HAVANA — Fidel Castro criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for what he called his anti-Semitic attitudes and questioned his own actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 during interviews with an American journalist.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, blogged on the magazine’s website Tuesday that a Cuban official called him to say Castro had read his recent article about Israel and Iran and wanted him to come to Cuba.
Goldberg asked Julia Sweig, a Cuba-U.S. policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, to accompany him. He said their first meeting with Castro lasted five hours.
“His body may be frail, but his mind is acute, his energy level is high,” Goldberg wrote.
He said Castro, who himself has been a fierce critic of Israel, “repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism,” chiding Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust.
Goldberg also said he revisited the Cuban Missile Crisis with Castro, asking whether Castro’s recommendation that the Soviets bomb the U.S. still seems logical now.
Castro’s answer: “After I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn’t worth it all.”
