Chavez will return to Venezuela this week

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Monday by phone that he would return home this week after cancer treatment in Cuba, in an apparent bid to squelch speculation that his health was failing. "I should be there in Caracas, God willing, on April 26," Chavez told state television VTV -- a telephone call that marked the first time Venezuelans had heard his voice live on state media in more than a week. The 57-year-old president also said he also would need to return to Cuba for another round of radiation and tests. "It's tough," he conceded. "Just ask anyone who has had radiation therapy about the effects it has. (But) I am pretty far along in the radiation sessions." Since arriving in Havana last week for what was earlier described as a final round of radiation therapy, Chavez -- usually onmipresent in state media -- only communicated via Twitter and written statements, with no TV appearances. The last new message on his Twitter feed appeared on Saturday. Some critics suggested the firebrand leftist president had maybe taken a turn for the worse, and slammed what they called his ruling from abroad by tweet. "We'll just have to get used to rumors flying, especially in the coming months," Chavez said, claiming they were "the bourgeois strategy of the Venezuelan right." At the weekend, his ministers quickly rallied behind their leader, insisting nothing was wrong. "The only one on his last leg is that piece of nothing," Information Minister Andres Izarra said on Twitter, using a barb Chavez often uses to describe his rival in the October 7 presidential election, Henrique Capriles. Chavez had surgery in late February in Havana after a recurrence of the cancer he was originally diagnosed with last year. He has been undergoing treatment after the removal of a malignant tumor in the same area of his pelvis where another such tumor was removed in June 2011. Officials in Caracas have never specified the type of cancer Chavez has or exactly where it is, but insist it has not spread to other organs. Earlier this month, Chavez made an emotional plea that put his health and political future in the spotlight, begging to God at a pre-Easter mass: "Please don't take me yet." "Give me your crown of thorns, Christ, I will bleed; Give me your cross, 100 crosses -- and I will carry them for you. But give me life, because I still have things to do for my people and my country," Chavez said. In power since 1999, Chavez is running for a third six-year term as president in the October election. He faces a tough challenge from the youthful united opposition candidate Capriles. Chavez is the most prominent face of the left in Latin America. He has led and rallied a group of leftist governments that he organized as a counterweight to the United States. Though polls show him leading Capriles ahead of the election, Chavez is battling public fatigue with his "socialist revolution," an unstable economy with soaring inflation, and rampant street crime.