Fidel Castro on anti-Semitism and Zionism

Our thanks to Arieh Lebowitz for this item. During a meeting with Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, visiting Cuba in January, Castro launched a disjointed historical discourse in which the following comments were embedded. Castro shows himself sympathetic to Jews persecuted by Nazism but then casts Zionism as "apartheid" and an instrument of imperialism and makes the anti-Semitic allegation that Jews or Zionists control US financial markets:

As a result of the harsh measures imposed on the defeated German state at Versailles in 1918, when a republican regime came to power, the German Mark devaluated to such an extent that you needed tens of thousands of them to buy one dollar. Such crisis fed German nationalism and contributed extraordinarily to Hitler's absurd ideas. He was looking for a scapegoat. Many of the most important scientific and financial talents as well as writers were Jewish. They were persecuted. Among them was Einstein, the author of the theory stating that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light; it made him famous. Also Marx, who was born in Germany, and many of the Russian Communists were of Jewish descent, whether or not they actively practiced the Hebrew religion.

Hitler did not lay the blame for the human drama on the capitalist system, rather he blamed the Jews. Based on crude prejudices, what he really wanted was "vital Russian space" for his Teutonic master race, dreaming of building a millennial empire.

In 1917, by the Balfour Declaration, the British decided to create the State of Israel within its colonial empire, located on territory inhabited by the Palestinians who had a different religion and culture; in that part of the world, other ethnic groups coexisted for many centuries before our era, among them the Jews. Zionism became popular among the Americans, who rightly detested the Nazis, and whose financial markets were controlled by representatives of that movement. That state today is practicing the principles of apartheid; it has sophisticated nuclear weapons and it controls the most important financial centers in the United States. It was used by this country and its European allies to supply nuclear weapons to that other apartheid, the one in South Africa, so that they might be used against the Cuban internationalist combatants who were fighting the racists in the south of Angola if they were to cross the Namibian border.
(Link here for this entire rambling discourse online.)