Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Tuesday that he will not return to lead the country as president, retiring as head of state 49 years after he seized power in an armed revolution.

"I communicate to you that I will not aspire to or accept--I repeat not aspire to or accept---the positions of President of Council of State and Commander in Chief," Castro said in the statement published on the Web site of the Communist Party's Granma newspaper.

A charismatic leader famous for his long speeches delivered in his green military fatigues, Castro is admired in the Third World for standing up to the United States but considered by his opponents a tyrant who suppressed freedom.

His illness and departure from Cuba's helm have raised doubts about the future of the Western Hemisphere's only communist state.

The bearded leader who took power in an armed uprising against a U.S.-backed dictator in 1959 had temporarily ceded power to his younger brother after he underwent emergency surgery to stop intestinal bleeding in mid-2006.

Castro has only been seen in pictures since then, looking gaunt and frail, though his health improved enough a year ago to allow him to keep in the public mind writing reams of articles published by Cuba's state press.

The free press in the free world is bending over backward not to call Castro what he really was: a communist dictator. Why? Perhaps this is an artifact of the Watergate-era notion of the "adversarial press." Journalists see themselves as standing in opposition to their own government, and since Castro was an enemy of the U.S. that put him on the same side. The enemy of my country is my friend, or at least my "unchallenged leader."