Mediacentral.com. 3/27 17:10 CST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cuban President Fidel Castro does not object to being labeled ``dictator,'' but any aspersions cast on his mental health really drive him crazy, a former intelligence agent for Cuba said Monday.
``Investigation of Castro's mental condition, this really bothers him because it humiliates him,'' said Jorge Masetti, who left Cuba a decade ago for Paris.
``They don't mind if you call him a dictator, in fact he even likes it, but if you treat him like a nut...,'' Masetti said through a translator at a press briefing at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Masetti has written a book, ``El Furor y el Delirio'' (''Fury and Delirium'') about his activities with guerrilla movements in Latin America in the 1980s and Cuban intelligence.
``I am fearful that he may seek an apocalyptic departure,'' Masetti said. Castro, 73, has been in power since his January 1959 revolution toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista.
``He is trying to provoke a confrontation with the United States by any means necessary, even in a pathetic and ridiculous way,'' he said, referring to the flare up over Cuban shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez.
The boy has been mired in an international custody battle between relatives in Miami demanding he stay and his father and the Cuban government demanding his return to Cuba.
``He's (Castro) trying to use the same methods today that he used to consolidate the power in the '70s to exploit and accentuate the contradictions of the United States, and the mobilization of masses,'' Masetti said.
``But unfortunately for him, the United States doesn't respond in the same way because the Cold War is over and the masses he's mobilizing in Cuba are rather tired and bored,'' Masetti said.
Masetti was born in Argentina and his father founded the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. Masetti was the son-in-law of Antonio de la Guardia, a Cuban intelligence official tried and executed by the Cuban government in 1989.
At age 17, Masetti joined the ERP guerrilla group in Argentina, an armed Marxist-Leninist group with ties to Cuba. Later, a small group of them joined the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and were assigned to special operations.
Those operations included the assassination of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in Paraguay and the bombing of a 1984 press conference of Nicaraguan Contra commander Eden Pastora that killed eight people including three journalists, Masetti said, adding he had left the group by that
time.
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