Ambassador Pedro Joaquin Coldwell said on his return to Havana on Saturday that the diplomatic row was completely over, the official Notimex news agency reported.

Mexico withdrew Joaquin Coldwell on Dec. 4 after Castro, speaking two days earlier at a meeting of Latin American leaders, seemed to criticize Mexico's free-trade pact with the United States, and suggested that Mexican youth knew more about Mickey Mouse than about their national heroes.

It was an unprecedented, if relatively minor, dispute between the two close nations. Mexico is the only Latin American nation that never broke ties with Cuba under U.S. pressure in the 1960s.

On Friday, Castro sent Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina to Mexico City with a public letter expressing his affection for the country.

Castro said in the letter that Cuban independence hero Jose Marti ``taught us to love Mexico, the country I love and admire more than any other.''

Castro wrote that if ``one single Mexican feels offended by my words, I have no objection at all to apologizing.''

But he insisted that ``at no moment did the idea or plan to offend or injure Mexico pass through my mind.''

Castro said his comments were taken out of context due to ``bad information, bad interpretation or bad intention.''

He said he was speaking informally and in jest to an intimate audience of friends when he suggested that in joining the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- the world's club of industrialized nations -- the Mexicans might ``leave us in the town of misery and move into an aristocratic neighborhood.''