Addict Maradona calls on Cuban leader for help
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-09 06:44

World Cup winning footballer Diego Maradona will face stricter treatment for cocaine addiction when he returns to Cuba this week, Argentine ambassador Raul Abraham Taleb said on Tuesday.

Maradona's family will ask Cuban leader Fidel Castro to be a "strict father" to the former Argentine captain, whose treatment at a Havana mental institution will be supervised by a Cuban judge, Taleb said.

Former Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona leaves a psychiatric clinic with an unidentified aide, in Buenos Aires, September 8, 2004. An Argentine judge on September 6 allowed Maradona to leave the clinic in Buenos Aires, where his family forced him to undergo drug reahabilitation over the last four months, to continue his treatment elsewhere. The 43-year-old, who led Argentina to the World Cup title in 1986 and again to the finals in 1990, is planning to return to Cuba to continue his treatment. [Reuters]

"He will probably arrive tomorrow," the ambassador said at a news conference. "He will come with his father, his personal doctor Alfredo Cahe, and not with people who encouraged him to continue taking drugs.

"They will ask Castro to use his friendship with Maradona to become a strict father."

Maradona's family forced him to enter a psychiatric clinic in Argentina in May after he was rushed to intensive care in April with a swollen heart and breathing problems.

An Argentine judge allowed the star-turned-drug addict to leave the clinic on the outskirts of Buenos Aires on Monday to continue treatment elsewhere and the 43-year-old was planning to return to Cuba, which he has made his second home in recent years.

This time Maradona will be confined to the Center for Mental Health (CENSAM) and denied privileges and the freedom to eat and drink at will until he is cured, the ambassador said.

For almost four years, Maradona lived at Havana's La Pradera health farm, where he partied with friends while playing golf almost daily at the Cuban capital's only golf club.

"He will be under control at CENSAM, because the prestige of Cuban medical treatment is at stake," Taleb said.

The centre, which advertises itself as a place for "curing mental illnesses and addictions," has an enclosed compound of bungalows and gardens run by Cuba's Interior Ministry in a leafy suburb of Havana.

Maradona, one of the most gifted players in the history of soccer who led Argentina to victory at the 1986 World Cup, said he has been fighting drug addiction for much of the last 20 years.

His family had argued his addiction left him mentally unfit to make decisions about his treatment.

He was bloated and barely able to speak when he was admitted to hospital in April, but has since slimmed down and appeared more lucid in a television interview last month in which he pleaded in tears to be allowed to leave Argentina.

"He appeared to have been detoxicated. He looked lucid, but emotionally broken," Taleb said.

The Cuban government said it was ready to do all it could to help Maradona and is expected to pay for his treatment.

"We are sure he will come through this," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told reporters. "We don't intend to turn him into a soldier, we intend to cure him."

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