U.S. to maintain hard line against Cuba, Bush says

President Bush said Friday that Fidel Castro’s “supposed retirement” meant only that Cuba was replacing “one dictator with another” and that the U.S. would not relax its strict opposition to the regime.

Bush’s remarks were his most extensive on the change taking place in Cuba, with Raul Castro’s elevation to the presidency in place of his ailing older brother. Fidel Castro, who ran Cuba for 49 years, last month announced that he was stepping down as president but would remain first secretary of the nation’s Communist Party and a member of parliament.

With two Cuban dissidents who had been expelled from the island nation joining him at the White House, Bush chastised other countries for not speaking out for democratic change in Cuba. And when that change comes, Cubans “will remember the few brave nations that stood with them, and the many that did not,” he said.

The president added, with stern demeanor, that Fidel Castro was “still influencing events from behind the scenes.”

“This is the same system, the same faces and the same policies that led Cuba to its miseries in the first place,” Bush said.

He spoke after meeting in the Oval Office with Miguel Sigler Amaya and his wife, Josefa Lopez Pena. Bush said Amaya was imprisoned in a crackdown five years ago in which teachers, librarians, journalists and others were arrested in what came to be known as “Black Spring.” The couple were ordered out of Cuba after Amaya was released in 2005.

Expanding on a call for change that he made in brief remarks after Castro announced his resignation in a letter Feb. 19, Bush said it was not time for the U.S. to shift its policies toward Cuba.

Rather, he said, Cuba must initiate “peaceful democratic change,” release all political prisoners, demonstrate respect for human rights and “pave the way for free and fair elections.”

Describing life in what he called “the tropical gulag,” Bush said that Cuban police had arrested protesters wearing bracelets bearing the Spanish word for “change” and that “much of the world was silent.” He said a similar lack of protest greeted the tear-gassing of parishioners at a Roman Catholic church in the southeastern city of Santiago in December.

He noted that former members of the Soviet bloc were outspoken in calling for “human freedom in Cuba,” but “the list of countries supporting the Cuban people is far too short -- and the democracies absent from that list are far too notable.”

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james.gerstenzang@latimes.com