VIENNA: Two firm admirers of Fidel Castro, the presidents of oil-and-gas-rich nations Bolivia and Venezuela, made clear at a protest rally that the anti-US, anti-imperialistic movement has a future.

‘We must dismantle, neutralize and make vanish this cynical empire,’ Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez told a cheering crowd Saturday of 1,600 in a conference hall in Vienna decked with pictures of Che Guevara, who was Cuban President Castro’s revolutionary comrade-in-arms. Che was killed in Bolivia in 1967. Chavez scoffed at the US war against terrorism saying that the United States has itself become ‘a terrorist state, itself a genocidal state.

‘We’re all threatened. This empire has no limits,’ Chavez said, speaking in Spanish as did the others at the rally. Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage Davila spoke about the ‘criminal Yankee blockade of Cuba’ and Bolivian President Evo Morales mentioned his ‘great admiration for Fidel.’ The youthful crowd, some with painted faces, were anti-globalisation protestors at the final rally of an ‘anti-summit’ against a more august gathering of European Union and Latin American leaders at another congress centre in Vienna.
thenews.com

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