Cubans, the one that came before us and our own, which led both from January 1 to today, have fought against the most powerful empire humanity has ever known. I do not harbor the slightest fear of seeming to exaggerate; I say this with modesty, even embarrassment. It hurt to see how hundreds of millions of young people in the world were not even able to learn how to read and write, or are semi-illiterate, or do not have jobs, and are ignorant of everything related to the inalienable rights of human beings. A colossal crime is being committed against thousands of millions of adolescents and young people of both sexes, whose wonderful intelligence is manipulated by the mass media, and in fact, many of them, especially males, are turned into soldiers to die in unjust, genocidal wars carried out all over the planet. The economic system that has prevailed is incompatible with the interests of humanity. It must end and it will end. The new generations of young Cubans will make their message be heard, the one born from their country's experiences; they will fulfill a sacred duty imposed by the era in which it befell them to live. They will do so with humility, and brandishing the truth, without any stupid beliefs in racial or national superiority of any kind. I have asked myself many times, why do our children and adolescents have to die? Why do our young people have to die? Why does all this intelligence, where so many virtues could be implanted and cultivated, have to disappear? Why do their parents have to die in fratricidal wars? Imagine that the website Global Research deserves no credit at all; that the theory of Gregory Ryskin, a biochemical engineer at Northwestern University, regarding the methane bubble that article writer Terrence Aym associated with the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, deserves no attention at all, inviting us to sleep peacefully. The Global Research site published the only explanation possible for the sinking of the Cheonan, a sophisticated antisubmarine ship capable of detecting a ship of that type from 185 kilometers away. Obviously, it could not be sunk by an old, Russian-made submarine built more than 50 years ago. We prefer to cling to the hope that the arguments used in the "Reflection" to be published on Tuesday, August 3, fit reality. Otherwise, the other danger of a war breaking out, of immediately becoming a nuclear one, would be the only alternative, and therefore, this message will be more important than ever. There is not a chance of one in a thousand, in ten thousand, or any number you like, that the United States or Israel will drop the sanctions established by the United Nations Security Council, with strict time limits; nor is there one of Iran accepting the inspection of its ships. Even a blind man would see it is crystal clear. We will not surrender, nor will we allow the empire to deceive the world. Fidel Castro Ruz is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Fidel Castro Ruz