Fidel criticizes Obama’s economic plans

HAVANA: 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 U.S. leader, released Wednesday.

The former Cuban president had previously praised Obama, but last week he wrote an essay in which he demanded that the new U.S. 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 U.S. 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.”

Thursday, AP