CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Cuban President Fidel Castro said in a television interview
                 broadcast Monday in the Middle East that his country is ready to make peace
                 with the United States only if it changes imperialist ways and respects the rights
                 of other peoples.

                 Castro's comments follow a visit to New York earlier this month, where he was
                 among 160 world leaders to attend the U.N. Millennium summit. During the visit,
                 Castro's first in five years, he shook hands with U.S. President Bill Clinton -- his
                 first handshake with a U.S. president.

                 "We are not ready for reconciliation with the
                 United States, and I will not reconcile with the
                 imperialist system," Castro, who rarely grants
                 interviews, told Qatar-based Al-Jazeera Television.
                 "But if the American people and their government
                 are ready to respect the rights of others, we are
                 ready, in this case, to work so that peace prevails.
                 Otherwise, their will be no reconciliation"

                 For decades, relations between communist Cuba
                 and the United States have been frigid. The United
                 States has kept agricultural and other trade
                 sanctions on Cuba since July 1963, longer than on
                 any other country but North Korea.

                 In July, The U.S. Congress voted to allow unrestricted U.S. food and drug sales
                 to Cuba and to allow Americans to travel freely to their island neighbor. The vote
                 was a major victory for farm, business and other groups trying to ease the
                 4-decade-old sanctions against Castro's government.

                 "For the past 40 years I have been struggling against the world's most powerful
                 and dangerous force, and against the continuous embargo," Castro, wearing an
                 olive-green military uniform, said in Spanish that Al-Jazeera, the Arab world's
                 most popular all-news station, had translated into Arabic.

                 Castro also said Cuba wouldn't collapse like the Soviet Union did "because they
                 became busy with bureaucracy and lost contact with the people, which is
                 something that never happened here."

                 "Communist rule is still valid for the future because it is the most equitable
                 system," Castro said. "We are defending our culture better than any other country
                 because other countries are being subjected to a Western cultural invasion."

                  Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.