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Castro slams Bush 'lies and slanders' on sex tours
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-07-27 14:34 Cuban leader Fidel Castro questioned US President
George W Bush's mental fitness on Monday and rejected as "lies and slanders"
recent charges by the American president that Cuba encourages sex tourism.
Addressing the nation on the anniversary of his initial guerrilla uprising 51
years ago, Castro portrayed Bush as a dangerous religious fundamentalist bent on
destroying Cuban socialism. He accused Bush of exhibiting "strange behavior and
bellicosity."
Cuban President
Fidel Castro delivers a speech marking the 51st anniversary of the
attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santa Clara, July 26, 2004.
[Reuters] | "Let's hope, in Cuba's case, God does
not instruct Mr Bush to attack our country," Castro said. "He had better check
on any divine belligerent order by consulting the Pope."
In a speech in Tampa on July 16, Bush had accused Castro of welcoming sex
tourism, as he courted Cuban-American voters in Florida, a pivotal state in
November's election.
Havana strongly denies tolerating sex tourism.
Castro said the accusations were aimed at justifying steps by the Bush
administration last month to restrict visits and cash remittances from Cubans in
the United States.
"Mr Bush's lies and slanders and those of his closest advisors were
fabricated in a hurry to justify the savage measures taken against Cuban-born
people living in the United States who have close family ties in Cuba," Castro
said.
Castro quoted extensively from a recent book "Bush on the Couch: Inside the
Mind of the President," by Dr Justin Frank, a Washington psychoanalyst and a
Democrat.
The book labels Bush as a "dry-drunk" whose abstinence and strict Christian
beliefs make him a rigid leader with paranoid tendencies and a simplistic
worldview.
Bush, who gave up drinking in 1986, has acknowledged that he "used to drink
too much" but said he did not believe he was addicted.
Castro also quoted from other recent books critical of Bush, including
Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" and "Against All Enemies," by former
counterterrorism official Richard Clarke.
The references "help to explain the strange behavior and bellicosity of the
US president," Castro said.
Cuba's communist government was born of a revolution against a corrupt
US-backed dictatorship that allowed Mafia-run gaming and prostitution to thrive
in Havana in the 1950's. Prostitution was banned, but returned during the severe
economic crisis Cuba has undergone since the collapse of Soviet communism.
Castro, who will be 78 on August 13, looked cheerful in his trademark
olive-green military fatigues as he handed out awards for revolutionary
excellence before his speech at a university theater in Santa Clara, 176 miles
east of Havana.
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