By IANS
Manaus (Brazil) : Cuban leader Fidel Castro “is alive because he’s Fidel”, says Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Before leaving the Amazon city of Manaus, where he met with the heads of state of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Ecuador, Rafael Correa, Chavez told reporters Friday that despite health problems and the fact that he is 81, “Fidel could live 100 more years”.
Doctors have changed nearly all his blood in “I don’t know how many transfusions”, he said, according to the Spanish news agency EFE.
Chavez said he last spoke “two or three weeks ago” with Castro, who has been convalescing since last July from a very serious intestinal ailment that forced him to provisionally hand over power to younger brother Raul, the communist island’s long-time defence chief.
The Venezuelan leader said Fidel told him then that “he needed an illness to have time to watch television, write, think”.
During Chavez’s meeting Thursday with Brazil’s Lula, the two South American leaders agreed to move forward with two joint ventures between their respective nations’ state-run oil companies, as well as with a plan for a natural gas pipeline that would span much of South America.
Lula also told the Venezuelan president that he would do everything in his power to ensure that the Brazilian Congress ratifies Venezuela’s entry into the Mercosur trade bloc as a full member.
Following a meeting early Friday with Ecuador’s Correa, Chavez said the two countries agreed to inaugurate in November the Bank of the South, a development bank devised by Venezuela’s leftist president as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
In addition to Venezuela and Ecuador, the other countries of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas organization – Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua – are expected to participate in the lending organization.
Chavez said he “imagines” Brazil will also be among the countries involved in getting the new financial institution up and running.