Cuban state television has shown Fidel Castro for the first time in three months and the ailing 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 Chavez, his closest ally in Latin America.
"This is far from being a lost battle," Mr Castro said. He spoke slowly in an almost unintelligible voice in
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In this photo released by Cuba's daily newspaper Juventud Rebelde, Cuba's leader Fidel Castro, left, meets with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez in Havana on Monday. |
footage that showed him sipping orange juice and standing.
The new video was shown almost six months to the day since Mr Castro temporarily handed over power to his brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro, on July 31st 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.
Mr Castro was last seen in an October 28th video clip looking very frail and walking with difficulty. He appeared to have put on weight in the latest images.
Cuba has denied Mr 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.
Mr Chavez, 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. Mr Chavez said he found Mr Castro in "good humor" 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 United States - and efforts to forge an anti-US alliance of Latin American countries.