Castro Rails Against Rum

Says Rum Damages Society, U.S. Doctors Too Interested In Money

(AP)  First Fidel Castro gave up smoking. Now the leader of a nation famous for making great cigars and fine rum is taking aim at drinking.

"How much damage has rum caused any society?" the Cuban president asked a crowd of medical students late Tuesday night. "How many deaths from the irresponsibility of accidents and alcoholic drinks?"

Castro urged Cubans to celebrate the New Year "but without rum. It's not that there is going to be a dry law. No. Those who want to buy will pay a lot."

"If there is one thing I can assure you, it's that neither cigarettes nor rum will ever be sold cheaply in this country," said Castro, who was arguably the world's most famed smoker before giving up cigars several years ago.

"I feel greatly for those sympathizers of the revolution who like to bend the elbow from time to time," he added, to a ripple of laughter.

The caution to drinkers came as Castro made an appeal for morality before one of his favorite audiences: thousands of students from throughout the Americas, most of them from poor families, who attend Havana's Latin American Medical School on full government scholarships.

Castro has often described the heavy investment in the school by his poor country as proof of the superiority of socialist morality and as an example of its health system. For years, Cuba has regularly sent thousands of its own doctors to remote, often disaster-struck areas to help millions of the poorest people in the hemisphere.

The Cuban leader said most U.S. doctors, "educated with a mercantilist concept," were unwilling to give up their high salaries and comforts to experience "the horrible conditions of the Third World."

He said the students were being educated "in truly humanitarian principles and not corrupted by consumer societies," and he called on them to be moral examples by serving poor rural areas when they return home after their graduations.

But the Cuban leader also warned against temptations closer at hand, including rum, the desire to drive and association with "idlers" and "parasites."

He said some hustlers had offered students money "to commit an illegality" involving automobiles — apparently a reference to people who buy the permits foreign students can get to purchase cars.

Car ownership is denied most Cubans and Castro suggested it may be denied the students, too.

"If we begin to see students with motorcycles, automobiles, etc., we are risking accidents," Castro warned. "The saddest thing that could happen is a case of death in an accident. We have the duty to protect you as much as possible."

"Except for needs of a physical sort, or something similar.... I don't see any benefit to being a scholarship student with an automobile here."

Referring to the sort of people who tempt the students, Castro alluded bitterly to "idlers who receive all the services and who produce nothing."

But he said he knew of no cases in which people were denied medical care because of "who he is, what he is named, what he thinks or if he is at the service of some outside power to destroy this noble revolution" — a reference to dissidents he accuses of taking U.S. funding.

He noted that some medical personnel have accepted gifts or taken bribes for extra attention in what is supposed to be free medical care. He urged doctors "to repudiate from the depths of their souls the mercenary who tries to bribe a doctor or medical worker."

"We will not rest until this is the most humane, most just and most honest society that has ever been created," Castro said. "We prefer death to corruption."