[NYTr] Castro's tip: Clinton-Obama the winning ticket

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Well, Reuters Anthony Boadle got the message. Will some of the US
liberals?]

Reuters visa Yahoo - Aug 28, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070828/pl_nm/cuba_castro_usa_dc

Castro's tip: Clinton-Obama the winning ticket

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping
Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and
win the U.S. presidential election.

Clinton leads Obama in the race to be the Democratic nominee for the
November 2008 election, and Castro said they would make a winning
combination.

"The word today is that an apparently unbeatable ticket could be
Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate," he wrote in an
editorial column on U.S. presidents published on Tuesday by Cuba's
Communist Party newspaper, Granma.

At 81, Castro has outlasted nine U.S. presidents since his 1959
revolution turned Cuba into a thorn in Washington's side by building a
communist society about 90 miles offshore from the United States.

He said all U.S. presidential candidates seeking the "coveted"
electoral college votes of Florida have had to demand a democratic
government in Cuba to win the backing of the powerful Cuban exile
community.

Clinton and Obama, both senators, called for democratic change in Cuba
last week.

Castro has not appeared in public since intestinal illness forced him
to hand over power to his brother Raul Castro in July last year.

He has turned to writing dozens of columns and essays, but rumors that
his health is worsening or that he may even be dead have swirled
through the Cuban exile community in Miami in the last two weeks.

Castro's only reference to U.S. President George W. Bush in his latest
essay was to say that he "needed fraud" to win Florida's electoral
college votes and the presidency in the fiercely contested election in
2000.

Castro said former President Bill Clinton was "really kind" when he
bumped into him and the two men shook hands at a U.N. summit meeting in
2000. He also praised Clinton for sending elite police to "rescue"
shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami
relatives in 2000 to end an international custody battle.

But even Clinton was forced to bow to Miami politics and tighten the
U.S. embargo against Cuba in 1996, using as a "pretext" the shooting
down of two small planes used by exile groups to overfly Havana, Castro
wrote.

He said his favorite U.S. president since 1959 was Jimmy Carter,
another Democrat, because he was not an "accomplice" to efforts to
violently overthrow the Cuban government.

Sixteen years after Dwight Eisenhower broke off diplomatic ties with
Cuba, Carter restored low-level relations in 1977 when interest
sections were opened in each country's capital.

Castro made no mention of Republican Cold War victor Ronald Reagan, or
of John F. Kennedy, whose Democratic administration launched the
disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by CIA-trained Cuban exiles in 1961.

One of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War came a year later
when Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev faced off for 13 days
over Soviet missiles that Castro allowed Moscow to place in Cuba.