US maintains Fidel Castro is in grips of terminal illness

[Jimmy2]

The US intelligence community still believes Cuban leader Fidel Castro is terminally ill and has "months, not years" to live, a spokesman said.

Though a Spanish doctor visited Castro last month and denied he has cancer, Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said "The bottom line: He is terminally ill."

"We believe that he has months, not years," Feinstein said, adding that "nothing has changed in the director's assessment" since the doctor's comments on Castro late last month.

US Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte told The Washington Post on December 15 that "everything we see indicates it will not be much longer, ... months, not years," for the 80-year-old Cuban leader.

Castro, who underwent an operation on July 27, is "in a process of slow but progressive recovery" and does not need further surgery, doctor Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido told reporters in Madrid after returning from the only Communist-ruled country in the Americas.

Garcia Sabrido, who heads a surgery unit at a major Madrid hospital and is described by the Spanish media as a top gastroenterologist, described Castro's condition as "fine."

In power since 1959, Fidel Castro has not been seen in public for five months, and few medical updates have been made public since his reported intestinal surgery in July. In Cuba, Castro's health is being treated as a state secret.

Castro named his brother and defense chief Raul Castro, 75, as Cuba's interim leader on July 31.

And Fidel Castro's absence at a December 2 military parade stunned people and sparked speculation he might be seriously ill, or near death.

Castro also sat out the National Assembly's last session of the year, marking only the second time in 30 years that the Cuban leader has missed an assembly meeting.

Then, in a statement released December 30, Castro was quoted as saying his recuperation will be a long process but that "the battle is far from lost."

US officials say privately they have doubts about Garcia Sabrido's assessment of the octogenarian revolutionary's health.

Cubans accustomed to decades of Castro's dominant presence in official media have not grown used to his absence of the past few months.

News reports in December said the Cuban leader was too ill to receive his old friend, Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was on the island for nearly a month.

US lawmakers back from a trip to Cuba on December 18 cast doubt on officials there who insisted Castro was not dying and would return to power.

"'He'll be back,' was the story, and 'he doesn't have terminal cancer,' is what government officials told us," Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said at the time.

"In fact, we were told while we were in Cuba that the medical doctors treating Fidel Castro are sequestered, are isolated even from their own families," he said.

Raul Castro has reached out to the United States more actively than has his brother in the past four months, calling for negotiations. The countries do not have full relations, and the United States has an economic embargo on Havana.

The United States so far has said it is not interested in negotiating until there is political opening in Cuba.