Cuban President Fidel Castro suffered a fall late Wednesday, possibly breaking an arm and a knee, but he laughed off the mishap and assured Cubans he remained in good spirits and "in one piece."
Television cameras captured the entire incident when the 78-year-old communist leader stumbled and fell following a speech before graduates of an art school in Santa Clara, a city 280km east of Havana.
PHOTO: AP
But he quickly got up and, sitting on a chair, hastened to assure the audience he remained in control and full of enthusiasm.
"Please excuse me for having fallen," Castro smiled, who was clad in his trademark olive uniform.
"Just so no one speculates, I may have a fracture in my knee and maybe one in my arm," he continued. "But I remain in one piece."
The audience responded with cheers and thunderous applause.
Castro joked about seeing pictures of his fall in yesterday's international media and voiced confidence he would again make front page news all over the world.
"But as you can see, I can speak and I can work, although they will make me undergo medical tests," he assured those present.
But the president left the event before it had concluded and was driven away in a car.
Castro came to power in 1959 following an armed revolt that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
He became prime minister of Cuba in 1961 and has maintained a tight grip on the communist regime ever since.
Cuba's National Assembly elected him president in 1976, following the adoption of a new constitution.
A man of robust health, he has had no visible health problems during his rule, except for an episode in June 2001 when he briefly fainted during a rally in one of the working class districts of Havana.
Doctors attributed that collapse to "excessive heat and overexposure to the sun."
But just eight hours later, Castro was on national television laughing and assuring citizens that rumors of his demise had been grossly exaggerated.
"Some people were saying that I feigned my own death to see what kind of funeral they were preparing for me," he joked at that time.
Before his fall yesterday, Castro had visited the mausoleum of former comrade Ernesto Che Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in 1967 as he was trying to foment a revolutionary uprising.
Flanked by Elian Gonzalez, the boy at the center of a heated custody dispute between the US and Cuba, Castro laid a wreath on Guevara's tomb.
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