Cuban President Fidel Castro on Thursday criticized the current world economic order as "a system of looting and exploitation".
"The world economic system today is a gigantic casino", said Castro in his speech at the Summit of Monterrey within the framework of the United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development (ICFD) in this northern Mexican city.
"Recent analyses show that for every dollar that goes into trade, over one hundred end up in speculative operations completely disconnected from the real economy", he added.
Castro arrived in Monterry, some 750 kilometers north of Mexico City on Wednesday night to attend the two-day plenary sessions of heads of state and government.
The Cuban leader, dressed in olive drab fatigues, announced his immediate return to Havana due to "a special situation generated" by his attendance at the summit.
Castro said extreme poverty affects 1.2 billion people living in Third World countries. The gap between living standards in rich and poor countries grows, instead of being shortened, and the revenue in the richest nations in 1960, which was 37 times larger than that of the poorest, is now 74 times larger, said Castro.
He said that today the world's richest three people own assets equivalent to the combined gross domestic product of the world's 48 poorest countries.
The Cuban leader urged the world's richest countries to cancel the foreign debt of the poor nations and to grant new loans in favor of financing for development.
After Castro's return to Cuba, the Cuban delegation was led by the president of the National Assembly of People's Power (Congress) , Ricardo Alarcon.
( March 22, 2002)
