Castro says remarks about Cuban model ‘not working’ misinterpreted

LONDON - Former Cuban president Fidel Castro has said that his comment to a US journalist about Cuba’s system not working had been misinterpreted.

The former president told a meeting at the University of Havana that the remark, which caused a sensation when reported earlier this week, did not reflect his view. He meant “the exact opposite”, he said.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, reported that at the end of a long lunch last month he asked the 84-year-old communist revolutionary if Cuba’s economic system was still worth exporting to other countries. He said Castro replied: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

Castro did not elaborate but the implication, but according to the Guardian, Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert from the Council on Foreign Relations who also attended the lunch, was that the state had too big a role in the economy.

The island’s dire economic state was hardly news but for the man who spent over half a century building it to breezily admit failure astonished observers.

With his comments at the today Castro, perhaps taken aback at the attention heaped on his nine apparently offhand words, sought to dampen the story. (ANI)