Retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro is in good health, appearing skinny but lucid, a Brazilian theologian who met him told official Cuban media.

Castro, 88, who stepped down from power in 2008, has not been seen in public in a year and his photograph has not appeared in Cuban media since August, giving rise to speculation about his health.

“The commander [Castro] enjoys very good health and is in very good spirits,” the writer and activist Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, better known as Friar Betto, told Cuban state television on Wednesday after meeting Castro in Havana.

The Cuban news agency Prensa Latina quoted Betto as saying Castro looked thin and took copious notes during their conversation. Castro was lucid and well-informed on national and international affairs, he said.

Though Castro periodically writes a column, he went silent for several weeks after his younger brother and current president, Raul Castro, and US President Barack Obama announced on December 17 they would restore diplomatic ties.

On January 12, Castro sent a letter to friend and retired Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona to squelch rumours he had died. On Monday he finally commented on US relations, offering lukewarm support for the agreement his brother reached with Obama.

“I don’t trust the policy of the US, nor have I had an exchange with them, but this does not mean ... a rejection of a peaceful solution to conflicts or the dangers of war,” Fidel Castro said in a statement published on Monday on the website of Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper Granma.