Cuban cartoons fire salvo at Washington

Cartoons and time capsules are the newest weapons in a four-decade-old war of words between the United States and Cuba.

Long-simmering US-Cuba tensions have heated up since last May when US President George W. Bush tightened sanctions and said he would step up propaganda against Cuban President Fidel Castro and support for Cuban dissidents in a move to hasten the downfall of communist rule on the island.

Cuba's state-run television has fired back by broadcasting cartoons lampooning the top US diplomat in Havana, James Cason, as the point man for a transition to a post-Castro Cuba sought by the Bush administration.

Mocked

The cartoons depict Cason as a fairy creature who at the tap of his wand privatises a health-care centre and a school renamed Nixon High School only to be chased back into the US diplomatic compound by angry Cubans.

Another cartoon mocks US plans to vaccinate all Cuban children ostensibly the most inoculated among Third World countries when Cuba's communist state is gone.

The series of four cartoons aired since last week warns Cubans their free health care and education will be lost if US plans for post-Castro Cuba, laid out by the White House last year, come true.

Cason, an outspoken diplomat who has openly backed opponents of Castro since assuming the Havana post in late 2002, said the cartoons were designed to instill the fear of change into Cubans.

Cason has been no less imaginative in devising ways of embarrassing the Cuban government.

In December, he invited a dozen dissidents to bury a time capsule in his garden to be opened the day democratic elections are allowed in Cuba.

The capsule contained reports on human rights abuses under Cuban communism, a copy of Animal Farm, George Orwell's allegory of revolutions that go wrong, and a speech by Bush unveiling plans to speed the end of Castro's rule.

Cason also built in his backyard a replica of a solitary confinement cell used to punish a leading Castro opponent.