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Cuba blasts Mexico over U.N. aid summit
By Marc Frank
HAVANA, Cuba, March 24 (Reuters) - Cuba accused Mexico on Sunday of selling out Cuban President Fidel Castro to the United States at last week's U.N. aid summit in Mexico, as a diplomatic spat over the country's marginalization at the event heated up.
Castro abandoned the summit in Mexico's northern city of Monterrey on Thursday, shortly before U.S. President George W. Bush arrived. Senior Cuban officials later charged that Castro, Latin America's symbol of rebellion against Washington, was asked by the summit host to make himself scarce.
Mexico has been a close ally of Castro's government since he took power in 1959. But relations have been strained in recent years as Mexico has moved closer economically and politically to the United States, which imposed an economic embargo on the communist-run island 40 years ago.
"The United States put a price on the Monterrey Summit, and the Mexican government accepted the deal. The money of exchange was Fidel," said a front-page editorial on Sunday in Cuba's state-run Juventud Rebelde newspaper.
Local analysts believe Castro writes or reviews all editorials published by Cuba's official media.
Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox, the summit host, have denied pressuring Castro to leave.
"I know of no pressure placed on anybody. Fidel Castro can do what he wants to do," Bush said at a joint summit news conference with Fox.
Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, who remained in Castro's place at Monterrey and was denied entry to some events where Bush participated, disagreed.
Mexican officials "with great authority, transmitted the message and specifically asked us, given they could not prevent Fidel from coming, that he leave immediately after lunch," Alarcon said.
'PAINFUL'
"It is painful that this happened in Mexico, because if there was at least one thing you could say about the country in the past, it was that it had an independent foreign policy," Sunday's editorial said of the incident.
The 75-year-old Castro and Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive and advocate of democracy and closer regional ties with the United States, had managed until now to avoid an all-out diplomatic dispute despite their ideological differences.
Castro said he was not offended when Fox met with dissidents during a brief visit to the Caribbean island in February.
Later in the month, when a group of Cubans rammed a bus into Mexico's Havana embassy in a failed attempt to leave the country, Castro and Fox worked together to end the incident quickly.
As Sunday's attack on the Mexican government showed, keeping Castro on the sidelines of a U.N. meeting on Third World development, his favored topic, proved too much for Havana.
"The Monterrey Summit will go down in the annals of this century as a place that obeyed the world's policeman, a master that has disdain for Mexicans, that condemns them to death on the border or assigns them the dirtiest work -- in domestic life and foreign policy, as we are seeing," the editorial said.
The five-day U.N. development conference, attended by more than 50 heads of state in the final two days, ended late on Friday with rich and poor nations saying they had struck a bargain to fight world poverty.
Castro ridiculed the efforts of the world's wealthy nations to fight poverty during his speech on Thursday, saying "the existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history."
By Marc Frank
HAVANA, Cuba, March 24 (Reuters) - Cuba accused Mexico on Sunday of selling out Cuban President Fidel Castro to the United States at last week's U.N. aid summit in Mexico, as a diplomatic spat over the country's marginalization at the event heated up.
Castro abandoned the summit in Mexico's northern city of Monterrey on Thursday, shortly before U.S. President George W. Bush arrived. Senior Cuban officials later charged that Castro, Latin America's symbol of rebellion against Washington, was asked by the summit host to make himself scarce.
Mexico has been a close ally of Castro's government since he took power in 1959. But relations have been strained in recent years as Mexico has moved closer economically and politically to the United States, which imposed an economic embargo on the communist-run island 40 years ago.
"The United States put a price on the Monterrey Summit, and the Mexican government accepted the deal. The money of exchange was Fidel," said a front-page editorial on Sunday in Cuba's state-run Juventud Rebelde newspaper.
Local analysts believe Castro writes or reviews all editorials published by Cuba's official media.
Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox, the summit host, have denied pressuring Castro to leave.
"I know of no pressure placed on anybody. Fidel Castro can do what he wants to do," Bush said at a joint summit news conference with Fox.
Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, who remained in Castro's place at Monterrey and was denied entry to some events where Bush participated, disagreed.
Mexican officials "with great authority, transmitted the message and specifically asked us, given they could not prevent Fidel from coming, that he leave immediately after lunch," Alarcon said.
'PAINFUL'
"It is painful that this happened in Mexico, because if there was at least one thing you could say about the country in the past, it was that it had an independent foreign policy," Sunday's editorial said of the incident.
The 75-year-old Castro and Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive and advocate of democracy and closer regional ties with the United States, had managed until now to avoid an all-out diplomatic dispute despite their ideological differences.
Castro said he was not offended when Fox met with dissidents during a brief visit to the Caribbean island in February.
Later in the month, when a group of Cubans rammed a bus into Mexico's Havana embassy in a failed attempt to leave the country, Castro and Fox worked together to end the incident quickly.
As Sunday's attack on the Mexican government showed, keeping Castro on the sidelines of a U.N. meeting on Third World development, his favored topic, proved too much for Havana.
"The Monterrey Summit will go down in the annals of this century as a place that obeyed the world's policeman, a master that has disdain for Mexicans, that condemns them to death on the border or assigns them the dirtiest work -- in domestic life and foreign policy, as we are seeing," the editorial said.
The five-day U.N. development conference, attended by more than 50 heads of state in the final two days, ended late on Friday with rich and poor nations saying they had struck a bargain to fight world poverty.
Castro ridiculed the efforts of the world's wealthy nations to fight poverty during his speech on Thursday, saying "the existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history."
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