Fidel Castro thanks Cubans for 90th birthday wishes, lambasts U.S.

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

WORLD NEWS | Sat Aug 13, 2016 10:42am EDT

Fidel Castro thanks Cubans for 90th birthday wishes, lambasts U.S.

By Sarah Marsh | HAVANA

Fidel Castro thanked Cubans for their tributes to mark his 90th birthday on Saturday in a meandering column carried by state-run media in which the iconic leftist revolutionary also lambasted old foe United States.

Cuba went into overdrive this month honoring the retired "El Comandante" who spearheaded its 1959 revolution and built a Communist-run state on the doorstep of the United States, surviving what it says were hundreds of assassination attempts along the way.

Thousands danced to Latin beats along Havana's curving seafront Malecon boulevard throughout the night from Friday to Saturday. It was a giant street party in his honor, with a live band playing "Happy Birthday" on the stroke of midnight and fireworks exploding on the other side of the bay.

"I want to express my most profound gratitude for the shows of respect, the greetings and gifts I have received the days, which give me the strength to reciprocate through ideas," Castro wrote in the opinion piece.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-fidel-idUSKCN10N283

[Marksman_91]

1. Lambasts the US yet has no problem to open up to it now

God, I can't wait for the Castros to die out.

[Mika]

2. Looks like he'll outlive yet another POTUS.

[Uponthegears]

3. Best wishes

To the liberator of millions.

Just think where Cuba would be today had the US not used its unsurpassed power to punish the Cuban people more than half a century for rejecting the "glory" of life under a corrupt stooge of global capitalism.

[Mika]

4. Decades of anti Cuba propaganda has erased that fact from many American minds.

[Marksman_91]

5. Maybe they'd actually have democracy?

Not saying that Fulgencio Batista was a benevolent dude, guy was a scumbag as well. But I think it'd have been more likely that he'd been democratically replaced by someone else and the Cuban government would've become more gradually progressive. Instead they got stuck with the same ruling family for 57 years. Nothing exactly democratic about that