-DATE-
19730407
-YEAR-
1973
-DOCUMENT_TYPE-
REPORT
-AUTHOR-
F. CASTRO
-HEADLINE-
RALLY IN SANTA CLARA
-PLACE-
CUBA
-SOURCE-
PRAGUE DOMESTIC SERVICE
-REPORT_NBR-
FBIS
-REPORT_DATE-
19730409
-TEXT-
Rally in Santa Clara

Prague Domestic Service in Czech 1730 GMT 7 Apr 73 L

[Excerpts] Josef Hora, our special correspondent, reports on the visit of
Husak's CPCZ and government delegation to Cuba:

Our representatives' tour of the island culminated in a Cuban-Czechoslovak
friendship rally. Some 50,000 inhabitants of Santa Clara town welcomed the
Czechoslovak and Cuban representatives with rapturous applause.

Fidel Castro spoke first to the crowd at a local factory. The American
imperialists thought they would destroy the Cuban revolution, but they
underestimated the heroism of the Cuban people and the strength of the
world socialist community, the first secretary of the Central Committee of
the Communist Party of Cuba and chairman of the Cuban Revolutionary
Government, Fidel Castro, said in his speech.

His remark that Czechoslovakia had been the first country to establish
diplomatic and economic relations with revolutionary Cuba and so had
helped strengthen its revolutionary poower, was greeted with a long
ovation from the crowd beneath the platform.  We have much in common
with the Czechoslovak people, Fidel Castro said, and the relations between
Cuba and Czechoslovakia and their communist parties have never been as
firm as they are today.

When Comrade Husak rose to speak he was greeted with enormous pleasure. The
Czechoslovak party and government delegation's tour of the Republic of
Cuba, like Fidel Castro's visit to Czechoslovakia last year, is a triumph
for the great friendship between our peoples, Comrade Gustav Husask said as
he began his speech. We are united by lengthy struggles for national
freedom and independence. We are united by great ideas of building a just
society, a society without oppression, without exploitation of the working
people. We are united by the noble ideals of socialism, socialism humanism
and proletarian internationalism.

The unity of the interests and objectives of the peoples of such distance
countries have finally been unequivocally confirmed by the
Cuban-Czechoslovak talks. Comrade Husak said at the meeting in Santa Clara:
The talks between the Czechoslovak and Cuban delegations are characterized
by profound friendship, by a unity of views on the main questions, by
profound understanding and the certainty of the victory of socialist ideas.

It can be said in general that the visit by out highest party and
government representatives to the Republic of Cuba as well as its results
mean a further pronounced strengthening of Czechoslovak-Cuban relations.
-END-