The Double Life of Fidel Castro (6 page)

There is nothing ordinary about Fidel Castro. He is unique, special, and different. One thing in particular, among all the others, marks him out from all his compatriots: he cannot dance the salsa! It holds no interest or attraction for him. Another thing that distinguishes
El Comandante
from “normal” Cubans is that he does not listen to music, neither Cuban nor classical—and certainly not American. His predilection for marital infidelity, on the other hand, is typically Cuban: it is a veritable national sport. Without being a woman chaser or a compulsive lover, like so many politicians all over the world, he still belied his name (
jidel
is Spanish for “faithful”). In games of love and seduction, he never encountered the least difficulty, resistance, or frustration. True, Fidel was not one of those all-powerful dictators who organized orgies—but he was no saint, either.

Married first to the upper-middle-class Mirta Díaz-Balart and then to the teacher Dalia Soto del Valle, he cheated on the first with the very beautiful Havanan Natalia Revuelta and on the second with “comrade” Celia Sánchez, his private secretary, confidante, and guard dog for thirty or so years. Other mistresses must be added to the tally: Juana Vera, aka Juanita, his official English-speaking interpreter and intelligence service colonel (she now works for Raúl); Gladys, the Cuban airline flight attendant who was present on foreign trips; and Pilar, aka Pili, another interpreter, this time French-speaking. He had doubtless had other relationships that I did not know about, before I took up my post.

Cubans had virtually no idea about any of this. For decades, the private life of the
Líder Máximo
was one of the best-kept secrets in Cuba and the public knew about only a tiny part of it. For, unlike his brother Raúl, the number-one Cuban has always been almost pathologically careful to hide almost all facets of his private life. Why? He thinks it is pointless, even potentially dangerous, to expose his life or display it to all and sundry in the full light of day. That was why, except in the early years, he separated his private life from his public life. This cult of secrecy doubtless originated in his clandestine years when, as with the resistance movements during the Second World War, compartmentalizing information was a question of survival.

As incredible as it seems, Cubans therefore did not see or even know of the existence of Dalia Soto del Valle, the woman with whom he had shared his life since 1961, until after 2006, when a seriously weakened Fidel was hospitalized and decided to hand over the reins of power to Raúl. For four decades, Fidel was always accompanied by a symbolic “first lady” who was not his spouse. During great occasions such as a national holiday or the visit of a foreign head of state and so on, it was actually Vilma Espín (1930–2007), Raúl’s wife and president of the Federation of Cuban Women, who appeared on stage in public beside Fidel, thereby filling the subliminal role of
la primera dama
.

Similarly, for almost as long, virtually nobody knew that in the 1960s and 1970s, Dalia had given no fewer than five sons to the
Líder Máximo
! Incredible but true: even the four children of Raúl Castro, who were kept out of the limelight, were not lucky enough to meet their first cousins before they reached adulthood! For almost twenty years, these close relatives lived just a few miles away from each other without ever meeting. As for the general public, they learned of the existence of Fidel’s five boys only after 2000, and even then they were given no information concerning their professional activities or personalities.

I, however, knew them all well. Having frequented the family for seventeen years, I can not only draw up a detailed family tree of the dynasty and set out each member’s qualities and flaws but also reveal several secrets and describe Fidel as a not very good father. This might all seem no more than gossip, but it sheds new light on the personality of one of the most influential public figures of the second half of the twentieth century.

Everything begins with the birth of the son who was “officially” the oldest of the Castros: Fidelito (“little Fidel”—named Fidel like his father, he was called Fidelito from the beginning to distinguish him from his illustrious genitor). Their physical similarity was striking: the same nose, the same Greek profile, the same hairline, the same beard . . . but such different lives.

Born in 1949, Fidelito is the only son of Mirta Díaz-Balart, a beautiful Havanan whom Fidel Castro had married the year before when he was still a simple law student—but already a committed political activist. In one of those strange quirks of history, Mirta’s family had been intimately linked to the Batista regime when the latter became dictator in 1952: her father, a lawyer, defended the American companies that reigned over the banana industry while her brother was no less than the reviled president’s minister of the interior! Mirta’s brother also formed part of the first wave of Cubans to choose exile in Florida at the time of the Triumph of the Revolution in January 1959. Another irony of history was that Lincoln and Mario, the sons of Mirta’s brother, forged careers within the American Republican party: elected as members of the House of Representatives, the Díaz-Balart brothers even became, for decades, the loudest spokespersons against Castrism. And all this while having Fidelito as their first cousin and Fidel as an uncle by marriage!

After their honeymoon in New York, Fidel—more in the grip of his political passion than of his relationship—rapidly lost interest in the elegant Mirta, whom he divorced in 1955. However, he won custody of little Fidelito despite being devoid, as we will later see, of the slightest paternal feeling. Long deprived of her son’s company, in 1959 Mirta settled in Spain, where she still lives today; for several years now she has been allowed to visit Fidelito, who remains in Cuba.

Early on, “little Fidel” took on the heavy mantle of potential heir, thus becoming the only one of the many Castro children to be introduced to the media. In 1959, in a memorable moment of television—which can be seen on YouTube—the little boy appeared in his pajamas next to his father, also wearing pajamas, in a program broadcast by the American channel CBS. In this somewhat ridiculous setting, the guerrilla fighter who had just triumphed in Cuba managed to reassure American viewers: for ten minutes, he ingeniously explained that he was not a dangerous communist but a good family man, like any other American. And it worked—at least for the time being.

A decade later, we find Fidelito in the USSR. Thanks to a favor to Fidel by the Soviet number one, Leonid Brezhnev, his son went there under a false identity to study at an ultrasecret nuclear research institute. His pseudonym was José Raúl and none of his fellow students had the faintest idea of his real identity, apart from a pretty Russian girl, Natalia Smirnova, whom he married and with whom he had three children named Mirta, Fidel, and José Raúl. His nuclear physics qualification in hand, Fidelito went back to Havana in the 1970s, staying with his uncle Raúl rather than his father, who in fact had little interest in him. For among the Castros, it is Raúl and not Fidel who has a sense of family and who is the pivotal member of the clan.

However, Fidel did appoint this brilliant scientist to the head of the Cuban Atomic Energy Commission (CEAC) when it was created in 1980. Over the years, Fidelito has shown himself to be his father’s son. Drunk on the trappings of power, he walks around the streets of Havana, for example, accompanied by bodyguards when that is theoretically a privilege exclusively reserved for the members of the politburo of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC). Such arrogance ends up annoying people; what is more, Fidelito took to embezzlement. In 1992, he was sacked from the CEAC because of his bad management. “He did not resign, he was sacked: Cuba is not a monarchy!” Fidel publicly thundered, particularly critical of his son’s “incomprehensible thirst for power,” apparently not realizing that this character flaw might have been hereditary.

Overnight, Fidelito was demoted to the rank of an ordinary official, an adviser on energy questions for the PCC Central Committee. The eldest of Castro’s legitimate children thereby became part of the “pajama plan,” the humorous Cuban expression for being sidelined. The uncompromising Fidel did not speak to him for several years after that; around the year 2000, Fidelito returned to favor, although he did not rejoin the circle of power. In March 2013, he even made a televised comeback at the age of sixty-five—without pajamas, this time. On the occasion of a trip to Moscow, he answered at length the questions of a journalist from the Russian channel Russia Today. The scientist praised the government of his uncle Raúl but was more reticent about the legacy left by his father, whom he never named, calling him instead by the rather distant term of “historical leader.”

Who knows, perhaps Fidelito’s career is not over? Intelligent, very well educated, and gifted with charisma, he is perfectly capable of exercising high office, all the more easily since he has remained close to his uncle Raúl and his physical resemblance to Fidel symbolically favors his return to the corridors of power.

Whereas Fidelito is the most famous of Fidel’s descendants, his half-brother Jorge Ángel, also born in 1949, is on the contrary the least well known. He was the fruit of a three-day passing encounter with Maria Laborde, an admirer from the province of Camagüey whom nobody has ever seen and who is today deceased. The Commander in Chief has always given a wide berth to this unplanned son. If Fidel barely concerned himself with Fidelito, he was even less interested in Jorge Ángel: he could go for months without asking for news of his sons, each of them taking refuge in turn with their uncle.

I later found out Jorge Ángel’s exact date of birth, thanks to the database of the Cuban civil identity service, which I managed to pirate and copy, with inside help, before leaving Cuba. I recently met a Cuban exile who had just arrived in Miami; having worked for State Security (the secret police), he personally knew Jorge Ángel and he confirmed the information I already had: Jorge Ángel was born on March 23, 1940, six months before Fidelito, who was born at the end of September that same year. Not only had no one ever known that Fidel had a hidden son, but, even more surprising, we now know that the “bastard” is in fact the real eldest of the Castros.

The relationship between the rather starchy middle-class Mirta and the feverish Fidel had never been one of consuming passion, to put it mildly—unlike his love for Natalia Revuelta, or “Naty,” with whom he had blithely cheated on Mirta. With her green eyes, her perfect face, and her natural charm, this Havanan was considered in her day the most beautiful woman in the capital. Married to a doctor, Orlando Fernández, Naty sympathized with the ideas of the revolutionary movement, frequenting Fidel first as a friend and then as a mistress. From 1953 to 1955, when the budding
guerrillero
was imprisoned in the penitentiary on Isla de Pinos (today Isla de la Juventud) after the failed attack on La Moncada barracks, she regularly went to visit him.

After two years of imprisonment, Fidel and his comrades were amnestied by Batista—whom they would overthrow three and a half years later. Fidel was then able to demonstrate all the gratitude he felt to his friend. . . .

In 1956, Naty gave birth to Alina. Fidel’s only daughter, this child was also the only one who dared to stand up to him. After his accession to power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro was still seeing the very beautiful Naty, whom he visited at her home, generally in the evening. One day when Alina was ten, Fidel told her that her real father was not Dr. Fernández, who had gone to live in the United States after the Triumph of the Revolution.

Being the daddy of an adorable little girl did not awaken paternal feelings in the
Comandante
: in the 1960s, the new leader of the third world had other fish to fry. When she was twelve, Alina and her mother were sent to Paris for a year, on Fidel’s orders. The little girl was sent to a boarding school in SaintGermain-en-Laye, where she learned French—which she still speaks fluently. Back in Havana, the teenager asserted her personality: as she recounts in her autobiography, at the age of fourteen this budding rebel announced her intention of leaving Cuba.
*
At the time, Fidel paid no attention, but Alina—who always does things her own way—persisted in the idea when she was an adult.

Her relationship with her genitor, whom she saw sporadically, became stormy. I remember her in the 1980s, a pretty young woman who had become a model. One day when I was in Fidel’s anteroom, Pepín Naranjo, the Commander in Chief ’s aide-de-camp, showed up with a copy of the magazine
Cuba
. Spread across its second page, Alina could be admired posing on a sailboat in a bikini, alongside two other superb models, in an advertisement for Havana Club rum.

_______________

*
Alina Fernández,
Fidel, mon père, confessions de la jille de Castro
[Fidel, My Father: Confessions of Castro’s Daughter] (Paris: Plon, 1998).

“What on earth is this?” fulminated Fidel. “Call Alina, at once!”