CUBA: WSJ's Mary O'Grady Blasts Atlantic's Goldberg On Fidel Coverage.

WSJ/ You gotta love the old style pissing match brewing between the ultra conservative, lifetime Fidel Castro hater, Mary O'Grady of the WSJ and conservative but gullible neophyte Cuba visitor Jeffry Goldberg of the Atlantic.

O'GRADY: "...at the Havana aquarium last month, Fidel Castro had a couple of humans eating out of his hand and clapping like trained seals.
I refer here to the Atlantic Monthly's Jeffrey Goldberg, who traveled recently to Cuba at Castro's invitation with his friend Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations."
   O'Grady then demolishes Goldberg as he recounts his recent pleasant meet and greet and eat with Fido.
    I normally disagree, sometimes vehemently, with O'Grady's views about Latin American leaders. But, today, commenting on Fidel's "smiley face" makeover for Goldberg and the media, I think O'Grady was devastatingly on-target.
      I know about Cuba, I've lived in Cuba, and Goldberg's version of Castro is not the Fidel from Cuba I'm  so familiar with. A delicious media hubbub in the making!!!
  GOLDBERG RESPONDS On BLOG: Header calls O'Grady: "Unhinged."
       http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/that-unhinged-mary-anastasia-ogrady-column/63591/

CUBA: Fidel's Recent Comment On a Broken Economic Model; An Interview With 2 Witnesses.

PBS NEWSHOUR/ 8:42 With transcript/
    Always dependable reporter Margaret Warner interviews Jeffrey Goldberg of "The Atlantic" magazine and Julia Sweig, who met with Fidel Castro in La Habana and discussed the Cuba's economic system and revealed a quote about a failing economy that... echoed around the world.

JULIA SWEIG: "Well, yes, he really said that. Let it be stated here definitively. I was there. He said it. And he said it definitively and unequivocally. His attempt to roll it back might take away from that, and it picked up in your story a little bit, was saying: Although we are changing our model, and it needs to change, that doesn't mean we're importing their model, the American capitalist model.

There's a long history in Cuba of discussing publicly what models do and don't work, whether Spanish imperial model, American neocolonial model, the Soviet communist model. And, so, God forbid they actually should change their model and import something else. This is a Cuban hybrid that is evolving."

CUBA: Fidel Walks Back His Latest Comment On Isla's Broken Economic Model.

M.HERALD/      When it hits the fan, blame the translator. So it goes, apparently, with Fidel Castro. It was all Julia Sweig's fault. The former president and strongman said today that he was "misinterpreted" when a US reporter wrote he said that the "Cuban model doesn't even work for us any more." Castro said he made the statement "without anger or worry. Now I'm amused to see how (the Atlantic reporter) interpreted it literally" with the aid of translator Julia Sweig. His answer Castro said, "meant exactly the opposite" of what the reporter wrote. Huh?

CUBA: Raul Fires 2 Ministers; May Open Sugar, Real Estate to Investors.

MERCOPRESS/    Cuban President Raul Castro has replaced two high-level government ministers... in sugar and transportation... because of errors and incompetence. “The Cabinet is now substantially different to what it was in 2006, and substantially different to what it was in 2008,” said author Julia Sweig. “Of course this is Castro solidifying control,” she said, “but it's also an attempt to impose a culture of governance and efficiency” in leadership positions that “under Fidel were very uneven.”