Ray Sanchez | Direct from Havana
7:03 AM EDT, June 25, 2008
Havana
Fidel Castro spends his convalescense collecting news and analyzing
world affairs, the former president said in a statement Tuesday night.
"What do I do?" the 81-year-old Castro was quoted as telling a top
official from China's Communist Party. "I help gathering news and
information and doing analysis about the most serious international
problems that I contribute to the leadership of the party and state."
In a two-hour meeting with Chinese Politburo member He Guoquian, Castro
also spoke of the "importance" of Chinese socialism, according to the
statement read on the official nightly TV news and printed in the state
press Wednesday.
Castro "underscored the advances of the Chinese people and the
importance of the socialist concept with Chinese characteristics," the
statement said.
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Raul Castro, who officially replaced brother Fidel as president in
February, has been a proponent of China's mix of tight political control
with a free-market economy.
The elder Castro has received several visiting dignitaries in the last
week, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a close friend. The
meeting with Chavez one week ago produced the first public video of
Castro in nearly half a year. Castro's signed essays also have appeared
more frequently in the official press.
Cuba expert and former CIA analyst Brian Latell speculated that Castro
might be secretly dictating his memoirs.
"He could by now have produced an enormous body of autobiography with
the assistance of doting aides and researchers presumably around him,"
Latell wote in his most recent report for the University of Miami's
Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.
"Castro's plan could be for the posthumous publication of multiple
volumes of memoirs, and possibly for a dramatic announcement of such a
plan coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution next
January," wrote Latell, author of "After Fidel: The Inside Story of
Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader."
Castro has not been seen in public since he underwent emergency
intestinal surgery in late July 2006.
"I have time to gather a great deal of information, to which I dedicate
nearly all hours of the day," he was quoted as saying in the latest
statement.
more in /news/local/cuba
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/cuba/sfl-0625havanadaily,0,4225621.column
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