HAVANA - Fidel Castro confirmed he had resigned from the top leadership of the Cuban Communist Party in an article published on Tuesday, after the party approved a raft of economic reforms.

"Raul knew that I would not accept a formal role in the party today," Castro said in an article on the Cubadebate.cu portal, referring to his brother Raul and his own absence from the party's new Central Committee, elected on Monday.

Fidel Castro, 84, had served as first secretary of the Central Committee of the party since the party's creation in 1965.

He said he had handed over the functions of the party head to Raul when he ceded power to his brother because of his own declining health in 2006, though he retained the first secretary title.

"(Raul) has always been who I described as First Secretary and Commander in Chief," Fidel wrote in the article.

"He never failed to convey to me the ideas that were planned," he added.

The move came after the party congress approved a flurry of measures on Monday.

The changes inject a modicum of the market into the country's economy ahead of a vote on Tuesday expected to officially relieve 84-year-old Castro of his position as party head after more than four decades.

The 1,000 delegates gathered in Havana for the four-day party congress approved some 300 economic proposals and elected a new leadership.

A total of 311 points have been discussed in a bid to decide how to transform the centrally planned economy to a more market-based one. The delegates lifted a decades-old ban on private property transactions such as the buying and selling of houses and cars.

The move met one of the main demands made by the public during the national debate on Cuba's economic reform plan from December to February, in which 8.9 million Cubans, or nearly 80 percent of the country's total population, participated.

In Saturday's opening address to the congress, Raul Castro said the Caribbean island nation is upgrading legal regulations related to private property transactions.

About 90 percent of Cubans own houses but are not authorized to sell them, while the country currently is short of more than 1 million homes due to the damage caused by three hurricanes in 2008.

The sale of cars is currently controlled by the state, and only artists, athletes and doctors working in missions abroad are allowed to purchase cars.

The congress on Monday started to elect members to the party's 100-strong central committee. Delegates will also renew 19 members of the party's Political Bureau and 10 members of its Secretariat before they wrap up the congress on Tuesday.

In another related development, the Cuban authorities have turned over 63 percent of idle land to new owners in order to boost agricultural and food production.

AFP-Xinhua