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Castro salutes Cubans on New Yr
01/01/2008 20:05 - (SA)
Havana - Fidel Castro commended Cubans for their "resistance" in defending the communist-ruled country's revolution as it enters its 50th year, in a message read out on official media on Tuesday.
"Overnight the 49th year of the revolution will have been left behind us, and we will be in the 50th year, which will symbolise 50 years of heroic resistance," said Castro, 81, who has been recovering from emergency intestinal surgery for 17 months and has ceded power temporarily to his brother, defence chief Raul Castro, the regime's number two official.
"Let us tell the world proudly of this record," said Castro, the only president more than 70% of Cuba's 11.2 million people have known.
Speculation on Fidel Castro's future has been rife, as he has not made it clear if he has left active public leadership behind him.
In a letter to the National Assembly on Friday, Fidel Castro also again made an ambiguous suggestion that he could give up the presidency, saying that he had stopped clinging to power.
"There was a stage when I thought I knew what had to be done and I wanted the power to do it," he admitted, saying it was due to "an excess of youthfulness and deficit of conscience".
"What made me change? Life itself, tempered by the profound thought of (Jose) Marti and the classics of socialism," Castro said, in the letter read by assembly speaker Ricardo Alarcon.
Castro made no remark on his political future on Tuesday but did say: "in this compatriot you have seen a person who always told you the truth".
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