Castro Admits Cuban Communism Not Working

(Sept. 9) -- None other than Fidel Castro himself now appears to have given up on Cuba's archaic communist system.

The revolutionary leader last week launched a surprise attack on the state-controlled economy he helped create 50 years ago during an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic magazine.

Goldberg asked the aging leader if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other nations and was stunned by Castro's brutally honest response. "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," said the 84-year-old former president, Goldberg wrote in a blog post.

The reporter told The Miami Herald that although Castro made the comment in an "off-hand way," he was certain the former Cuban leader wasn't joking. "I think this was an honest recognition on his part that his brother must re-order Cuba's economic system in order to keep the country afloat," he said.

Of course, the revelation that things aren't going well on the cash-starved Caribbean island isn't news to many people in the outside world. Cuba continues to suffer from the 48-year-old U.S trade embargo and has recently been battered by three hurricanes and a hefty drop in the price of nickel, its main export.

Fidel's younger brother Raul, who took over as president when his sibling fell seriously ill in 2006, has repeatedly called for wide-ranging reform of the state-controlled economy. And Raul has attempted to stanch the country's decline with limited economic liberalization and warned Cubans that they will need to work harder and expect less from the government. (The state pays workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and almost free transportation and housing.)

However, he has also said that Cuba won't abandon socialism.

Although Castro has frequently discussed foreign affairs since handing power to his 79-year-old brother -- in the same Atlantic interview, he slammed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust -- this is the first time he has publicly weighed in on domestic issues in four years.

His comments "sounded consistent with the general consensus in the country now, up to and including his brother's position," Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations who sat in with Goldberg on the lunchtime interview, told The Associated Press.

She added that Castro appeared "relaxed, witty, conversational and quite accessible" throughout their talk. "He has a new lease on life, and he is taking advantage of it," Sweig said.

Other experts, however, suggest that Castro's sudden turnaround could be evidence that his mental, as well as physical, health has deteriorated. "He is either crazy or senile. This certainly does not sound like something Castro would say," Jaime Suchlicki, head of the University of Miami's Research Institute for Cuban Studies, told the Herald. "But if he was quoted accurately, then I guess he's come to the realization, like everyone else, that Marxist-Leninist governments do not function. So the real question is, what is he going to do about it now?"