Fidel Castro says Cuba can talk with Obama
By ANITA SNOW
Associated Press
HAVANA -- Fidel Castro said Thursday that President-elect Barack Obama
is a man Cuba can talk with and indicated that communist officials would
be willing to meet with him wherever he wants.
But the former Cuban leader expressed disappointment with some of
Obama's Cabinet choices, including Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary
of state and Robert Gates as defense secretary.
In his latest essay distributed to official media, the ailing
82-year-old former president wrote that with Obama "a conversation can
be held wherever he wants," and that Cuban officials don't expect the
new U.S. administration to be marked by violence and war.
But he added that Obama must remember that a carrot-and-stick approach
won't work with Cuba.
Castro, and Cuban officials in general, have said very little about
Obama since he won the U.S. presidential election. But he did describe
him as intelligent in an earlier essay.
Fidel's younger brother, President Raul Castro, suggested in an recent
interview with actor-director Sean Penn for The Nation magazine that he
and Obama hold talks at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo.
On Obama's Cabinet choices, Fidel Castro noted that Clinton's husband,
former President Bill Clinton, signed laws that significantly tightened
the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba and that Hillary Clinton expressed
support for maintaining the embargo.
"I'm not complaining," Castro wrote. "I'm simply pointing it out."
The older Castro brother also said that Gates, who Obama has asked to
stay on as defense secretary, is a Republican rather than a Democrat
like the future president.
Despite his disappointment, "I wouldn't say now that Obama is less
intelligent. On the contrary, he is demonstrating faculties that allowed
me to see and compare his capacity with his mediocre adversary John McCain."
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