Reuters. 14 February 2003.
Castro says U.S. war on Iraq unjustified.

HAVANA -- Cuban President Fidel Castro said Friday a U.S.-led war against
Iraq was unjustified because it was unlikely that Baghdad possessed weapons
of mass destruction.

Lashing out at his longtime ideological foe, Castro said the United States
had failed to prove its case against Iraq and was acting unilaterally by
ignoring the United Nations.

"A war is about to break out. ... It is an unnecessary war, using pretexts
that are neither credible nor proven," Castro said in a speech to a
conference of Latin American economists.

"The immense majority of world opinion unanimously rejects a new war," he
said, adding that it was "hardly probable" that Iraq had biological,
chemical or nuclear weapons.

The Cuban leader said Washington was flouting international rules and
disregarding the United Nations, which "was practically dissolved by
imperial decision after the fateful 11th of September."

Castro said the Iraqi people had suffered more than 10 years of bombings
and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly children, due to
hunger and disease since the Gulf War.

The 1,500 economists at the anti-globalization conference issued a
declaration condemning U.S. plans for a war on Iraq.

"This time it is Iraq. It could be any other country next," the statement
said.

"Humanity should rise up against this immoral and irrational war."

The conference hosted by Cuba attacked free-market and neoliberal economic
policies that the United States and the International Monetary Fund have
advocated in developing nations for two decades, saying they had only
increased poverty and indebtedness.

The economists also assailed the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a
plan to pull down tariff barriers throughout the hemisphere by 2005. Cuba
is the only country outside the project.

Castro, leader of one of the world's last communist societies, said the
FTAA was a U.S. plan to dominate Latin America, "a spurious union between
unequal parts, where the most powerful will eat up the weakest, including
Canada, Mexico and Brazil."