Posted on 08/05/2006 4:41:19 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
MEXICO CITY - The Cuban government has provided no details on Fidel Castro's health and released no pictures of the leader since it announced Monday night that he was having surgery and handing power to his brother.
Cubans were told in a statement attributed to Castro that most details of his health would be kept "a state secret" to prevent the island's enemies from taking advantage of his condition.
Most Cubans have insisted that they are sure Castro will recover and that the government will function fine until then. But others have privately expressed worries that their leader may be more sick than the world knows.
Speculation around the world has filled the information void.
In Brazil, the daily Folha de Sao Paulo ran a story Saturday saying "Cuban authorities" informed Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his party's leaders that Castro's health is worse than publicly acknowledged. The newspaper reported Castro, 79, apparently has abdominal cancer, and that the unidentified Cuban authorities said he would be too incapacitated to reassume power.
But hours after the newspaper hit the streets, Silva's office took the unusual step of shooting down the story.
"There's no truth to the news published today," said Andre Singer, Silva's spokesman. "The president has ... not received any information from Cuban, or any other authorities, on the alleged diagnosis published by the newspaper."
Folha, however, said it was standing by its story.
"The information was obtained from aides of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva," the paper said in a statement, adding that it will publish its response to Silva's denial in its Sunday editions.
Cuban officials have insisted that Castro is recuperating and alert.
On a trip to Bolivia, Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage said Saturday that Castro is recovering satisfactorily from surgery. Health Minister Jose Ramon Balaguer said the same thing on Friday while visiting Guatemala. Cuban Parliament Speaker Ricardo Alarcon said in comments broadcast Saturday — recorded Thursday — that Castro "remains in stable condition" and "is resting in order to recover as quickly as possible."
But Cuban officials have kept silent on what precisely is ailing Castro, where he is and what surgical procedure he underwent.
In Miami, home to a large Cuban exile community, the information void has led some of the local media to ask medical experts and exile leaders to speculate.
"I was getting a call every 15 seconds or 30 seconds," said Ramon Saul Sanchez, head of the Cuban exile group Democracy Movement, adding that some of his interviewers asked him to make conjectures on whether Castro is dead. He said he responded that there is nothing to do but wait.
Omar Montejo, a spokesman for the University of Miami School of Medicine, said he has fielded calls all week from local and national media looking for medical experts. He said he gets calls for gastrointestinal specialists, and sometimes oncologists, on the assumption Castro could have cancer.
"The first day or so there was a lot of media calls trying to see if our medical experts could come up with an educated diagnosis based on the little bit of information that we had," Montejo said. "At one point we considered a news conference simply because we were getting so many calls."
Montejo said it's hard for doctors to comment in the absence of more concrete information or a diagnosis.
In a piece that appeared Saturday in the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, columnist Fausto Maso was pessimistic about Castro's chances.
Under the headline "The interminable death of Fidel Castro," Maso wrote: "He will be able to live some time more, but in an operation like that at his age, up to a fourth of those who enter the operating room die and those who survive are left with their days numbered."
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Associated Press writers Jessica Gresko in Miami and Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed to this report.
I saw a documentary that it took the Russians like a month to get him so well embalmed to look life like.
Castro deserves at least the same as Lenin. < /sar >
Cuba's President Fidel Castro (R) and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez wave while posing next to a statue of a young guerrilla leader legend Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as they visit the childhood home of Guevara, the house where he lived and now has been turned into a museum, in Alta Gracia, Argentina July 22, 2006. EDITORIAL USE ONLY REUTERS/Palacio Miraflores/Handout (ARGENTINA)
The real question is whether he will be able to resume Dictator duties. Unless he is going to live to 160 he will be stepping down in the not too distant future no matter what.
They're free of charge so you get what you pay for. IIRC, there are a couple showplace hospitals that puts on a dog an pony act so Western journalists will crow about how great Cuban medicine is. Most are what you'd expect from a third world communist dictatorship. Not a place you would want to go even if you're mildly ill.
One theory I have is that if Fidel is still alive, he's under the care of foreign doctors or even in another country. They sure don't want that news slipping out.
No, really. It smells.
Is that a statue of Jimmy Carter?
HA! That's what I wondered too!
Talk about poetic justice!
(overheard in the halls of the rulers: "I'm a beautician, not a magician!")
As the papers said, a hundred + years ago, about John Wesley Hardin, "Except for being dead, he was in remarkable shape."
That makes sense. After all, it's quite difficult to take photographs of a man while he's buried six feet under.
I hate it when the media omits relevant facts.
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