HAVANA, Cuba (AP) – Banners hanging from restored buildings in this seaside city encourage ailing leader Fidel Castro to live to 160, but Cubans are now grappling with the realisation that his days as their charismatic leader

may be over.

Most Cubans have known no other ruler than Castro, who 50 years ago Saturday landed on a boat from Mexico with fellow rebels to launch a revolution that triumphed on January 1, 1959. But Castro, waylaid for four months with an intestinal ailment, was still too sick to attend Tuesday’s kick-off of a five-day celebration of his 80th birthday. He turned 80 on August 13 but postponed the party because of surgery two weeks earlier.

Castro’s supporters in this Caribbean island of 11 million fervently wish he will at least appear for the military parade Saturday marking the semi-centennial anniversary of the boat landing.

Traffic cops in blue uniforms and black boots this week were directing traffic, primarily smog-belching Russian Lada sedans and 1950s-era American cars, from the enormous Plaza de la Revolucion, which was being readied for the parade.

But if Castro fails to appear on the grandstand, some will take his absence as a sign he will never return to power, although it is considered sacrilegious among the Castro faithful to even speak of the possibility.

“I hope he attends the parade on Saturday,” Amparo Mora, a 45-year-old housewife, said in her home in Havana’s colonial section. “He doesn’t even have to stand, just be there, with doctors at his side if that is necessary. I want him with us. I want him with us eternally.”

The birthday bash is being attended by hundreds of personalities from Latin America and beyond. They praised Castro’s revolutionary achievements in a colloquium entitled “Memory and Future: Cuba and Fidel” at Havana’s convention centre.

But with Castro absent, it seemed at times more like a memorial service.

Tomas Borge, a founder of Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front, denied the birthday celebrations have turned into a goodbye to Castro, even as he stressed that the Cuban’s leaders legacy is more important than his

physical presence.