I Was at Death's Door, says Castro


Mexico City, Aug 31 (IANS/EFE) After a serious illness that took him four years to recover, former Cuban president Fidel Castro has said he felt like he "rose from the dead into a world of crazies" and that he "didn't aspire to live any longer".

Castro, in an exclusive five-hour conversation with Carmen Lira, editor of Mexican daily La Jornada, said he was almost "at death's door".

The Cuban leader said after his health improved, he began "to see quite clearly the problems of the growing world tyranny", and among them he perceived the "imminence of a nuclear attack that would unleash the world conflagration".

Castro, who recently turned 84, reappeared in public in July after being out of the limelight for four years with a serious illness that forced him to transfer power to younger brother Raul.

"I didn't aspire to live any longer, much less anything else. I asked myself several times if those people (his doctors) were going to let me live under these conditions or if they were going to allow me to die. Then, I survived, but in very bad physical shape," he said, although he provided no specifics regarding the nature of his illness."

"I was at death's door," said Castro about his suffering, while revealing that, although he was a large-framed man over six feet in height, he weighed just around 66 kg during his illness.

"Today, I'm already between 85 and 86 kg, and this morning I managed to take 600 steps alone, without a cane, without any help," he said.

When he began to recover, Castro felt "like I was in a world of crazies. A world that appears every day on television, in the newspapers, and which nobody understands. But I don't want to be absent from the world".

"The world is in the most interesting and dangerous phase of its existence and I'm quite engaged with what's going to happen. I still have things to do," he said.

Castro said he wants to form a movement against nuclear war which will become a "force of international persuasion to prevent that colossal threat from coming to pass".

The former president thought "the nuclear attack was going to come over North Korea", an opinion he later altered because, in his judgement, military action against North Korea would be vetoed by China in the UN Security Council.

"But regarding Iran, nobody's going to do that, because there's no veto from either China or Russia," he said.

Castro earlier said fears the US will attack Iran to stop Tehran's nuclear programme, which the West say is aimed at developing atomic weapons, an allegation Iran denies.

A military strike on Iran could lead to nuclear war, Castro said.

"We have to mobilise the world to persuade Barack Obama, the president of the US, to avoid nuclear war. He is the only one who can push, or not push, the button," the Cuban leader asserted.

Castro said the cumulative destructive power in the world's existing nuclear arsenal is a thousand times greater than that of the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

  

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Title: I Was at Death's Door, says Castro



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