Havana ? Fidel Castro said Friday his comments about the Cuban economic model no longer working were misinterpreted by a visiting American journalist — taking back an admission that caused a stir around the globe.

Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro, left, and Cuban journalist and biographer Katiuska Blanco, attend the presentation of Castro’s new book “La Contra Ofensiva Estrategica,” or “The Strategic Counter Offensive,” Friday at the University of Havana.

The 84-year-old ex-president said he was not misquoted but meant “the opposite” of what he was reported as having said by The Atlantic magazine reporter Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goldberg wrote Wednesday that during three days of interviews with Castro in Havana last month, he asked the former leader over lunch and wine if Cuba’s communist system was still worth exporting to other countries. He said Castro replied: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

Castro read from Goldberg’s blog during an event at the University of Havana and said he was misunderstood.

“I expressed it to him without bitterness or worry. It’s funny to me now how he interpreted it, word for word, and how he consulted with Julia Sweig, who accompanied him and gave a theory,” Castro told those assembled. “The reality is, my answer meant the opposite of what both American journalists interpreted about the Cuban model.”

Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations who came to Cuba with Goldberg, confirmed Castro’s comment earlier this week, telling The Associated Press it was in line with calls by Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor as president, for gradual but widespread economic and labor reform on the island.

Goldberg blogged that Sweig told him Raul Castro “is already loosening the state’s hold on the economy.”

Since July 2006, when serious intestinal illness nearly killed Fidel Castro and forced him to cede power to Raul, Cuba has implemented reforms such as allowing the unrestricted sale of cell phones, privatizing some state-run barbershops, licensing more private taxis and distributing fallow government land to private farmers in hopes they could put it to better use.

Still, Cuba’s former “Maximum Leader” maintained Friday that wasn’t what he meant at all.

“My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system no long works — neither for the United States nor the world, which it steers from crisis to crisis, which are ever more serious, global and repetitive, and from which there is no escape,” Castro said. “How could such a system work for a socialist country like Cuba?”