HAVANA (Reuters) - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met with ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro on Tuesday and said he was "incredibly lucid" and healthy enough to resume his political role in Cuba.
By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met with ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro on Tuesday and said he was "incredibly lucid" and healthy enough to resume his political role in Cuba.
"I think Fidel is ready to assume his political role in Cuba and the role he has in history," Lula said at the end of a one-day visit. It was not clear he meant Castro would resume hands-on running of Cuba. In fact, Lula invited Fidel Castro's brother, acting President Raul Castro, to visit Brazil.
Lula met for two and a half hours with the 81-year-old revolutionary, who has not appeared in public since undergoing stomach surgery that forced him to hand over power temporarily to his brother Raul in July 2006.
!ADVERTISEMENT!"Fidel spoke for two hours and I for half an hour," Lula joked in remarks to reporters before heading home to Brasilia.
Two photographs of the meeting showed Castro looking much the same as in the last pictures released of him in October.
In one, Castro is shown in a track suit sitting in an armchair chatting with Lula. In the other, a relaxed and smiling Castro posed for Lula to take a photograph.
Lula, a former labor leader who said he belonged to a generation that admired Castro's 1959 leftist revolution, offered Cuba millions of dollars in credit and help in its search for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It was his second visit to Cuba as president of Latin America's largest nation.
Brazilian officials cast Lula's trip as an opportunity to engage communist-run Cuba with increased trade and investment.
Brasilia has the economic resources, technology and diplomatic clout to help Cuba as it approaches a crucial moment of its history without Fidel Castro at the helm and under pressure from the United States to open up to multiparty democracy, a Brazilian foreign ministry official said.
"We want to see Cuba back in the fold and can provide the Cubans with a level of comfort in the transition ahead by not being confrontational like the United States," he said.
ECONOMIC TIES
Lula met earlier with Raul Castro at the Palace of the Revolution government house in Havana, where the two nations signed eight agreements to bolster economic ties.
Brazil's export financing agency, COFIG, announced approval of credit for food purchases and the expansion and overhaul of the Che Guevara nickel mine.
Brazil is offering Cuba up to $1 billion in credit lines to pay for Brazilian goods and services, including $600 million for roads.
Cuba secured the commitment of Brazilian state oil company Petrobras to explore for oil in deep-sea Cuban waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where six foreign oil firms have already contracted 24 of 59 blocks.
Petrobras president Jose Sergio Gabrielli said the Brazilian giant was acquiring and analyzing data and had yet to identify which blocks it would sign risk contracts for. Petrobras had been reluctant to return to Cuba after sinking $16 million in a north-coast well that proved dry in 2001.
Petrobras and the Cuban state oil company CUPET agreed to consider a joint venture to build a lubricants plant in Cuba, a project discussed for years.
The one concrete agreement to emerge from Lula's visit was the licensing of Cuban interferon to Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation for tropical medicine research.
The influential Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper praised the credit splurge for Cuba in an editorial, saying it would clear the way for Brazilian companies to take part in Cuba's necessary modernization and reform process.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle, editing by Patricia Zengerle)
