Cuba and the United States are keeping the verbal blows flying in a diplomatic row that communist President Fidel Castro says is aimed at unravelling their limited, tense bilateral ties.

After the United States began scrolling human rights messages last week across the top of the US Interests Section here, Castro condemned the "provocation" and organized a march of more than one million people to protest.

The towering red-lettered rolling message scroll on the US Interests Section building displays texts such as quotes from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and sayings by civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.

It also flashes brief news items which US officials say are a bid to subvert strict censorship in Cuba's state media.

"By deciding to instal that contraption, that garbage before the stunned eyes of the world, their only goal must be a provocation to destroy" the limited bilateral relations in place since 1977, an outraged Castro, 79, said late Wednesday before personally presiding over major construction work next to the US mission.

Castro has called the work a "surprise," and a "response ... to the new and insolent provocation by the headquarters of the counterrevolution in Cuba."

Observers think that whatever it is, it is meant to block the US messages.

Michael Parmley, the head of the US Interests Section, said Thursday: "that is a strange definition of what a provocation is ..." adding: "We intend to continue our presence here."

"We know what we are doing," Parmley told reporters. "We are going to try to continue to communicate with the Cuban people regardless of what the conditions are."

Officials in Castro's government said that around 1.4 million Cubans turned out Tuesday for a six-and-a-half-hour protest outside the US Interests Section to oppose Washington's "aggressive" policies toward Cuba and urge Washington to convict government opponent Luis Posada Carriles, who is being detained in the United States, as a terrorist.

The anti-Castro militant is wanted in Venezuela for bombing a Cuban airliner in an attack that killed 73 people. Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born Venezuelan national, was arrested in May on charges that he had entered the United States illegally through Mexico.

The government-organized march brought the Cuban capital to a standstill. Marchers swarmed along the seafront Malecon boulevard and past the US building carrying small Cuban flags as they shouted "Bush, Fascist!"

"They have lit up the billboard," Castro fumed. "They are so courageous, these cockroaches. It seems the little Bush gave them the order," he said, referring to US President George W. Bush. Castro has called Parmley a "little bandit."

The Cuban president also blasted Washington over the Posada Carriles case. Washington "wants to set free the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, which authorities in that country, including the father of the current president (a former CIA director), trained to commit monstrous crimes against the people of Cuba," he said.

A US immigration judge has ruled that the anti-Castro militant should not be sent to Cuba or Venezuela because of the risk that he would be tortured. US immigration authorities say they are looking for a third country to which he might be expelled.

In Washington, the US State Department dismissed the event in Cuba as a "protest against freedom."

Castro has regularly used giant demonstrations outside of the US Interests Section in Havana to vent his anger at Washington, which has maintained an economic embargo against the island nation since 1961.

In 2002 a stage was set up outside the building, with a statue of national hero Jose Marti, when the two rivals clashed over the case of Elian Gonzalez, a boy who was harbored in the United States by relatives before being sent back to Cuba to be reunited with his father.

In December 2004, US representatives infuriated the Cuban government by putting up an illuminated "75" on the building to signify 75 dissidents who had been rounded up by the authorities.

Cuba in turn raised large billboards, some with swastikas, that denounce the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United States and Cuba do not have full diplomatic relations, but maintain interest sections in the other's capital. The United States also maintains its controversial base at Guantanamo, Cuba against Castro's will.

Copyright © 2006 AFP

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