Off The Grid: Fidel Castro Says U.S. Gov't Owes Cuba "Millions of Dollars" in Damages

In an op-ed published in the Official Cuban Communist Party newspaper, the former Cuban leader doesn't mince words when speaking about his country's diplomatic relations with the United States.

Secretary of State John Kerry is in Havana today to raise the American flag at the U.S. Embassy for the very first time in 54 years, in an effort to restore diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Yet former Cuban leader Fidel Castro does not acknowledge this historic event in a new op-ed released this week. Instead, he expresses his concerns over U.S. and Cuba's troubled past in his column for Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma.

Castro offers a brief history of the U.S. and Cuba's strained relationship. He writes on the repercussions of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings -- and how that propelled the United States to be "the country with the greatest wealth and the best weaponry on Earth, in a world torn apart, full of death, the wounded and hungry."

He calls out President Richard Nixon for removing the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, claiming that the "foundation of a crisis was created."

"Cuba is owed compensation equivalent to damages," Castro writes, "which have reached many millions of dollars, as our country has denounced throughout our interventions in the United Nations, with irrefutable arguments and facts."

The leader of the Cuban Revolution finishes with a call to action for peace "for every inhabitant on the planet regardless of skin color or national origin, and for the full right of all to hold a religious belief or not."

What do you make of Castro's column? Sound off below.

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