Viewing cable 09HAVANA344, FIDEL CASTRO IMPRESSED BY POTUS AFTER CAIRO SPEECH

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Wednesday, 10 June 2009, 18:05
C O N F I D E N T I A L HAVANA 000344 
SIPDIS 
DEPT FOR WHA/CCA 
EO 12958 DECL: 06/09/2019 
TAGS PREL, PGOV, CU 
SUBJECT: FIDEL CASTRO IMPRESSED BY POTUS AFTER CAIRO SPEECH 
Classified By: COM Jonathan Farrar for reasons 1.4 (b) and (d)
¶1. (C) The Government of Cuba has offered no official reaction to President Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo. Former president Fidel Castro, however, previewed his interest in the Cairo speech in a Reflection article on June 6 that he started with “Yesterday afternoon, while I was carefully analyzing Obama’s address at the Muslim university in Cairo...” (Note: Fidel’s June 6 Reflection was devoted principally to linking the June 4 arrest in the United States of Kendall and Gwendolyn Meyers for espionage related charges to the June 3 OAS resolution regarding Cuba. End Note.) Fidel’s subsequent Reflection on June 9 will only add to speculation from our civil society and diplomatic contacts that Fidel is obsessed with President Obama.
¶2. (C) Fidel’s latest, lengthy (3,500 words) Reflection focused entirely on the Cairo speech, including pages worth of short excerpts from the speech itself. Fidel split the speech into two sections. Fidel mostly sympathized with POTUS - in his own way - regarding the first section, which included the fact that the U.S. is not at war with Islam, the Israel-Palestine issue, and Iran and nuclear weapons. Specifically, Fidel said, “One cannot blame the new president of the United States for the situation created in the Middle East...He takes office at an exceptionally complex time for his country and the world...It is still too early to pass judgment on his degree of commitment to the ideas he presents...” Fidel then continued his attempts to walk a thin line between a positive impression of a popular U.S. president and the idea that the evil empire will never change. For example, Fidel explained that “the current president’s main difficulty lies in the fact that the principles he is advocating contradict the policy the superpower has pursued for almost seven decades...” Fidel also renewed his insistence that the United States is a racist country by adding that “Not even Obama could imagine when he was working in the black communities of Chicago that the terrible effects of a financial crisis would combine with the factors that made his election as president in a strongly racist society possible.”
¶3. (SBU) Fidel referred to the second section of the speech on the topics of democracy, religious freedom, and women’s rights as the moment when “Obama starts philosophizing and lecturing about U.S. foreign policy.” Fidel targets the line in the speech “No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other” and argues that it was followed by Obama immediately contradicting himself “with a declaration of faith that turns the United States into the supreme judge over democratic values and human rights.” Overall, Fidel said the speech “would appear to be a public relations campaign carried out by the United States with the Muslim countries; in any case, this is better than threatening to destroy them with bombs.” Fidel ends his article by calling POTUS a “very good communicator”, highlighting the ecumenical breadth of the speech, and complimenting Obama on his “impressive working capacity.”
¶4. (SBU) The U.S. Interests Section (USINT) posted a video of the speech, a link to the America.gov website covering the speech, and a Spanish translation on our homepage. USINT is distributing a Spanish copy of the speech to Cuban Muslims and other contacts in civil society and the diplomatic community. The Cairo speech was not available to Cubans through the official Cuban media, and only excerpts of Fidel’s Reflections were read on the radio and television. This is not the first time Fidel’s Reflection was the first official source of information regarding a significant world or domestic event. He frequently provides the only snippets of President Obama’s speeches available to Cubans outside of USINT’s reach. (Note: Today’s Communist Party newspaper Granma notes that tonight’s roundtable television program will discuss, among other things, Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East. End Note.) FARRAR