Cuban President Fidel Castro delivers a speech on July 26, 2006, at the Plaza de la Patria square in Bayamo, in the province of Granma, during a ceremony marking the 53rd anniversary of the assault on the Moncada barracks by rebels led by Castro. The failed Moncada assault marked the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. Photo: ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images ?For many years I was able to survive, by chance, the empire?s killing machine.??Fidel Castro

“The issue of the accusation related to his plan to kill me comes from before he used fraud to steal the victory from another candidate,” the convalescing Pres. Castro, 80, said of Pres. Bush.

Pres. Castro, who claims to hold a sort of world record in evading assassination plots, at some 650 in his count, recalled in an opinion piece in the Cuban Communist Party newspaper that he reported the alleged plot publicly on August 5, 2000 in a speech in Pinar del Rio.

Of all the U.S. presidents since 1959, Pres. Castro said Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) ordered no hit, and that he had no knowledge of former president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) ever having given a green light for a Castro assassination bid.

Pres. Castro’s recollections come a week after he insisted, in an essay titled “They will never have Cuba,” that Cuba would keep making and importing weaponry to stave off a U.S. invasion.

Fidel Castro, who took power in Cuba in January 1959, is still on the mend from major intestinal surgery last year.

He will turn 81 on Aug. 13, and has not appeared in public since his July 26 operation for intestinal trouble. His brother Raul Castro, 76, took the helm of the country last July 31.

Cuba does not reveal much detail about Fidel Castro’s health, citing national security concerns.

Fidel Castro has revealed, however, that he had been “between life and death” when he handed power to his brother Raul.

“For many years I was able to survive, by chance, the empire’s killing machine,” he wrote in another editorial in Granma, referring to the U.S. government.

“Soon it will be a year since I fell sick and, when I was between life and death, expressed in the Proclamation of July 31, 2006: ‘I do not have the slightest doubt that our people and our revolution will fight until the last drop of blood,” Pres. Castro wrote.

His close ally Bolivian President Evo Morales said in a recent interview published in Chile that Fidel Castro underwent at least 10 surgeries since taking ill.

Pres. Castro has appeared in official video and still images, first in a bathrobe and then in a track suit, appearing lately to have regained some of the weight he lost after intestinal surgery.

Since March 29, Fidel Castro has written more than 20 policy articles in Granma and other official government publications, including articles on global warming, ethanol, and U.S. imperialism.

Cuba—targeted by U.S. efforts to isolate it economically and diplomatically—said a European Union call for dialogue was a step in the right direction. But it also demanded the EU give up once and for all the idea of re-imposing sanctions against the Americas’ only one-party communist country.