Mexico-Cuba: Fox Visit/Fidel's Remarks

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

Cuba-Mexico: Fidel's remarks on Vicente Fox Visit 

[A copy in espanol of a Feb 7th interview with Fidel, from Cuba's 
Embassy in Mexico City, follows this english AP report sent by 
Barry Stoller. --NY Transfer]


source - bstoller@utopia2000.org 


AP. 8 February 2002. 

Castro reacts to Mexican president's  visit. 

HAVANA -- President Fidel Castro affirmed that he had no problem with
the brief meeting that Mexican President Vicente Fox held with Cuban
dissidents this week and said he was satisfied with Fox's first visit
here as head of state.

Castro said that on the eve of the Monday meeting, Fox told him that
Mexican Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda planned to meet with a small
group of government opponents at the Mexican Embassy in Havana and that
Fox himself would greet them.

"This was not reason for any problem," Castro told reporters Thursday
night after the inauguration of an international book fair here.

Overall, Castro said, he was "satisfied with the visit." During Fox's
24-hour stay, the two presidents discussed ways to increase trade and
investment between their neighboring nations. The visit was "rich, with
many activities ... in every moment the environment was good," said the
Cuban president.

"My personal impression of Fox? Very good ... He is a man who talks, a
man who listens, who doesn't change his character, he is a person with
whom one can talk with much frankness," Castro said.

The Cuban president said he placed "the highest importance" on Mexico's
affirmation that it would not present, sponsor or co-sponsor any project
aimed at condemning Cuba during a meeting of the United Nations Human
Rights Commission in Geneva this April.

That affirmation "was highly satisfactory," Castro said.

The Cuban leader also said that he had not yet seen a list of Cuban
prisoners that Castaneda had given Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez
Roque with a request that they be considered for possible release.

Fox "absolutely did not talk to me about counterrevolutionary prisoners,
not once," Castro said, using the word his government employs for
dissidents.

Castro's statements were the first official reaction to Fox's 20-minute
encounter early Monday with seven of the island's better known
dissidents.

Castro also said he disagreed with Castanada's assessment that Mexico's
relationship now is with the Republic of Cuba rather than the Cuban
revolution.

"We have the opposite feeling," Castro said. "We are more interested in
the relationship with the Mexican revolution than with the Republic of
Cuba. I don't understand what he was trying to say but the republic of
Cuba cannot be divided, separated from the revolution. There is no
possible separation."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Barry Stoller
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews

 
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