A little less than a year ago my imperialist enemies were prancing in the streets of Mafia Miami as they celebrated the imminence of my death, many even claiming I was already gone.  We can tell you now that I really was about dead.   I had one, two, three and more intestinal operations, all unsuccessful, and it appeared a half-century of my inspired domination of Cuba was going to pass.  The husky, vigorous and indomitable man you’d always known had become feeble, bedridden, and gray.  Thankfully, I had long since developed the finest medical system in the world, and my marvelous team of doctors provided life-sustaining nutrition through a series of intravenous procedures and catheters.  Now I’m taking everything required through my indefatigable mouth.

I am also spending the first free time of my life, excepting my imprisonment for trying to liberate the nation in the 1950’s, to reflect and write about the transcendent issues of this era and for eternity.  No longer do I have time to be a political movie star in battle fatigues, forever trimming my beard and getting dressed up and preparing my hours-long speeches and likewise lecturing interviewers from around the globe.  I am a writer now, making my work easily available to you online, and though I shall not tell you everything I know – that would undermine Cuban foreign policy – I do promise never to tell a lie.

My most vital declaration is that George W. Bush is an apocalyptic person.  “He expresses only emotions and constantly feigns rationality.”  The ironic result is that his aggression destroys not only hundreds of thousands of foreign lives but also thousands of American   All of this is utterly unnecessary and results from Bush’s hatred of the poor world.  He certainly cannot plausibly claim that America’s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and precision-guided missiles is designed to defeat the terrorists.  On the contrary, “imperialism intends to institutionalize world tyranny with these weapons.  It aims them at other great nations which arise not as military adversaries capable of surpassing their technology with weapons of mass destruction, but as economic powers that would rival the United States whose chaotic and wasteful consumerist economic and social system is absolutely vulnerable.”

I certainly do commiserate with the American people about the horrors of 9/11, and am evermore worried by the certainty that Bush and his courtiers, based on intelligence reports, either knew or should have known that an attack on U.S. soil was imminent.  “If something similar were to happen with any kind of explosives of nuclear material, given that enriched uranium flows like water throughout the world since the days of the Cold War, what would be the probable fate of humanity?”

Objective observers could not fail to be still more appalled that “George W. Bush is undoubtedly the most genuine representative of a system of terror forced on the world by the technological, economic and political superiority of the most powerful country known to this planet.”  No other conclusion was possible after the El Paso Federal Court in April, inevitably acting on the orders of President Bush, released on bail Luis Posada Carriles, a terrorist with as much blood on his face as Osama bin Laden.

Bush has long proclaimed himself the enemy of all terrorists.  Yet, with the most obscene hypocrisy, he has embraced Carriles, a criminal who with support of U.S. officials in 1976 destroyed a “Cuban passenger plane in midair, with 73 athletes, students and other Cuban and foreign travelers on board, together with its dedicated crew.”  The same people in 1985 “bought his freedom while the terrorist was held in prison in Venezuela, so that he could supply and practically conduct a dirty war against the people of Nicaragua, resulting in the loss of thousands of lives and the devastation of a country for decades to come; (they) empowered him to smuggle with drugs and weapons making a mockery of the laws of Congress; (they) collaborated with him to create the terrible Operation Condor and to internationalize terror; (they also) brought torture, death and often the physical disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans.”

George W. Bush is evidently allied with the terrorists as long as their victims are poor people and from nations with governments he disapproves of.  He is lucky I am an old man and too tired today to write, as I have on other recent days, about the looming catastrophe of excessive oil consumption and the “monstrosity” of transforming food into fuels.  Since the Americans and Europeans, the world’s most ravenous consumers, have the capacity to produce only 30 percent of their needed biofuels, the rest must perforce come from the “South, capitalism’s poor and neocolonial periphery.”  I have also been writing about starvation and soaring food prices and deforestation and African AIDS and the need to replace incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent.  No matter what the issue, I cast the United States as the villain.  That has always worked politically even as my own anachronistic policies failed.  My countless pratfalls were – and still are – daily obscured by the giant glowering to our North.

Last week I gave my first televised interview in almost a year since being stricken, and would like to apologize for its brevity, only about an hour.  As a convalescing man soon to turn 81, I feel better in a track suit than military uniform and simply can no longer deliver the five-hour speeches I know you would love to hear.  Though I probably have neither the energy nor testosterone to reclaim suffocating control of the country, I assure you that the current commander, my brother Raul Castro, will not do anything I’d disapprove of.  He wouldn’t, would he?  I do fear, however, that those who succeed Raul may become democratic.  Be assured, I really will be dead when that happens.