State television showed Fidel Castro for the first time in three months on Tuesday and the ailing Cuban leader said he was still in the fight to recover from surgery that forced him to relinquish power last July.
Castro (80) looked stronger than he had in a previous video, but still frail, in the images from a two-hour meeting on Monday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, his closest ally in Latin America.
”This is far from being a lost battle,” Castro said. He spoke slowly in an almost unintelligible voice in footage that showed him sipping orange juice and standing.
The new video was shown almost six months to the day since Castro temporarily handed over power to his brother, Defence Minister Raul Castro, last July 31 after emergency surgery for intestinal bleeding.
That was the first time he had relinquished control since his 1959 revolution that steered the Caribbean island on a socialist course and made Cuba an enduring ideological foe of the United States.
Castro was last seen in an October 28 video clip looking very frail and walking with difficulty. He appeared to have put on weight in the latest images.
Cuba has denied Castro has stomach cancer but his precise illness is a state secret. He is thought to be suffering from diverticulitis, a disorder of the large intestine.
Chávez, who has built a close economic relationship with Cuba and whom critics accuse of leading the world’s fifth largest oil exporter toward Cuban-style communism, told his mentor he brought him ”the embrace of millions who admire you, love you, need you and follow you step by step”.
”There is Fidel standing, in one piece,” he said in the five-minute video clip.
Chávez said he found Castro in ”good humour” and speaking clearly about global issues such as climate change.
He said they spoke about ”the threats of the empire” — a reference to their common foe, the US — and efforts to forge an anti-US alliance of Latin American countries.
They also discussed a joint venture agreed to last week that included a fibre optics cable plan to bypass a US trade embargo and a steelworks in Venezuela using Cuban nickel, Chávez said.
The video showed them browsing newspaper clippings together.
”Fidel said days ago that the battle [for his health] is not lost. I would say more: we are winning it,” Chávez said.
They parted with Castro’s favourite slogan, ”socialism or death”.
Information about Castro’s health has been scarce in the last six months.
A Spanish doctor who examined him in December said two weeks ago that Castro is making a ”slow but progressive” recovery, although his condition is serious due to his age.
The doctor, Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, head of surgery at Madrid’s Gregorio Maranon public hospital, said Castro has suffered complications after surgery on his digestive system but may recover.
The surgeon largely dismissed reports by Spain’s El Pais newspaper that said Castro had undergone three botched operations for diverticulitis.
Chávez said on January 19 that the Cuban leader was ”fighting for his life”. A few days later, he said Castro was up and walking, adding in a light-hearted tone that he was almost jogging. – Reuters