HAVANA — Fidel Castro responded Monday to President Barack Obama’s historic trip to Cuba with a long, bristling letter recounting the history of U.S. aggression against Cuba, writing that “we don’t need the empire to give us any presents.”
The 1,500-word letter in state media titled “Brother Obama” was Castro’s first response to Obama’s three-day visit last week, in which the American president said he had come to bury the two countries’ history of Cold War hostility. Obama did not meet with Fidel Castro, 89, on the trip but met several times with his brother Raul Castro, 84, the current Cuban president.
Fidel Castro writes of Obama: “My modest suggestion is that he reflects and doesn’t try to develop theories about Cuban politics.”
Castro goes over crucial sections of Obama’s speech in Havana line by line, engaging in an ex-post-facto dialogue with the American president with critiques of perceived slights and insults, including Obama’s failure to give credit to indigenous Cubans and Castro’s prohibition of racial segregation after coming to power in 1959. He ends with a dig at the Obama administration’s drive to increase business ties with Cuba.
