The Cuban delegation headed by Castro also included Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban National Assembly, and foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque.

At the September 6-8 summit, U.S. president William Clinton argued for further imperialist military interventions in other nations under the UN banner, calling for "peacekeepers that can be rapidly deployed" around the world. He pointed to invasions of Iraq, Yugoslavia, East Timor, and Sierra Leone as examples of more to come.

In response, the Cuban leader said in his brief remarks to the summit, "The principle of sovereignty cannot be sacrificed to an exploitative and unjust order in which a hegemonic superpower, relying on its power and strength, seeks to decide everything. Cuba will never accept that."

He pointed to the legacy of "plunder of most of the Earth by the colonial powers, the rise of imperialism, and the bloody wars for redivision of the world" as the basis for the conditions of oppression and superexploitation that prevail in the semicolonial world today.

Two days later, on September 8, Castro spoke at an "Evening in Solidarity with Cuba" in Riverside Church. More than 2,000 people filled the main section of the church, and a nearby room was set up with a video monitor for an overflow crowd. Hundreds more, unable to get in, listened to the Cuban president from loudspeakers outside the church. Tickets to the event were reserved for those invited by the event's sponsors.

The meeting was sponsored by the New York Welcoming Committee for the Cuban Delegation to the United Nations Millennium Summit, made up of a number of organizations. These included some of the groups that had sponsored a meeting for Castro in Harlem during his 1995 trip to New York and a range of other political organizations active in opposing U.S. policy toward Cuba. Present at the meeting were several delegations and individuals from Cuba solidarity groups as far away as Florida and California.

Speakers included Democratic congresspeople Maxine Waters from California and José Serrano from New York; Rev. James Forbes of Riverside Church; Luis Miranda, president of Casa de las Américas, a Cuban-American organization that supports the revolution; and Lucius Walker of IFCO-Pastors for Peace.

In his four-hour speech, Castro detailed the growing gap between a handful of the planet's wealthiest nations and those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He noted that "in over 100 countries, the per capita income is lower now than it was 15 years ago." So-called developing countries "are actually in the process of being underdeveloped."

Calling for cancellation of the foreign debt, through which the imperialist powers squeeze the semicolonial world, he pointed out that the total debt now stands at $2.4 trillion--four times what it was in 1982, despite the fact that "between 1982 and 1998, Third World countries have paid out more than $3.4 trillion to service the debt."

Castro highlighted Cuba's record of internationalist solidarity with struggles for national liberation around the world. He pointed to the thousands of Cuban volunteer combatants who helped defend Angola's independence against invasions by the South African army under apartheid rule.

The Cuban president condemned Washington and other imperialist powers for their many years of backing the apartheid regime while seeking to strangle revolutionary Cuba through 40 years of an economic embargo, including the Helms-Burton law. None of these powers "took on the apartheid government or declared economic war on them: there was no Helms-Burton against the fascist regime of apartheid."

While Washington falsely accuses Cuba of violating human rights, Castro said, Puerto Rican political prisoners remain in U.S. prisons. He condemned the recent execution of Gary Graham by the Texas government and voiced support for the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row in Pennsylvania. He pointed to the fact that of the more than 3,600 people awaiting execution in the United States today, "there is not one millionaire on death row."

In Cuba, Castro said, in face of the U.S. embargo as well as the economic crisis sparked by the collapse overnight of favorable trade and aid from the former Soviet bloc countries, the Cuban people are waging a fight to maintain the fundamental course of the revolution and its social gains.

Not only has Cuba not closed a single hospital, Castro said, but thousands of Cuban volunteer doctors have gone to countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, and Cuba is even helping open medical schools in Gambia and elsewhere. Some 4,000 students from the semicolonial world are currently studying in Cuba, a number projected to increase to 10,000.

While the Cuban president was able to address the meeting in New York, the U.S. State Department denied a visa to National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcón to attend an earlier meeting of the Interpar-liamentary Union, held at the UN. It also denied him a permit to travel to Washington, where he was invited to meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Alarcón said he had planned to announce that Cuba was reserving spaces for 250 Black youth from the United States to study for free in Cuba's medical schools.