Sucre, Bolivia – Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage said during an appearance in this Bolivian city, where he was attending independence celebrations, that Cuban leader Fidel Castro did not have stomach cancer.
Lage said Saturday that reports in the Brazilian media about Castro’s illness were incorrect and that the Cuban leader was “recovering.”
The Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo reported Saturday that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had been informed by Cuban authorities that Castro had cancer and might not be able to return to office.
“Cuban authorities told the president and the Workers Party (PT) that the dictator has cancer and that even if he recovers he might not return to power,” the newspaper reported, without revealing its sources.
Folha de Sao Paulo said that “word from Havana received confidentially indicates that Castro is very ill.”
Lula was deeply moved and asked his supporters to keep quiet about the matter, according to the daily.
The Brazilian government later denied that it had been informed by Havana about Castro’s health.
“The president of the republic, who is following the situation of the Cuban president’s health through the Foreign Ministry, was at no time informed by Cuban authorities or any other source about the supposed diagnosis,” Brazilian presidential spokesman Andre Singer said in a communique.
In a statement read on Cuban state television Monday night, Fidel Castro announced he was ceding power on a provisional basis to his 75-year-old brother, Raul, while he recovered from surgery to stop intestinal bleeding.
The Cuban leader will turn 80 on Aug. 13.
Lage traveled to Sucre, the official capital of Bolivia, to witness the swearing-in ceremony Sunday for the assembly that will rewrite the Andean nation’s constitution.
Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, is a friend and close ally of Castro, who sent a Cuban medical brigade to provide free health care to poor residents of the Andean nation and has given other assistance.
Lage, former Chilean President Eduardo Frei and Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu are among the foreign guests invited to the ceremony.
