Posted on 04/19/2016 2:31:59 PM PDT by jazusamo
HAVANA — Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro delivered a valedictory speech Tuesday to the Communist Party that he put in power a half-century ago, telling party members he will soon die and exhorting them to help his ideas survive.
“I’ll be 90 years old soon,” Castro said in his most extensive public appearance in years. “Soon I’ll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without a truce to obtain them.”
Castro spoke as the government announced that his brother Raul will retain the Cuban Communist Party’s highest post alongside his hardline second-in-command. That announcement and Fidel Castro’s speech together delivered a resounding message that the island’s revolutionary generation will remain in control even as its members age and die, relations with the U.S. are normalized, and popular dissatisfaction grows over the country’s economic performance.
Fifty-five years after Fidel Castro declared that Cuba’s revolution was socialist and began installing a single-party system and centrally planned economy, the Cuban government is battling a deep crisis of credibility.
With no memory of the revolution’s heady first decades, younger Cubans complain bitterly about low state salaries of about $25 a month that leave them struggling to afford food and other staple goods. Cuba’s creaky state-run media and cultural institutions compete with flashy foreign programming shared online and on memory drives passed hand-to-hand. Emigration to the United States and other countries has soared to one of its highest points since the revolution.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I always believed Criswell was a nut and never heard that one but wish he would have been right.
Damn. I always wished the people of Cuba could hang him upside down with piano wire and his pants pulled down instead of dead in his sleep on some nice bed with “get better soon” cards from Obama next to his bed after getting the needle to stop the pain.
Now the New York Yankees who never get those players. And George Costanza will never be able to attend that cocktail party with all those girls and good food but that’s okay because you usually have to stand up which is better than trying to balance a plate on your lap.
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