Cuba Reacts Angrily to Tightened U.S. Trade Sanctions

Cuba, vowing to defend its socialism to the death, said Saturday that tighter U.S. trade sanctions against it rule out, at least for the present, any possibility of political compromise with Washington.

State news agencies and newspapers poured scorn and abuse on legislation signed by President Bush on Friday that sharply tightened a 30-year-old U.S. economic embargo against the Communist-ruled island.

The latest dispute, coming 30 years after the Cuban missile crisis, marked another low point in U.S.-Cuban relations, which have been unremittingly hostile since Washington broke diplomatic ties with Cuba in 1961.

Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper, Granma, cited a public pledge made last month by President Fidel Castro that “we revolutionaries prefer death a thousand times” to giving up Cuba’s socialist system.

It condemned as “a pirate’s license” the Cuban Democracy Act signed by Bush, which bans foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies from doing business with Cuba and bars ships that trade with the island from U.S. ports for six months.

Granma said the law, also known as the Torricelli Bill--after Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.)--was the product of “a visceral hate against our people (that) has no limits.”