Since handing over power to his brother Raul in 2006, ex Cuban leader Fidel Castro has kept a pretty low profile.

On Friday, the 88-year-old former communist revolutionary and Cuban Prime Minister, who had retreated from his position due to illness, appeared in public for the first time in more than a month to meet with cheese masters at the Food Industry Research Institute in the capital city of Havana.

Images of Castro at the meeting have been released by the official Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma.

As reported by the BBC, Castro’s public appearance comes days after his country and the United States announced the reopening of embassies in each other's capitals; the reopenings will take place on July 20.

As Castro is not often seen in public, every outing becomes an opportunity for media speculation.

In December of last year, Presidents Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro announced that their respective nations would commence a thaw in over 50 years of icy relations.

Political analysts believe that this current thaw would have never occurred if Fidel Castro was still in power. After the easing of tensions between the U.S. and Cuba had begun, Castro wrote in Granma that although he did not trust the policy of the United States, “this does not mean I reject a pacific solution to the conflicts."

Before Castro handed over power to his brother, there was evidence that he was changing his mind about the history of U.S.-Cuban relations.

When asked by an Atlantic Monthly reporter back in 2010 if his old notion that the Soviets should have just bombed the U.S. still seemed logical to him, the self-described “dialectical materialist" replied that: "After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it all."