HAVANA -- Cuban President Fidel Castro is in good health, the foreign ministry said Monday, denying a report that he had been treated for a potentially fatal brain ailment.

``I am not going to pay any attention to these kinds of stories, which crop up from time to time. What I can, in fact, confirm is that our president is enjoying excellent health,'' ministry spokesman Alejandro Gonzalez told Agence France-Presse.

The Herald published a report on Sunday that Castro, 71, was rushed to the hospital on Oct. 22 with symptoms of hypertensive encephalopathy, a traumatic rise in blood pressure, which can cause a stroke.

 
The report quoted Elizabeth Trujillo Izquierdo, a Cuban physician who was part of a medical team at a Havana hospital but who fled to Costa Rica in April.

The report seems to conflict with Castro's public schedule for the time he was supposedly undergoing treatment at Cuba's Medical Surgery Research Hospital, where Cuba's leadership is hospitalized.

 
The report quoted Trujillo as saying that Castro was hospitalized from Oct. 22 to 28, and that he was extremely ill, nearly in a coma, for the first three days.

But on Oct. 26, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls told foreign reporters in Havana that he had had a six-hour conversation with Castro the day before -- halfway through his alleged hospitalization. Navarro Valls described the talks as ``cordial and relaxed.''

Trujillo, in a new interview Monday with El Nuevo Herald, stood by her story but acknowledged that her dates might be off. ``I didn't write the dates down,'' she said. ``. . . It could have been a day before or a day after the days she first gave.

``The fact is that Fidel was there, under the conditions that I reported, and it's not strange that he might have gone out three days later, without our knowledge, to chat with someone for a few hours, she said.

Rumors about Castro's ill health have been rife.

In August 1997, there were rumors that he was extremely ill because he had not been seen publicly but these were put to rest on Sept. 1 when he gave a speech that lasted nearly an hour during a downpour.

Asked about the Herald report, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said, ``I don't think it's appropriate for us to comment on the health of Fidel Castro.''

Rubin also declined to comment on whether Trujillo had been interviewed by U.S. government officials.

The Costa Rican government, meanwhile, said it did not know Trujillo's whereabouts.

``The information that we have is that her entrance was illegal,'' Foreign Minister Roberto Rojas said at a press conference. ``We know that she came in, but we do not know when.''

``We are trying to find her to give her protection,'' he added.

Earlier, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Vilma Aguiluz, said that the ministry had also opened an investigation into the activities in Costa Rica of Leonel Martinez, the Cuban consul in Managua.

Trujillo told El Nuevo Herald in an interview last week in San Jose, where she is in hiding, that Cuban agents tried to kidnap her after she was recognized by Leonel Martinez, a Cuban diplomat assigned to Nicaragua. He visits San Jose occasionally to handle consular issues because Costa Rica and Cuba don't have full diplomatic relations.

Pablo Alfonso of El Nuevo Herald contributed to this report.