Fidel Castro: Still Not Dead

Just days after a report surfaced that Fidel Castro had a stoke and clinging to life and right after Cuban Vice President Elias Jaua gave us his shaky evidence of Fidel Castro being alive, state-run Cuban media published an op-ed signed by Castro today, telling everyone to keep calm, carry on, and check out some cool photos of Fidel Castro in a garden being undead.

Just days after a report surfaced that Fidel Castro had a stoke and clinging to life and right after Cuban Vice President Elias Jaua gave us his shaky evidence of Fidel Castro being alive, state-run Cuban media published an op-ed signed by Castro today, telling everyone to keep calm, carry on, and check out some cool photos of Fidel Castro in a garden being undead.

First off, it looks like he's alive. Well, alive since Friday anyway. Yes, we're skeptical of state-run anything, but there are some photos (which are just asking for a Tumblr treatment) of Castro taken by his son which accompanied the column on the Cubadebate website, which is state-run and self described as "alternative information media that alerts about the defamatory campaigns against Cuba." In a couple shots, like the one below, the 86-year-old is holding a recent issue of state newspaper Granma: 

See, looks pretty alive right? Well, we were curious as to when the picture was taken. We looked up the headline, "El pueblo, protagonista del fortalecimiento de nuestra democracia socialista" found it on Granma's official website, and see that it ran and was updated on October 19. So there's that, if the old guy pictured really is Fidel Castro (he hasn't been seen in public since March according to CNN), he was alive enough to take pictures. And apparently alive enough to write a column.

"I don't even remember what a headache is," reads the column entitled "Fidel Castro is Dying" signed by Castro. "Although a lot of people in the world are taken in by the organs of information, which are in the hands of the privileged and the rich that publish these stupidities, people are increasingly believing less and less in them," reads the gist of Castro's column (via Google Translate)—essentially, don't believe everything you read, except for this thing I wrote.