``The revolution has just begun,'' Castro said Friday night, echoing his first speeches after his Jan. 1, 1959, triumph over the forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Castro said it seemed ``unreal'' to be speaking from the wood-banistered balcony of Santiago's 16th century city hall where he made his first appearance as Cuba's leader.
In that speech, he denied thoughts of being Cuba's leader. This year he looked to the future, describing Cuba as a bulwark against the onslaught of a capitalist system that he said had created inequality, misery and death.
The revolution he led has evolved into ``a struggle together with other peoples for all humanity,'' he said.
About 2,000 invited supporters filled the small Cespedes Park in Santiago for a ceremony reminiscent of a U.S. political convention. Castro's speech was preceded by an impressionistic documentary film showing scenes of the mass jubilation that greeted the rebel victory, with noted Cuban pianist Frank Fernandez playing from a nearby platform.
The event was televised nationally.
Castro noted that 7 million of Cuba's 11 million people have been born since the revolution -- and that levels of literacy, education and medical care have soared.
``The people I lead are not the same people of that Jan. 1,'' he said.
Though saying he is not unchanged either, Castro -- wearing his trademark olive-green military uniform -- promised that he is someone ``who dresses the same, who thinks the same, who dreams the same.''
Castro praised three generations of Cubans for resisting the U.S. economic embargo and other pressures against the island.
But he devoted much of his speech to attacking a global free-market system he said had become ``a new religion,'' which he insisted ``inevitably will fall.''
``The current system is unsustainable because it is based on (economic) laws which are blind, chaotic, ruinous and destructive to society,'' Castro said, blaming capitalism for widespread poverty and inequality.
``Absolutely nobody is or can be secure'' under such a system, which has ``turned the planet into a giant casino,'' he said.
Several dozen tourists -- increasingly important to Cuba's own struggling economy -- leaned on the balcony of a hotel overlooking the tree-shaded plaza lined with colonial-era buildings.
Below, revolutionary veterans wearing medals on their chests chanted ``Fidel! Fidel!'' before and after the speech.
Among those in the crowd were Nobel literature laureates Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia and Jose Saramago of Portugal.
It was far more orderly than the joyous confusion that night four decades ago when the rebel leader arrived in the eastern Cuban city where he had spent much of his youth.
Batista had fled Cuba early in the morning. But Castro devoted much of his speech to warnings against a military takeover -- a threat that quickly dissolved.
``I am not interested in power nor do I envisage assuming it at any time,'' Castro told the crowd here in 1959. ``All that I will do is to make sure that the sacrifices of so many compatriots should not be in vain.''
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press