Fidel Castro attacks Obama economic plans

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-05 11:58

HAVANA _ US President Barack Obama intends to print "enormous sums of money" to keep American society from grinding to a halt, Fidel Castro said in his second critical essay of the US leader, released Wednesday.

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro is seen in Havana in this picture taken January 21, 2009 and released January 23, 2009. [Agencies]

The ailing former Cuban president had previously praised Obama, but last week he wrote an essay in which he demanded that the new US president return the Guantanamo military base to Cuba and criticized his response to the Israeli incursion into Gaza.

His latest column, posted on a government Web site, said that "any criticism on my part (of Obama) is classified, without exception, as an attack, an accusation or other similar names."

The 82-year-old revolutionary accused US authorities of attacking Cuba throughout the 1960s, including with the Bay of Pigs invasion, but said it is not his intention "to blame President Obama for actions that were taken when he was a child of 6."

He did question how the present-day US will fare under Obama's stewardship, however.

He wrote, for example, that the United States "cannot satisfy its vital needs without the extraction of the enormous material resources of a great number of countries."

He questioned whether the new vehicles produced by the American automotive industry would be efficient enough to "meet the geological demands to protect humanity from the growing deterioration of the environment?"

He also said that he believes Obama "intends to print enormous sums of money in search of technologies that generate energy production without which modern societies would be paralyzed."

Suffering from an unknown illness, Castro has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006. His younger brother Raul succeeded him as president almost a year ago.

Following Obama's inauguration, the elder Castro praised the new US president as "intelligent and noble."