[url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100908/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_cuba_fidel_castro wrote:Yahoo! News[/url] {OK, Cuba, Castro, Failure}]Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work
By PAUL HAVEN, Associated Press
HAVANA – Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.
The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.
He said Castro made the comment casually over lunch following a long talk about the Middle East, and did not elaborate. The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg's account.
Since stepping down from power in 2006, the ex-president has focused almost entirely on international affairs and said very little about Cuba and its politics, perhaps to limit the perception he is stepping on his brother's toes.
Goldberg, who traveled to Cuba at Castro's invitation last week to discuss a recent Atlantic article he wrote about Iran's nuclear program, also reported on Tuesday that Castro questioned his own actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, including his recommendation to Soviet leaders that they use nuclear weapons against the United States.
Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba has clung to its communist system.
The state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.
President Raul Castro and others have instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and have warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to depart from Cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.
Fidel Castro stepped down temporarily in July 2006 due to a serious illness that nearly killed him.
He resigned permanently two years later, but remains head of the Communist Party. After staying almost entirely out of the spotlight for four years, he re-emerged in July and now speaks frequently about international affairs. He has been warning for weeks of the threat of a nuclear war over Iran.
Castro's interview with Goldberg is the only one he has given to an American journalist since he left office.
___
On the Web: http://www.theatlantic.com/jeffrey-goldberg/
Castro then went on to say...
[url=http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/09/10/cuba.castro.communism/ wrote:CNN[/url] {OK, Cuba, Castro, Failure}]Fidel Castro says his comment on Cuban model was misunderstood
From Shasta Darlington, CNN
Havana, Cuba (CNN) -- Former Cuban President Fidel Castro said Friday that he was misinterpreted when he recently told an American journalist that the Cuban model no longer works.
In a speech at the University of Havana that was then broadcast on Cuban TV, Castro said he meant "exactly the opposite" of what was understood by Jeffrey Goldberg, who was interviewing him for The Atlantic.
According to Goldberg, when he asked Castro during an interview last week if the Cuban model could be exported, the 84-year-old former leader answered: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."
The comment was widely interpreted as Castro's admission that the Soviet-style economic model he introduced after his revolution no longer works.
Goldberg wrote on The Atlantic's blog that he turned to Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Affairs, who was present at the interview, "to interpret this stunning statement for me."
"She said, 'He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under "the Cuban model" the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country,'" he wrote.
On Friday, Castro said he was correctly quoted, but that, "in reality, my answer meant exactly the opposite of what both American journalists interpreted regarding the Cuban model."
"My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system no longer works for the United States or the world," he said. "How could such a system work for a socialist country like Cuba?" Castro called Goldberg "a great journalist."
"He does not invent phrases, he transfers them and interprets them," he said. "I await with interest his extensive article."
He told an audience that included some of his former soldiers who were there to mark the publication of his 608-page autobiography that the capitalist system "leads from crisis to crisis, each one more serious."
