Cuba appeared to move into the post-Fidel Castro era at the weekend when the ailing Communist leader failed to make a much-expected return to public view at a mass military parade to celebrate his 80th birthday.

The world’s longest-serving president, who last addressed the public on July 26, failed to appear at the military parade through Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, despite hundreds of thousands of Cubans chanting “Viva Fidel!”

Speculation about his impending demise was fuelled by the Government putting on sale a special newspaper edition of a year-old interview he did with a French academic, entitled “After Fidel, what?”

President Castro, who underwent surgery for “sustained” intestinal bleeding on July 27, failed to turn up despite the presence on the podium of the leftist leaders of Bolivia, Haiti and Nicaragua, and Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel prize laureate novelist.

Cubans reacted with emotions from dismay to foreboding. “You could tell he was not there because everyone was hanging their heads; very sad,” said one woman, carrying a sign proclaiming “Fidel: 80 years more”.

“He is definitely in a critical condition,” ventured a plasterer. “He is definitely not coming back. But the country will go on. No problem.”

The leader’s place at the parade — the first in Havana in a decade — was taken by his younger brother, Raúl, 75, the long-time Defence Minister and his presumed successor, who took over as acting president on July 31.

Dressed in military fatigues with medals on his chest, Raúl told the throng that the past four months had demonstrated the self-confidence of the Cuban people.

“We will preserve at whatever price necessary the liberty of the people and the independence and sovereignty of the ‘patria’,” he vowed. A mousier character than his leonine brother, he gave no explanation of the President’s absence.

The President, who has defied a reputed 638 assassination plots and a US economic embargo since seizing power in a 1959 revolution, turned 80 on August 13. Because of his health, his birthday celebrations were postponed until Saturday to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his armed band landing on Cuban shores from Mexico aboard the ship Granma to start the revolution. The last video of him on October 28 showed him looking extremely frail sitting up in bed, prompting speculation that he was suffering from terminal cancer.

Yesterday a watchman said that he was planning to flee the country to join his brother abroad. “Raúl is much worse than he is.” Mr Castro heads a collective leadership made up of six other ministers — including Carlos Lage Dávila, the powerful Vice-President and economics overlord. Mr Lage signalled to Cubans at the weekend that their rulers understood the hardships they faced, acknowledging that the Caribbean island had yet to recover fully from the extreme economic difficulties it suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of Soviet subsidies.

“We have yet to overcome completely those concerns. We know well the austere life of many of our compatriots, the unavoidable and avoidable obstacles they face every day,” he told a symposium on President Castro. “But we are advancing despite embargoes and threats and we can affirm that we are living today the most promising and hopeful moment in our history.”

In an interview last year, President Castro said that the Cuban revolution would live on because it was not based on a “cult of personality”. “But this country can self-destruct. This revolution can destroy itself,” he said. “Yes, we can destroy it, and it would be our fault.”

How the great and not-so-good celebrate

In March 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu arranged lavish public celebrations to mark the end of Romania’s £5 billion debt, which he had paid off by selling food, leaving food shortages Source: news archives

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