HAVANA (Reuters) – Fidel Castro said yesterday his recent comment that communist-led Cuba’s economic model does not work was badly understood and that what he really meant was that capitalism does not work.
Castro, speaking at the University of Havana, said his words had been misinterpreted by his interviewer, US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, who quoted a US analyst saying they indicated Castro now supports a smaller state role in the island’s Soviet-style economy. Goldberg wrote in a blog on Wednesday that he asked Castro, 84, if Cuba’s model was still worth exporting to other countries.
“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Castro told him.
Castro confirmed that he said those words “without bitterness or concern.”
But, he said, “the reality is that my response means exactly the opposite.”
“My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn’t work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.” Castro’s words to Goldberg had been interpreted by some as a rejection of communism, by others as an indication that he supports economic reforms being implemented by his younger brother, President Raul Castro.
President Castro, who took office in early 2008, has introduced modest changes aimed at increasing productivity while preserving the communist system installed by Fidel Castro after he took power in a 1959 revolution.
Goldberg, who interviewed Castro two weeks ago in Havana, wrote in a Tuesday blog that Castro had criticized Iran for anti-Semitism and renounced his own actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when he urged the Soviet Union to launch nuclear weapons on the United States.
