Cuba's President Fidel Castro appears on the daily newscast Mesa Redonda in Havana in this file image taken from television, January 30, 2007. [Reuters]

CARACAS - Cuban President Fidel Castro's health is improving because he is now eating, the ambassador to Cuba from ally Venezuela said on Thursday, without making clear when Castro had been unable to eat.

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Castro, who has handed power over temporarily to his brother, has not appeared in public for more than six months since undergoing emergency surgery for intestinal bleeding.

The operation meant Castro, 80, initially could not eat, but there also were media reports that at the end of last year his health worsened again and he had to be drip-fed.

"Fidel is improving progressively. The problem is that originally he could not take in foods but now he is taking in foods and that has improved his health significantly," Ambassador Ali Rodriguez told Venezuelan state television.

It was not clear if he was referring to July or to a later relapse.

The ambassador has known Castro for years and is a long-standing ally of President Hugo Chavez, who regularly visits the Cuban leader or talks to him by telephone about his health.

Castro's precise illness is a state secret but he is thought to be suffering from diverticulitis, a disorder of the large intestine.

Chavez said last month Castro had put on weight and that his health was improving.

Also last month, Cuban state television showed Castro for the first time in three months. He looked stronger than in the previous video but still frail.

Castro's illness forced him to relinquish control for the first time since his 1959 revolution that steered the Caribbean island on a socialist course and made Cuba an enduring ideological foe of the United States.