Castro to Bush

This is an edited excerpt from a recent speech by Cuban president Fidel Castro, who led hundreds of thousands in a march last Friday in Havana to protest the economic embargo by the U.S.

Mr. George W. Bush:

We have not gathered in a hostile gesture to the American people whose ethics, rooted in the time when the first pilgrims emigrated to this hemisphere, are well known to us. This is a denunciation of the brutal, ruthless and cruel measures against our country that your country has just adopted.

We know beforehand what you believe, or want to make others believe, about those who are marching here.

In your opinion, they are oppressed masses who yearn for liberty and who have been forced onto the streets by the Cuban government.

You completely ignore that no force in the world could drag a dignified, proud people, which has withstood 45 years of hostility, blockade and aggression from the most powerful nation on earth, onto the streets like a flock of animals. A statesman, or whoever claims to be one, should know that down through history really humane ideas of justice have been shown to be much more powerful than force; force leaves in its wake only dusty, contemptible ruins; humane ideas leave a luminous trail that no one will ever be able to extinguish. Every era has had its own ideas, both good and bad ones, and they have accumulated. But the worst, most sinister and uncertain ideas belong in this era in which we live in a barbarous, uncivilized, globalized world.