I don't find those assertions all that nutty.

Quiet down. You are going to hurt Charles's feelings.

I haven't believed a word Castro has said since he quit smoking cigars.

umm he's right, its a well known fact that the US helped the Afghanis fight the soviets by giving money/weapons to the mujahadeen, which later became al qaeda....

and it should be obvious to anyone with a brain that Bush used terrorism as a political scare tactic.... so just put 2+2 together and you have this

i believe him. totes.

"I wonder what it's like to be Granma's political cartoonist?"

I wonder why you ask that? Does it have anything to do with the Star of David stabbing a chicken??

Granma's political cartoonist lays as low as the Stranger's resident McGinn iconoclast (no, I won't tell who).

He was a CIA client and ally during the cold war. The US made them, they just ignored the religious insanity as long as they were fighting the Soviets.

You might be a wee young to remember but they were Reagan's freedoom fighters and cocaine smuggling contras.

No,he is not on the US payroll now,but he was . So crazy Fidel does make a point, US made Al Queda and Bush ignored their threat until they hit and murdered thousands.
Make fun of Fidel,but don't forget to make fun of Reagan and Bush Sr. The US foreign policy was not that enlightened either and newspaper s here lied about Iraq as much as Granma lied about Angola.

Oops that should read, along with the cocaine smuggling contras.

His time passed thirty years ago. Now he's just the crazy old uncle in the attic.

I'm not one to believe crackpot rumors ... but that Osama Bin Laden one I actually could believe (regardless of the fact that we (CIA) funded/trained him to be the insurgent leader he became)

it'd actually be nice if castro could put an articulated critique of reagan/bush sr/bush jr foreign policy together. hell, he could even throw clinton in there. might shame americans into holding their leaders accountable for bone head/evil decision making. but instead he's just a miserly old nut who's been wearing the same clothes for 50 years.

Osama was on the federal payroll. That's known. Castro's saying that Osama is still on the federal payroll.

And that's crazy.

Brendan@13: You're quoting the AP. Castro's quote: WikiLeaks blah, blah, blah "effectively proved he was a CIA agent." WAS, past tense.

@13 Yeah, he was fired in 2009.

4: umm he's right, its a well known fact that the US helped the Afghanis fight the soviets by giving money/weapons to the mujahadeen, which later became al qaeda....

One could consider bin Laden an "agent" of the U.S. government in the sense that he was he was helping to accomplish a U.S. goal: drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. There have been many alliances of convenience ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend") throughout history and the fact that the "friends" have agreed to fight a common enemy doesn't mean they are actually friends.

But it's quite a leap from that to assert that bin Laden continued to serve as a U.S. government agent once the Soviets were finally driven out. As this November 1998 article in The Independent, Terror 'blowback' burns CIA, says...

"Mr Mohamed's arrest [for the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam] seems to be part of a pattern, as the US slowly moves towards the realisation that many of those now arrayed against it with Mr bin Laden were once its allies in the war in Afghanistan. The two sides turned against each other as the war in Afghanistan unwound, and America, not Russia, came to be seen as the enemy."

In the same way, the United States and Soviet Union turned against each other (or turned back against each other) after their alliance of convenience in WWII ended.

Pointing out that the U.S. government helped create the Frankenstein monster that became/is al Qaeda is one thing. Claiming that it then used al Qaeda to attack the U.S. on 9/11 (or to attack the African embassies before that) is another thing entirely.

I wonder what his salary and benefits are?

"People on park benches, in cafes, and in bars across the country are deprived of the pleasure of enjoying a newspaper (among other serious deprivations)"

What capitalists arrogantly dismiss as "serious deprivations", socialists understand are the wonders of a worker's paradise.

Would you put it past the CIA to have Bin Laden on staff?

Before my third look at that headline, I was certain Castro was accusing Obama of being a federal employee, and was thinking that damn, his mind's really gone downhill since handing over his presidency.

Might be shocking, and very unlikely to be proven true anytime soon, but not insane.

After all that Bush/Cheney nuke fiasco and all the WikiLeaks thing anything sounds possible at this point.

@20, (My own conclusion: while there is undoubtedly no freedom of press in Cuba, for most of America, "freedom of the press" is routinely capitulated for right-wing propaganda.)

The essential difference being that you can easily access a wide variety of non-right-wing propaganda news sources. You can also write lots of articles critical of the government without fear of being locked up. Those are very, very big differences.

Point being: what a shitty post. If you want to diss Cuba and Granma (though with the latter, why bother?) you should at least go there.

First, dissing the Cuban government and its propaganda tools is different than dissing Cuba itself. Second, do Europeans who want to diss the U.S. government need to come here? Do we need to go to North Korea to diss that government? Somalia?

Point being: that's a silly argument.