Cuban acting President Raul Castro (R) and Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Felipe Perez Roque at the end of the closing ceremony of the XIV Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Havana. AFP PHOTO

The event was also marked by North Korea's defense of its nuclear weapons program, historic talks between India and Pakistan and the absence of convalescing Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Leaders of the developing world agreed on the need to counter overwhelming US influence, and several launched blistering attacks on the United States during the summit.

But Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi insisted the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was not "anti-any country."

"I do not see this summit as anti-US," he said, stressing there were differences of opinion within the 118-state movement.

The two-day summit highlighted the rows between the United States and two countries that US President George W. Bush has accused of being part of an "axis of evil," Iran and North Korea.

North Korea charged that the United States left it no option but to secure deterrent nuclear weapons, and pledged that as long as it was hit by US sanctions it would not return to six-party talks.

"The United States, far from complying with the six-party commission's agreements, has continued to impose unilateral sanctions, sending the talks to a standstill," Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, said Saturday.

"Korea has nuclear arms as a deterrent to firmly guarantee the peace and security of the Korean peninsula and the region," he said.

The summit's final declaration backed Iran's right to nuclear energy. The United States and European powers fear that Tehran wants to use its nuclear program to build an atomic bomb.

Cuban Interim President Raul Castro met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Saturday to express "Cuba's support for the right of Iran -- or any other country -- for peaceful use of nuclear energy."

Ahmadinejad, who insisted Tehran's atomic program had strictly peaceful objectives and claimed the United States was the real nuclear threat, traveled to Venezuela Sunday.

In the voluminous final declaration, heads of state and government from 56 countries and delegates from the other NAM member states also urged UN reform to give greater weight to poor countries and expressed their opposition to terrorism and what they see as US interventionism.

The NAM document also condemned what it terms Israel's "unlawful" policies in the Palestinian territories and its recent military intervention in Lebanon.

On the sidelines of the summit, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf agreed at their breakthrough talks Saturday to resume negotiations on the disputed Kashmir region and to jointly battle terrorism.

The summit's big absentee, Fidel Castro, 80, still met with foreign dignitaries in a hospital-like room, clad in pajamas and looking gaunt.

Raul Castro, 75, long Cuba's defense chief, officially heads Cuba while his bearded sibling recovers from gastrointestinal surgery he underwent in July, and chaired the summit.

Many of the summit participants headed from here to New York, where they will take part next week in the UN General Assembly.

The next NAM summit will be held in 2009 in Egypt.