Pope Benedict slams U.S. embargo on Cuba

PanARMENIAN.Net - Pope Benedict XVI has criticised the 50-year-old U.S. trade embargo imposed on Cuba, as he ends a visit to the island, BBC News reported.

The Pope called for greater rights in Cuba, saying he wanted a society in which no-one was denied basic freedoms. This aim was not helped by economic measures which "unfairly burden" Cuba's people, he said.

Earlier, Pope Benedict met Cuba's revolutionary leader and former president, Fidel Castro, and celebrated Mass in front of vast crowds in Havana.

The Pontiff made his parting comments in the airport in Havana, in the presence of the current president, Raul Castro. He said all Cubans should be able to share in "forging a society of wide horizons, renewed and reconciled".

"No-one should feel excluded from taking up this exciting search by the limitations of their basic freedoms, or excused from this by indolence or a lack of material resources - a situation which is worsened when restrictive economic measures, imposed from outside the country, unfairly burden its people," he said.

The U.S. trade embargo, known as the blockade or "el bloqueo" in Spanish, was introduced soon after the 1959 Revolution. It was strengthened in 1962, with the support of Cubans who had fled to the United States, after Fidel Castro's Cuba nationalised the properties of American citizens and corporations.