Bolton said in a May 6 talk at the Heritage Foundation that the "United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research-and-development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.

"We are concerned," he said, "that such technology could support BW [biological warfare] programs in those states. We call on Cuba to cease all BW-applicable cooperation with rogue states and to fully comply with all of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention."

Bolton’s uncorroborated assertions were widely picked up by the big-business press. "The only thing true in Bolton’s lies is that Cuba is 90 miles away from United States territory," said Castro in his speech. "No one has ever presented a single shred of evidence that our homeland has conceived a program to develop nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. The doors of our institutions are open," he said. "Cuba has absolutely nothing to hide."  
U.S. official’s double-talk
U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell told reporters while traveling to a NATO meeting in Iceland several days later that "we do believe Cuba has a biological offensive research capability." Backing down somewhat from Bolton’s statement, Powell said, "We didn’t say it actually had some weapons, but it has the capacity and capability to conduct such research."

U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice reinforced the anti-Cuba slander on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" May 13 with a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach. "You can’t show someone a biotech lab and be assured they’re not creating weapons of mass destruction," she said. "That’s not how biotech weapons work. And they’re actually very easy to conceal and you need multiple measures to make certain biotech weapons aren’t being developed and transferred."

Rice didn’t mention the extent of Washington’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, which it stores in at least eight locations in the United States and the Johnson Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Or that the U.S. government reserves to itself the right to develop new biological and chemical weapons under the guise that it can learn to defend its armed forces and population against potential attacks.

For example, under such a pretext the U.S. Army labs have been producing a powdered and aerosol form of anthrax since 1992. This fact was made public last December during the FBI investigation surrounding letters containing anthrax that were sent through the U.S. mail.

In his May 10 address Fidel Castro said that it’s a "lie to say that Castro considers terror as a legitimate tactic for furthering revolutionary objectives," an assertion made by Bolton. "Actually, everybody knows that our revolutionary movement never used such methods that do not fit with our doctrine, our principles, and our concept of armed struggle.  
 
Revolutionary principles
"Never were the civilian population and innocent people the victims of our actions," Castro said of the revolutionary struggle against the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. "Our tactic always was to fight against heavily equipped enemy units."

Addressing Bolton’s statement that during a trip to Iran last year Castro said the two countries could "bring America to its knees," the Cuban leader explained that he never made such a remark. "I did say, in one of the three speeches I made during that visit, that imperialism was bereft of ideas, that ideas are more powerful than weapons, and that one day imperialism would crumble. I also said that ‘the Iranian people with heroism and not with weapons defeated the Shah,’ and this showed the power of ideas."

In his speech Castro said that 34,307 Cuban medical volunteers have served "free of charge" around the world, "safeguarding the health of millions of people. Nobody in the world," he said, "could beat them in their dedication and their willingness to make sacrifices. At this very moment, 2,671 of them are working in isolated and inhospitable places in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

"It would be very difficult to persuade these men and women to produce viruses and bacteria to kill children, women, old people, or the people of any country. The pride and high moral standards of our people," Castro said, "rests on the rationality of a policy that does not contradict their ethics and principles."

The Cuban president said that laws in the country prohibit the manufacture, possession, or transportation of chemical or biological agents and that "if a Cuban scientist from any of our biotechnology institutes had been cooperating with any country in the development of biological weapons, or if he or she had tried to create them on his or her own initiative, he or she would be immediately presented in a court of justice as we would consider it an act of treason to the country."

Castro said that the "idea of destroying Cuba, an obsession that has lasted more than 43 years, has led and still leads U.S. policy down a tortuous path filled with lies, mistakes, failures, and crimes."  
 
 
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