Soaring Wings

In this photo released by the state media Cubadebate web site, Fidel Castro, left, stands with U.S. journalist of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, second from right, and Cuban Jewish Community President Adela Dworin, third from right, at the National Aquarium in Havana, Cuba, Monday Aug. 30, 2010. Goldberg is a national correspondent for the magazine who has written on the Middle East and Iran.

Cuba has released pictures of Fidel Castro with an American magazine correspondent and a Washington-based policy expert, while a Mexican newspaper published an interview in which the gray-bearded revolutionary expressed regret for past persecution of homosexuals.

The images show Cuba’s 84-year-old former leader with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Julia E Sweig from the Council on Foreign Relations during a visit Monday to the Havana aquarium _ Castro’s second trip there during a media blitz that has seen him making near daily appearances.

Goldberg is a national correspondent for the magazine who has written on the Middle East and Iran. State media reported that he and Sweig interviewed Castro, but gave no indication of what was said.

For months, Castro has warned of nuclear war that would pitWashington and Israel against Iran and would also involve an attack on North Korea. He even said he expected fighting to begin earlier this summer, but has since said those doomsday predictions may have been somewhat premature.

The Council on Foreign Relations is a nonpartisan think tank with offices in New York and Washington, and Sweig is a longtime scholar on the US-Cuba relationship.

Also on Tuesday, Mexico’s left-leaning daily La Jornada published an interview in which Castro said Cuban authorities had been wrong to send gays and lesbians to work camps in the early years of his government.

“Those were moments of great injustice, great injustice!” the paper quoted Castro as saying.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Cuban officials fired homosexuals from state jobs, imprisoned them or sent them to work camps. Castro told La Jornada, “Yes, we did it, us,” but also said, “I am trying to limit my responsibility in all this because, of course, I personally do not hold those kinds of prejudices.”

Still, when pressed if the Communist Party or some other entity was behind what occurred Castro said, “No, if any person was responsible, it’s me.”