Cuban President Fidel Castro turned 76 on Tuesday, presiding over school openings and saluting newly minted doctors, defying the United States as he has almost every day for decades.
Castro who was born August 13, 1926, in Biran, eastern Cuba and has spent more than half his life in power, opted to spend the day on a lightning tour of schools being renovated.
In the afternoon, Castro led a ceremony capping the restoration of 200 schools, calling himself ”the happiest man in the world,” then rushed to another gathering to congratulate a phalanx of 4 000 new graduates of the island’s medical schools.
”Today we have the conviction that there is no force in the world capable of destroying our dreams,” Castro said at one ceremony, underscoring his view that the only communist-ruled country in the Americas still is on the right path.
Dissidents for the first time won national public attention in May as former US president Jimmy Carter visited Cuba, submitting 11 000 signatures to the legislature asking for broad economic and electoral law reforms.
But it was swept aside last month as Castro flexed his control over the island and more than eight million people — almost every Cuban eligible to vote — voted to make the prevailing system ”irrevocable” in the constitution.
Castro, a baseball fanatic and Jesuit-educated lawyer who came to power in 1959 aged 32, has been a perpetual thorn in the side of the United States, which was alarmed and embarrassed by Castro’s establishment of a Cold War communist-bloc nation just 144 kilometres off its southeast flank.
The Cuban president ushered in universal education and health care for Cubans, and equalised salaries across the island, while fixing the blame for hardship on the 40-year-old US economic embargo Washington hoped would foment rebellion against him.
In Washington the United States labelled Castro a ”dinosaur” as he turned 76, and issued him a birthday challenge to renounce communism and embrace reform for the benefit of the Cuban people.
State Department representative Philip Reeker suggested Castro take a close look at US President George Bush’s initiatives for Cuba which promise an easing of sanctions against the island in exchange for broad democratic and market reforms.
”If the Cuban government takes these concrete steps toward democracy, President Bush will work with the United States Congress to ease the ban on trade and travel between the United States and Cuba,” Reeker said.
”So there’s a birthday challenge, dinosaurs notwithstanding, for Mr Castro to once again step back and think about the future of his own people.” – Sapa-AFP