HAVANA (Reuters) – A US journalist who reported that Fidel Castro told him the Cuban economic model no longer works expressed surprise yesterday that the former Cuban leader is now saying his words were misinterpreted.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly magazine, said Castro, 84, had made similar statements before and that economic changes under way on the communist-led island made it “a truism that the Cuban model isn’t working.”
Goldberg wrote in a blog last week that he asked Castro in an interview two weeks ago in Havana if the Cuban economic model was still worth exporting and he replied, “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”
Castro denounced Goldberg in a speech on Friday, saying he was not misquoted, but misunderstood.
“The reality is that my response means exactly the opposite,” he said. “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.”
But Goldberg said he believes he got it right.
“I don’t know how you can interpret that as its opposite,” he told reporters on a conference call from Washington. “Of course, I was somewhat surprised by his speech.”
Castro’s comment provoked an international reaction with some interpreting it as a rejection of the communism he installed after taking power in a 1959 revolution, and others as an indication of support for economic reforms being implemented by his younger brother, President Raul Castro.
