Fidel Castro is slamming a Russian newspaper report claiming that Cuba refused to allow fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden to use Cuba to connect flights from Moscow to South America.

The 87-year old is rarely seen or heard from these days.  The former Cuban leader handed the reins of the presidency to his brother Raul in 2008, and vowed to retire from his second career as a columnist in Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper earlier this year. 

But a report in Russia’s Kommersant newspaper brought the revolutionary out of retirement.  It claimed that Cuba buckled to US pressure to deny landing rights to any Russian Aeroflot plane carrying Edward Snowden, who was believed to be looking for a South American country to give him asylum.

In his column, Castro blasted Kommersant as a well-known “counter-revolutionary” and “mercenary” newspaper, and its report a “paid-for lie”.

“I admire the bravery and justness in Snowden's declarations,” Castro wrote, “In my opinion, he did the world a service by revealing the repugnantly dishonest politics of an empire that lies and cheats the world.”

And while he was criticizing America, Castro warned against the US-UK-led drive to launch air strikes at Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack.