Ailing Cuban President Fidel Castro railed against the US in a newspaper article on Sunday, calling it an unethical "world tyranny," and urged the CIA to come clean about all its attempts to murder him.
"My purpose is to show the huge level of hypocrisy and total lack of ethics that have characterized the actions, chaotic by nature, of the US government," Castro wrote at length in the Juventud Rebelde daily.
Just shy of a year since he was hospitalized with health problems and ceded power provisionally to his brother Raul, Fidel Castro, 80, has taken to writing articles on US imperialism and other issues in government publications while he continues recovering.
Castro's Sunday article titled "A World Tyranny" is a continuation of last week's "The Killing Machine" and claims no less than 627 failed attempts on his life by the CIA between his rise to power in 1959 and 1993.
declassification
It followed the declassification of secret CIA documents last month exposing how the agency recruited top mafia figures to assassinate Cuba's communist leader.
"The killing began under the [president Dwight D.] Eisenhower administration (1953-1961) and [president Richard] Nixon (1963-1969)," Castro said, adding that "with some exceptions, other administrations followed the same policy."
"I have survived numerous assassination attempts" since early days as a guerrilla leader, Castro said.
"Only luck and the habit of carefully watching every detail has allowed us to survive," he said.
Castro called on the CIA to declassify every single secret file it keeps on anti-Cuban plans it fielded in the past.
cargo ship
"In the name of freedom of information," he said, "why don't they declassify a single document that tells us how the CIA 50 years ago blew up the cargo ship La Coubre and cut short a delivery of Belgian weapons [for Castro's Cuba] that the agency itself on June 14, 1960 admitted was of great concern to the United States."
The cargo ship was destroyed in an explosion in March 1960 in Havana harbor that killed more than 100 people on board.
reflections
Since the end of March, Castro has published some 25 articles under the master heading, "Reflections of the Commander in Chief."
Most of them are openly hostile to the US and US President George W. Bush.
"Can we ignore the wars of plunder and butchery waged on poor countries that make up three fourths of our planet?" Castro asked in the latest installment of his column.
`border of abyss'
"No! They are part and parcel of our present world and of a system that cannot sustain itself in any other way," he answered.
"At enormous political, economic and scientific cost, the human species is being led to the border of the abyss," he added, blaming the US for the direction things are taking.
Castro turns 81 on August 13 and has not appeared in public since his July 26 operation last year for intestinal trouble.
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