VI. 9 Jul 75 CUBA

FIDEL CASTRO INTERVIEWED BY DAGENS NYHETER

Stockholm DAGENS NYHETER in Swedish 3 Jul 75 pp 1, 12 LD

[Stas Holmberg Interview with Cuban Prime Minister Castro: "The United States No Longer Wants To Assassinate Me"]

[Excerpt] Havana, 7 July--For a man who has for many years been on the CIA death list, Cuba's leader Fidel Castro looked remarkably unconcerned. He sat on a sofa in the Swedish Embassy a few hours before Olof Palme's departure from Cuba and when he was questioned about the CIA's repeated attempts to assassinate him, he raised both hands to the ceiling in a gesture of resignation:

"Good Lord," he said. "We have known all that for a long time. It seems a little ridiculous," Fidel said, "to hear today of disclosures of new assassination plans when here in Cuba we already knew of them.

"Yet what is now being disclosed in the United States is only a small part," he said. "We could describe a dozen similar assassination plans and we will also do so when the U.S. investigations are over."

But he did not believe that he ran the risk of being assassinated by the CIA any longer.

"If there are such plans today, we at least, do not know of them," he said. "I believe that the United States is no longer so interested in assassinating me--and I believe that it has accepted the Cuban revolution as a fact and that sooner or later it must come to an agreement with us.

"But no one can be absolutely certain," he said.

Raised Eyebrows

That Fidel Castro said while seated on the Swedish Embassy sofa will cause some eyebrows to be raised in many countries which Cuba has accepted as international allies.

One of the key phrases of Olof Palme's Latin American trip has been "a new economic world order." It is a term which embraces small countries' rights to control their natural resources, and in both the oil power, Venezuela, and the potential oil power, Mexico, Olof Palme's hosts have adopted the concept with enthusiasm.

When Fidel Castro explained his own skepticism concerning talk of "a new economic world order" after dinner at the Swedish Embassy, he did so in a violent attack on the world's oil-producing countries.

He believed that a new world order could not be created by the introduction of new privileges for a new group of countries.

The Poor Are Affected

"It is insufficient to demand that all countries have control over their own raw materials," he said. "All privileges are created at another's expense, and today it is not the industrialized countries which are affected by the oil countries' profits but the poor countries which do not have oil.

[CEIVED FROM JUL 14 1975 CIA]

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