Fidel Castro won…

January 23, 2009

HAVANA: Fidel Castro said he doubts he will make it to the end of Barack Obama’s four-year term and instructed Cuban officials to start making their decisions without taking him into account.In an online column posted Thursday titled “Reflections of Comrade Fidel,” the 82-year-old former Cuban leader suggested his days are numbered, saying Cuban government and Communist Party officials “shouldn’t feel bound by my occasional Reflections, my state of health or my death.”

“I have had the rare privilege of observing events over such a long time. I receive information and meditate calmly on those events,” he wrote. “I expect I won’t enjoy that privilege in four years, when Obama’s first presidential term has ended.”

He did not elaborate, but the lines had the ring of a farewell, and Castro suggested that he was on his way out.

“I have reduced the Reflections as I had planned this year, so I won’t interfere or get in the way of the party or government comrades in the constant decisions they must make,” he wrote.

Castro stepped down in July 2006 to undergo emergency surgery and has not been seen in public since. He turned over the presidency to his brother Raúl in February after nearly a half-century as Cuba’s leader, but his periodic essays have continued to carry weight.

They are diligently read in full at the top of midday and nightly radio and television newscasts. At times, they have even appeared to contradict the words of his brother, the president, prompting speculation over who is really in charge.

The bulk of Thursday’s column was devoted to praising Obama, the 11th U.S. president since the Cuban revolution, in part for his decision to close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay. Castro recalled his thoughts Tuesday as he watched Obama assume the “leadership of the empire.”

“The intelligent and noble face of the first black president of the United States,” he wrote, “had transformed itself under the inspiration of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King into a living symbol of the American dream.”

Obama has said he will not end the U.S. embargo on Cuba without democratic reforms on the island, but will ease limits on Cuban-Americans’ visits there and on the money they send home to relatives. He has also offered to negotiate personally with Raúl Castro.

The column was Fidel Castro’s second in as many days. Before that, he hadn’t been heard from in more than a month, fueling rumors that he had suffered a stroke or lapsed into a coma. Those rumors were dispelled on Wednesday when President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina met with him.