Fidel Castro isn't dead yet, and he says he won't give Senator John McCain the "enormous favor" of a revolutionary endorsement of Senator Barack Obama. But Castro praised Obama effusively in a disjointed essay in the Cuban Communist Party "newspaper."
The paper, Granma, printed Castro's virtual endorsement of Obama on May 26. Granma officially sets the party line and is the definitive policy trendsetter of the Cuban leadership and its followers abroad.
Now, Castro seems as torn about Obama's May speech to the conservative Cuban-American National Foundation as Qaddafi is about Obama's AIPAC speech, cited above. He's rougher on Obama than is Qaddafi, but the point is, Castro chooses his words to let those on the Left know that the Illinois senator is basically OK, because he's "the most progressive candidate to the US presidency."
Castro knows that he would harm Obama's chances by endorsing him: “Were I to defend him [Obama], I would do his adversaries an enormous favor.”
So the retired Cuban dictator would withhold his overt support, preferring an oblique approach. Castro called Obama a man possessed of “great intelligence” with fine “debating skills” and a “work ethic” to make any party member proud. Barack Obama, Castro declared, is “doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate to the US presidency.”
Castro called Obama’s analysis of poverty in Latin America “a magnificent description of imperialist globalization: the globalization of empty stomachs!”
“We ought to thank him for it,” he added.
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