Castro ends 8-month silence to slam US environmental plans (Roundup)

Mar 29, 2007, 15:27 GMT

Havana - Ending eight months of silence, ailing Cuban President Fidel Castro published an article in Cuban state media Thursday criticizing US environmental policies.

'The sinister idea of converting food into fuel has definitely been established as an economic lineament in US foreign policy,' the Cuban leader wrote, arguing that US President George W Bush's support for using crops to produce ethanol for automobiles in rich nations could deplete food stocks in developing countries.

The article published in the Cuban Communist Party daily Granma was the first attempt by Castro, 80, who is recovering from intestinal surgery, to comment on international issues since he was taken ill in July 2006 and handed over power to his younger brother Raul.

Fidel Castro has only been seen in half a dozen videos and several pictures since the surgery, the last ones published in March where he appeared with Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

'More than 3 billion people in the world condemned to premature death by hunger and thirst,' read the headline of Castro's article.

Castro's health has been treated as a state secret in Cuba, which has not revealed the exact cause of his illness. Over the past months, rumours of the imminent death of the Cuban leader have been strongly denied by the authorities. However, over the last few weeks the expectation of his return has increased, owing to several hints by Cuban and international officials.

A few weeks ago, Bolivian President Evo Morales announced the possibility of that Castro would appear publicly on April 28. This would mark the first anniversary of Bolivia's joining the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Americas (ALBA), the Cuban and Venezuelan alternative to the US-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Cuba has not yet confirmed Castro's appearance. The island is entering its ninth month without its socialist leader of almost half a century.

In the article, Castro warned that the plans to convert products like corn, sugar cane or soy into ethanol for use as fuel additives could cause serious ecological damage and would adversely affect the third world population.

Castro refered to a meeting Bush had Monday with the leading US automotive groups, in which Bush urged them to double the number of vehicles fuelled by alternative combustibles such as ethanol, in an attempt to combat climate change and also to reduce the US's dependence of oil.

'I think that reducing and recycling all the electricity and combustible consuming motors is an elemental and urgent necessity for all humanity. The tragedy does not consist in reducing the costs of energy, but in the idea of converting food into combustibles,' Castro said in the article.

Bush strongly promoted the production and use of biofuels in Latin American countries in a regional tour earlier this month, with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as his main ally in these efforts. The US and Brazil together produce around 72 per cent of the wolrd's ethanol.

According to the Cuban leader, even if the US dedicated its entire corn production to the production of ethanol, there still would not be enough ethanol for its fuel needs.

'If you apply this recipe in Third World countries, you'll see how many people of the hungry masses of our planet will stop eating corn. Or even worse: finance poor countries to produce ethanol from corn and there won't even be one tree to defend humanity of the climate change,' Castro wrote.

The Cuban president considered that instead of these policies, countries should concentrate in other ways of saving energy, as Cuba does.

'All the countries in the world, poor and rich, could save millions and millions of dollars just by changing all incandescent light bulbs into fluorescent ones, something Cuba has been doing in all homes. That would give climate change a break without starving the poor masses of the world,' said Castro, who in the past few years has made ecology one of his major interests.