Something wasn't quite right, Hugo Chavez recounted. And the Venezuelan president's mentor, 84-year-old Fidel Castro, noticed straight away.

"What's wrong with you?" Castro asked. The Cuban leader urged Chavez to stand up and looked him over with what the Venezuelan populist called Castro's "eagle eyes." "Where's the pain?"

Castro then "began to question me, like a father questions a son," Chavez said in his account of their meeting in Havana last month; he said he "confessed" his ailments as if he were Castro's patient.

At the Cuban revolutionary's insistence, Chavez then went under the scalpel to remove a malignant tumor. Later, Castro brought peanut butter he himself had made and gabbed with a recovering Chavez about world affairs. "Fidel is like a saint," Chavez told Cuban state television.