CASTRO ON THE WAR IN IRAQ

None of the accounts we've read of Fidel Castro's two-hour May Day speech in Havana's Revolution Square -- variously reported in The Kansas City Star, which had the most interesting account, the Financial Times, and Channel News Asia -- mentioned the Cuban president's personal remarks about the war in Iraq.

Courtesy of the public relations office at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York, which transmitted the written text of the speech, here's what Castro had to say about that:

The Iraq war brings to many people memories of the Vietnam War. To me, it brings back memories of the Algerian war of liberation, when French military might shattered against the resistance of a people with a very different culture, language and religion, in a country which in places is just as desert-like as many regions of Iraq, a people that managed to defeat the French troops and all their technology, which was fairly advanced for its time. The French had previously sustained defeat in Dien Bien Phu, where Bush's predecessors were on the point of using nuclear weapons.

In this type of war the entire arsenal of a hegemonic superpower is superfluous. This superpower can conquer a country with its enormous power but it is impossible to administer and govern that country if its population battles resolutely against the occupiers.

Castro also underscored the violations of human rights by U.S. military authorities who are holding prisoners indefinitely at the Guantanamo naval base on the eastern tip of Cuba. Such violations are a matter of real concern for Americans and others. But Castro's sentiments are rather suspect coming from someone with his record on human rights.