Ex-Cuban president, Fidel Castro, who reappeared before international press in a special Parliamentary session on Saturday, Aug. 7, gave his first interview in four years to a group of Venezuelan journalists, to whom he spoke about the possibility of nuclear war, U.S. President Barack Obama, and the Afghanistan War, reported the newspaper La Jornada and the Cuban News Agency.
The Cuban leader, who became seriously ill at the end of July 2006, said there's a need to mobilize public opinion to convince Obama not to pull the nuclear trigger, and he warned the U.S. president to be careful because "it's a miracle" there hasn't been an assassination attempt against him, according to excerpts from the interview published by the television network Telesur.
Castro, who will turn 84 on Friday, also spoke about the release of classified documents on the Afghanistan war posted on the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks. Wearing an olive green uniform and making a show of his good health, he said that a statue should be made in honor of WikiLeaks, according to Radiocubana.
The complete interview was broadcast simultaneously on Monday, Aug. 9, by Cubavisión, Venezolana de Televisión (VYV) and Telesur.
See here images from part of the Telesur interview and listen to audio of the conversation. Also see photos of the Cuban leader sent by Venezuelan journalists via Twitter and official images published by CubaDebate.
Other posts from the Knight Center about Fidel Castro are available here.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
