Then Should We Call It “The Fortune Of The People?”

Fidel Castro is furious and an threatening to sue Forbes magazine (we would love to sit in the courtroom on that one) for ranking him among the world’s richest people.

Perhaps Forbes forgot that everything he owns, or controls belongs to “the people.” You could say Castrol is fit to be tied, except in his dictatorship his security people usually do the tying…so let’s just say he’s mad:

“Once again, they have committed the infamy of speaking about Castro’s fortune, placing me almost above the queen of England,” Castro said in a speech to top officials of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party, military and police.

“Do they think I am (former Zairian President) Mobutu (Sese Seko) or one of the many millionaires, those thieves and plunderers, that the empire has suckled and protected?” he said in reference to his capitalist archenemy, the United States.

“What they should be doing is looking for the money of all those people,” he said.

Last year Forbes put his fortune at $150 million and this year it has it as $550 million. The magazine says that in the past they used a percentage of Cuba’s gross national produce to estimate his fortune. This year they used more traditional methods “comparing state-owned assets Castro is assumed to control with comparable publicly traded companies.”

The Cuban government issued a blistering press release blasting the report as a “slander” and Forbes “an American magazine of decaying credibility….The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.”

Oh.