|
Sun Jun 30, 7:42 Am Et . By Anita Snow, Associated Press
Writer.
Yahoo!
HAVANA - Fidel Castro accused Russia of betraying Cuba by breaking all of
its former trade and other agreements with the communist island a decade ago
after the Soviet Union collapsed and forming an alliance with the United States.
"Russia, allied with the United States, broke all the accords and
betrayed Cuba," Castro said in speech reported by Sunday the Communist
Party daily Granma. "I cannot use another word, although I do not try to
blame any one leader in particular.
"It was the fruit of its errors and the painful way in which it lost
the ideological battle against the western capitalist and imperialist
bourgeoisie, under the standard of the United States," Castro said in an
official version of the speech made Saturday at a ceremony celebrating the
renovation of more than 100 Havana schools.
Castro currently is leading Cuba in its own intense ideological battle, even
moving last week to have socialism permanently inscribed in the constitution as
"irrevocable."
Cuba is still struggling to recover from the economic crisis that began when
it lost its primary sources of preferential trade with the collapse of the
Soviet bloc.
The Cuban leader said the schools also fell into disuse because of the U.S.
government's tightening of trade sanctions against the island during the 1990s,
which he referred to as a "double blockade."
Hundreds of primary and secondary schools in the nation's capital had
classrooms without windows, bathrooms without doors, leaky roofs and antiquated
plumbing.
Castro's words came two days after the Group of Eight economic summit of the
world's most powerful countries ended in Canada, where leaders agreed to help
Russia dispose of its Soviet-era arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons.
The 20 billion dollars pledged by industrial nations to help eliminate the
arms has been met with a mixed response back in Moscow, where some retired
military leaders and others have accused Russian President Vladimir Putin ( news
- web sites) of capitulating to the West by agreeing to cooperate more closely
with NATO and assuming full entry into the G-8.
Havana, too, has criticized Moscow's alliance with NATO, as well as its
decision to close a listening post it built in Cuba two years after the 1962
missile crisis. | 
