A return to power for Cuba's Castro?: Dictator reportedly exercising,
engaged in world affairs
FRANCES ROBLES
Miami Herald
A return to power for Cuba's Castro?: Dictator reportedly exercising,
engaged in world affairs
Seven months ago, Fidel Castro was considered all but dead. These days,
he's reported to be taking long walks with old friends and calling other
presidents to discuss global warming.
To hear National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon tell it, Castro is
in fact preparing for a comeback. This week Alarcon said to foreign
correspondents in Havana that Castro would be in "great shape" to run
for president of the Council of State, his official title.
"I'd nominate him," Alarcon said after a National Assembly session.
As Castro loyalists insist that the ailing leader is getting lots of
exercise, eating well and engaged in domestic and world affairs,
Alarcon's comments were the strongest suggestion yet that Castro might
return to public life.
But his comments raise the question of whether a man who seven months
ago was written off for good could return to power - and whether his
acting president brother would let him.
"It depends on his health. If he's 100 percent, nobody is going to stop
him," said Cuba expert Phil Peters of the Lexington Institute think tank
in Virginia. "There seem to be indications he's getting better."
Castro ceded power, "temporarily" but for the first time in 47 years, on
July 31 after announcing he had undergone surgery for an intestinal
illness. His younger brother Raul, the defense minister, has taken the
reins in a period marked by surprising stability.
Although Fidel Castro has not appeared in public since then, the
government recently released a transcript of a telephone call he made to
Haiti's Rene Preval and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
During a trip to Paris earlier this week, Foreign Minister Felipe Perez
Roque said Castro was in direct contact with Communist Party leaders and
increasingly taking on more work.
"He has a telephone at his side and uses it a lot," Raul Castro said
last month, according to The Associated Press. "He's consulted on the
most important questions. He doesn't interfere, but he knows about
everything."
Castro's longtime friend, Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, told the newspaper El Pais this week that Castro walks
"kilometers" and is improving "hour by hour."
Castro, he said, is obsessed with detail, in good humor, and talking
passionately about preferred topics such as climate change.
Officially, Castro's health remains a state secret, and it's unclear
whether statements that his brother and other close allies make about
his status are truthful or over-optimistic.
But experts point out that many outsiders insisted Cuban officials were
lying several months ago when they denied reports Castro was on the
brink of death, only for Castro to eventually emerge in a late January
video with Chavez, having regained considerable weight and looking much
better.
Cuba expert, Lexington Institute think tank in Virginia
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/world/16936914.htm
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