A daughter of acting President Raul Castro said on Sunday that her uncle Fidel is recovering "very well" from surgery and would likely again be "present and very active" in Cuba's government.
"Fidel is stupendous," said Mariela Castro Espin, who attended the dedication of a book of collected speeches and interviews by her mother Vilma Espin, head of the Federation of Cuban Women.
Raul Castro took over as acting president in July after his brother Fidel underwent surgery and disappeared from public view, aside from occasional videotaped meetings with foreign visitors.
The most recent showed a meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Jan. 29 in which Fidel Castro seemed noticeably stronger and less haggard than before. The videotape eased speculation fed by a Jan. 16 report in the Spanish newspaper El Pais that described him as being in "very grave" condition after three failed operations.
Cuban officials have not given details of his illness. It has not been clear if the Cuban leader would eventually return fully or would leave government in the hands of colleagues. There have been no visible signs of unrest or major policy changes since he stepped aside.
Asked if Fidel Castro would resume his full duties, his niece said, "I imagine him returning and not returning because one way or the other he is going to be present and very active."
Castro Espin, who heads the National Center for Sex Education, said she had not seen her uncle in recent days, but had spoken with "many people to be able to have information from different points of view" about his condition.
"I know that he is very well, that he is recovering very well, that he is even very conscious of his age, of the current moments of the revolution and with great confidence in his comrades," she said.
Castro "is recuperating as a man of 80 years should recuperate," she said.
Her comments were similar to those of Cuban Parliament Speaker Ricardo Alarcon in a story published on Sunday by the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.
Alarcon was quoted as saying he had spoken with Fidel Castro "several times" by phone and that the Cuban leader was closely following events.
"I'm confident that he will not only continue leading, as he is now, on fundamental topics, but that we will see him more closely," Alarcon said.
"It would be natural to expect that things would be like before, but without using so many hours making appearances and visits," Alarcon said.
But he added, "I wouldn't risk saying that he will be more discreet and controlled, because that could be ridiculous. He's capable of coming back and surprising everybody."
Vilma Espin, 76, who served as Cuba's de facto first lady for years, did not attend the book presentation. She is reputed to be ill.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency