The former Cuban leader Fidel Castro hosted an "emotional" meeting with the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, yesterday, reaffirming the close relationship between the countries, Cuban media reported.
Lula is on his last official trip to the island before his term as president expires. He told reporters that Castro, who ruled Cuba for 49 years before health problems forced him to hand power to his younger brother Raúl, looked "exceptionally good".
Photographs showed the two long-time friends chatting and smiling while sitting around a table in the backyard of a two-storey house.
A report on Cuban television said the two had a long and friendly dialogue, discussing topics including the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December and the recently ended Rio Group summit in Cancun.
Castro, 83, thanked Lula for his "gestures of solidarity and co-operation" with Cuba, the report said.
"The emotional meeting was an expression of the existing friendship between the two leaders and the brotherhood that unites the two countries," it added.
The trip, which is Lula's third to Cuba in two years, was intended to signal the island's importance to his successor, who will take power after Brazil goes to the polls in October, a Brazilian diplomat said.
Under Lula, a former union leader, Brazil has provided money and corporate muscle to Cuba at a time when the Cuban economy has suffered in the global recession.
The state-controlled Brazilian oil giant Petrobras is studying whether to drill for oil off Cuban shores, while the Odebrecht construction firm is heading a huge revamp of the port of Mariel, west of Havana, into the island's main commercial port.
Brazil's state-run National Development Bank has given $300m (£196m) to Odebrecht to build new roads, rail lines, wharves and warehouses at Mariel, best known as the site of a 1980 exodus in which thousands of Cubans fled to the US in boats.
Lula's visit was overshadowed by the death of the Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo on Tuesday after an 85-day hunger strike.
While touring the Mariel project yesterday, Raúl expressed regret at the death of Zapata, who had been in prison since 2003 and was serving a 36-year sentence, but blamed it on "relations with the United States".
He said Zapata had not been murdered or tortured.