Fidel Castro criticizes Obama's economic plans

President Barack Obama intends to print "enormous sums of money" to keep American society from grinding to a halt, Fidel Castro said in his second critical essay of the U.S. leader, released Wednesday.

The ailing former Cuban president had previously praised Obama, but last week he wrote an essay in which he demanded that the new U.S. president return the Guantanamo military base to Cuba and criticized his response to the Israeli incursion into Gaza.

His latest column, posted on a government Web site, said that "any criticism on my part (of Obama) is classified, without exception, as an attack, an accusation or other similar names."

The 82-year-old revolutionary accused U.S. authorities of attacking Cuba throughout the 1960s, including with the Bay of Pigs invasion, but said it is not his intention "to blame President Obama for actions that were taken when he was a child of 6."

He did question how the present-day U.S. will fare under Obama's stewardship, however.

He wrote, for example, that the United States "cannot satisfy its vital needs without the extraction of the enormous material resources of a great number of countries."

He questioned whether the new vehicles produced by the American automotive industry would be efficient enough to "meet the geological demands to protect humanity from the growing deterioration of the environment?"

He also said that he believes Obama "intends to print enormous sums of money in search of technologies that generate energy production without which modern societies would be paralyzed."

Suffering from an unknown illness, Castro has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006. His younger brother Raul succeeded him as president almost a year ago.