Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said Cuban leader Fidel Castro believes China's market socialism will make it a 21st century's superpower. “Castro wrote me about Mao Zedong and his original vision and wound up saying how China, with its strategy of market socialism, has become a superpower and will become the superpower of the 21st century," AFP quoted Chavez as saying . "The socialism of the 21st century must adapt to conditions of the 21st century," Castro wrote in his nine-page letter to his Venezuelan friend and ally. Chavez was speaking to reporters as Latin American leaders joined him to talk trade in Barquisimeto, 250 kilometers west of the capital, Caracas. "Fidel is in charge," Chavez said of the 80-year-old Cuban leader, who is recovering from intestinal surgery nine months ago. Castro temporarily handed over the power to his brother, Raul Castro, on July 31.
Meanwhile, Cuban officials say Fidel Castro has returned to perform many of his previous functions, but there is no clear sign yet that Castro would officiate on May Day. The Cuban leader's letter dealt with the thoughts of the founder of Chinese communism, Mao Zedong, and of the Argentine hero of the Cuban revolution, Ernesto Che Guevara.
Castro was conspicuous by his absence at the trade summit, which included leftist presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Rene Preval of Haiti as an observer. The governments of Cuba, Ecuador, Uruguay and Caribbean nations were represented at Chavez's beckoning to discuss his home-grown, Latin American alternative to US-backed free-trade pacts: the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, which is named for Simon Bolivar, historically the liberator of northern South America from Spain.