Maximum Leader Hints at Retirement

Cuba’s acting leader, Raul Castro, sat next to the empty chair of his ailing brother at the final session of the National Assembly before next year’s parliamentary election. In a letter read out before the day’s business got underway, Fidel Castro said that in the past he had been a “utopian socialist”. It was a phase, he said, when he believed he knew what we had to do and wanted the power to do it.

“What the foreign press in Cuba have most reported in recent days has been the phrase where I expressed… that I am not a person who clings to power. I could add that I was once, for the excesses of youth and lack of conscience,” he said. “What changed me? Life itself, through the deepening of the thoughts of [Cuban independence leader Jose] Marti and the classics of Socialism,” he said.

Mr Castro also urged people to support his brother, saying he had read in advance a speech Raul made earlier this week in which he said Cuba needed to become more democratic, at least by allowing more open debate about economic and social issues.

Source: BBC

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