Above: Fidel Castro

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Recent threats by North Korea have gotten the attention of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

In a statement released Friday, Castro warned that if war breaks out in the Korean peninsula, “people on both sides will be terribly slaughtered, with no benefit to any of them.”

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has always been was always friendly with Cuba, and Cuba has always been and will remain [friendly] with it,” Castro wrote.

Castro warned that any such war would affect more than 70 percent of the planet’s population.

He said it represented one of the “most serious risks of nuclear war” since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, what Castro called “the October Crisis.”