Havana, Feb. 19, 2008 -- It was 6:00am on July 1, 2006, when we stretched, and finally descended the steps from Fidel Castro's offices in Revolution Square. As it turned out, on that steamy July morning we would be the last US guests received by Fidel Castro before he took critically ill a few weeks later.

We were a group of US health professionals, and he'd given us the whole night, speaking with passion about cochlear implants for deaf-and-blind Cuban children, the devastating health picture in Africa, Cuba's scaling up of medical training for the world (100,000 over the next decade), and the urgent need for planet-wide energy savings. He asked one of his aides for an update on the hospital being built by indigenous Garifuna MDs in Honduras, graduates of Havana's Latin American Medical School. At 3:00am, he made a call to the Cuban medical team in East Timor to see if their supplies had arrived.

About 4:00am, he discovered we hadn't eaten anything since the evening before, to which we replied that he apparently had not even had dinner. So, he ordered up a glass of cold ruby-red sorrel tea and his "tsunami", a five-grain cereal he was eating for his already chronic digestive problems. To our great chagrin and his great amusement, he passed around spoons so we could try the stuff. Then we also tried various flavors of Cuban soy yogurt, and the same hot chocolate sold to Cubans at corner grocery stores.

At one point, he suddenly turned to the pediatrician in our group: "Are you the same doctor now you were the day you graduated?". The physician took the question as a barb at old age, and jested that "sure, I'm just a little greyer". But it turned out that the Cuban President was quite serious. "I've been a politician for over 40 years," he said, giving our doctor that piercing Fidel Castro eye, "and I'm just beginning to learn something about politics."

One of our group took her cue to ask his advice for a good friend, an African-American woman who had just been elected by her district on a social justice platform. What would Castro say?

"I think you've given me pause," he opened. And that was rare enough.

"Remember that politics is an art, not a science," he ruminated. "So I would say a few things, and they would be the following:

 Defend your values and ideas now just as fervently as when you were young. Without passion, there's no reason for living.

 Our biggest problem today is to see if we can survive as a human race, if we know how to care for ourselves and the planet. This has to be on every politician's mind.

 Life is a struggle against yourself, especially if you have a little bit of power. The challenge is to remember the words of Jose Marti (Cuba's national hero): ‘All the glory in the world fits in a single kernel of corn.'

Today's announcement of Fidel Castro's resignation brought back my memory and my notes from that marathon all-nighter. Rarely you find a politician who takes his own advice: Fidel Castro has proven once again that he may be one-of-a-kind.

And that politics is indeed an art.

--Gail Reed