Americas Features
Background: Fidel Castro's health always a state secret
By DPA
Aug 1, 2006, 19:00 GMT

Havana - The health of Cuban President Fidel Castro has always been a state secret in the small island country, where he handed over power to his brother late Monday for an operation for intestinal bleeding.

Although Castro himself has referred to the subject on several occasions, little is known of his alleged ailments, and hypotheses are often amplified from Miami by dissidents of the Cuban regime.

Just five days ago, Castro joked about the Florida community of immigrants is known.

'Let the little neighbours up north not worry, for I do not intend to exercise power until I am 100 years old,' Castro said in a speech in Bayamo to celebrate the 53rd anniversary of the failed assault on the Moncada Barracks that marked the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.

According to the Miami Herald in Florida, which quoted a source with connections in Cuba, no one had been allowed into or out of the CIMED state security hospital in Havana since Sunday. Employees were not allowed to leave at shift change, the paper reported.

The secrecy has prompted speculation about the illness. In Washington, a key US senator, Mel Martinez of Florida, said the announcement that Fidel Castro has temporarily relinquished power might mean the Cuban dictator is already dead.

'There's a possibility that he may be very, very ill or dead,' Martinez, the Cuban-born senator told reporters in Washington. He added, however, that he had no details on Castro's condition beyond media reports.

'I don't think there would be an announcement such as this unless it was pretty clear that he was incapacitated beyond recovery in the short term,' he said.

In Florida, the county government where much of Cuba's immigrant community lives in Little Havana, set up a telephone hotline 'for the control of rumours' coming out of Cuba at this time of uncertainty, the 'El Nuevo Herald' Spanish language newspaper reported.

Castro is only known to have suffered two previous incidents of physical problems, and both happened in public. In June 2001 he had a fainting spell as he addressed a mass audience in Havana.

On October 2004 he slipped at the end of a rally in the Cuban town of Santa Clara, injuring his arm and leg. He subsequently was seen in public in a wheelchair for the first time ever.

The news of Castro's most recent surgery was divulged on Monday night through a document that was handwritten and allegedly signed by Fidel Castro himself. The Cuban leader claimed that his health problems has arisen from stress from his visit to Argentina barely two weeks ago, where he delivered a three-hour speech to a crowd of 50,000, and his subsequent commitments in his own country.

'This caused me an acute intestinal crisis with sustained bleeding which forced me to undergo complicated surgery,' the Cuban president allegedly wrote. He added that after the operation he will need 'several weeks of rest'.