The Cuban government called President George W. Bush on Saturday a "furious and impotent spectator" with zero influence over changes in the communist country following Fidel Castro's retirement. ( Reuters )
"He can neither stop, interfere with or influence what happens in Cuba," Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said.
Bush said on Friday that neighboring Cuba had replaced one dictator with another and vowed to maintain hard-line policies against Havana until it begins a democratic transition.
Bush insisted that Fidel Castro, despite having stepped aside last month and turned over the presidency to his brother Raul, "is still influencing events from behind the scenes."
Perez Roque said Bush's view that nothing had changed in Cuba was acknowledgment of the failure of his Cuba policy, which has tightened sanctions to financially undermine the one-party state.
"President Bush's words yesterday show that he is just a furious and impotent spectator," the minister said, in the first official Cuban comment on Bush's statement. "I enjoyed listening to the frustration in his words."
Perez Roque said Bush's lament that more of the world's major democracies had not joined the United States in isolating Havana was also recognition that Washington's policy on Cuba had itself become isolated.
He spoke at a news conference with the European Union's top development aid official, Louis Michel, who was in Havana to try to relaunch EU ties with Cuba. Washington had opposed the visit.
Speaking after a White House meeting with Cuban dissidents on Friday, Bush said he thought it was wrong to see Castro's retirement as a chance to reconsider a decades-old U.S. trade embargo. He said Cuba must release political prisoners and allow free elections before sanctions can be lifted.
Growing ranks of U.S. politicians, from members of Congress to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, are urging a review of the U.S. policy of shunning Cuba.
Perez Roque recalled that 184 countries voted in November at the United Nations for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba, with only three states voting with the United States.