Former Cuban president Fidel Castro presented two volumes of his memoir entitled Time Guerrilla in a ceremony that marked his first public appearance since in April last year, Cuban media reported.
The memoirs trace his life from infancy until 1958, when he succeeded in leading a revolution that turned Cuba into a communist country aligned with the Soviet Union.
Castro’s recollection of events is reported through conversations with journalist Katiuska Blanco.
“I have to seize the opportunity now because my memory is spent,” the 85-year-old Castro told guests at a presentation on Friday at the Palace of Conventions in Havana.
The Cuban leader had not been seen in public since April, when he attended the closing ceremony of a Communist Party congress. Among the guests on Friday was Cuban Cultural Minister Abel Prieto, Union of Writers and Artists president Miguel Barnet and Blanco, the book’s author.
“I’m willing to do everything possible to convey what I remember well,” Castro was quoted as saying in the official newspapers Granma, Young Rebel and on the Web site Cubadebate. “I’ve been expressing all the ideas I had and the feelings that I went through. I am aware of the importance of telling all this to pass it so that it can be useful.”
During the conversations with Blanco, which span 1,000 pages in the book, Castro said: “I prefer an old clock, old eyeglasses, old boots and in politics, everything new.”
Blanco, who also authored the first official biography of Castro and his family, presents his memoirs in the form of questions and answers.
The book is similar to One Hundred Hours with Fidel, a book of conversations between Castro and Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, published in late 2006, just after the Cuban leader turned over power to his brother, Raul, amid a health crisis.
Since then, Fidel Castro has dedicated himself to publishing a book that narrates his experiences during the Cuban revolution and writing columns in the media titled Reflections. The columns expound his views on current events.
He gave copies of his two-volume memoirs to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff during her visit to Cuba last week, according to diplomatic sources in Brazil.
The memoirs are published by Editora Abril and illustrated with photographs and drawings by the Cuban painter Ernesto Rancano.
Fidel Castro spoke about international politics during his presentation at the Palace of Conventions.
He said he closely follows events in Venezuela under the government of his friend, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
“No one did more for the people of Venezuela and the Bolivarian Movement,” he said.
He also referred to the Chilean student protests demanding free and quality education under the guidance of their leader Camila Vallejo.
“We should support the ideas of the young Chilean in the sense of fighting for education available equally to all,” Fidel Castro said.
“It shouldn’t be just general education and free, but we should also worry about what is taught,” he added.
Regarding the politics of Latin America and the Middle East, he said: “There is no longer room only for national interests. Instead, they should be framed under world interests. Our duty is to fight until the last minute for our country, for our planet and for humanity.”
Fidel Castro also congratulated the families of five Cuban agents convicted of espionage in the US. The Cuban government refers to them as “heroes” and “anti-terrorists” for their work in monitoring anti--Castro groups in Miami.
“You have to see what these men have endured,” he said.
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
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country