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Castro Leads 800,000 Cubans in Anti-Embargo March


Updated 10:25 AM ET October 18, 2000
By Andrew Cawthorne

HAVANA (Reuters) - President Fidel Castro led hundreds of thousands of Cubans on a march on Wednesday to protest a change in the economic embargo on the communist-run island likely to be passed by the U.S. Congress later in the day.

Wearing tennis shoes rather than his usual military boots, and waving a Cuban flag in one hand, Castro, 74, strode past the U.S. diplomatic mission on Havana's sea-front at the head of an estimated 800,000 people who followed noisily behind.

The crowd had been called out by the ruling Communist Party to express popular rejection of restrictions included in a U.S. bill to alter the four-decade-old trade embargo by allowing food and medicine sales to the Caribbean island.

They also protested a new U.S. measure that would allow the use of frozen Cuban funds to compensate alleged terrorism victims.

"This is a patriotic march against the (genocidal) blockade, and the latest attempts to destroy our Revolution," said one Havana housewife, Olga, as she joined the march. "Whenever the Revolution calls us out, we will be there."

While the Congress move on sales is hailed in some quarters as a historic easing of the sanctions, Havana rejects it as a sham which actually bolsters the embargo because of conditions written into the bill at the behest of anti-Castro factions including Florida's Cuban-American exile community.

Those include a prohibition on U.S. financing and a codification of the ban on American tourism to Cuba.

"They have included a load of restrictions which are humiliating for the country, and make it impossible in practice," President Fidel Castro said on the eve of Wednesday's march in his first public comments on the bill.

"They still pretend that it (the bill) is an historic moment," he added. "The historic moment is when 800,000 citizens speak in the name of the people of Cuba."

HAVANA PARALYZED

The U.S. Senate was expected to pass the legislation later Wednesday, the last step before sending it to President Clinton for enactment. Havana says it will not buy a single aspirin or grain of rice, although some analysts view that as a possible lobbying position rather than an immovable stance.

Wednesday's march paralyzed Havana, and drew nearly half its roughly two million residents onto the streets. Schools and workplaces were closed, roads blocked, and convoys of buses brought demonstrators in from the outskirts.

Marchers, most wearing T-shirts showing the face of Cuban 19th century independence hero Jose Marti, chanted "Down with the blockade! Long live the Revolution!" as children blasted out patriotic slogans from loudspeakers.

State media was given over entirely to coverage of the march, with TV commentators and newspaper columnists faithfully repeating the same analysis and vocabulary as their leaders.

Soon after Castro passed the U.S. Interests Section, American diplomats appeared on a balcony to watch the march.

The march was the latest of dozens of such protests outside the U.S. mission this year as Cuba has sought to revive revolutionary fervor among its people, especially during the custody saga over 6-year-old shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez.

Away from Wednesday's patriotic fervor, local dissidents claimed a quiet wave of repression was taking place.

They said Cuban state security had aborted a series of opposition meetings in recent days by temporarily rounding up the activists involved. Havana regards all opponents of Castro's one-party system as U.S.-backed

"counter-revolutionary" mercenaries and traitors.

"At the same time as the government holds these mobilizations, the political repression is continuing," said Elizardo Sanchez, who heads the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a dissident rights' group.

He said more than 50 dissidents had been temporarily detained in the last 10 days, in the biggest crackdown since the start of the year. All but three had been freed soon after.

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Manuel Alonso