The Double Life of Fidel Castro (7 page)

Two hours later, Alina strode into his office, not in the least intimidated. The ensuing argument was the most memorable of them all: shouting reverberated all over the room, shaking the walls of the presidential office.

“Everybody knows you are my daughter! Posing in a bikini like that is unseemly!”

“Oh, so you’re interested in what I’m doing now?” replied Alina, screaming even louder. “I don’t care about your aesthetic considerations—I want to live!”

It was truly
la jiesta del Guatao
, a Cuban expression referring to that village where, according to legend, festivals often degenerate into general free-for-alls. Alina eventually tore out of the office like a rocket, Fidel and Pepín standing there speechless.

Several years went by and then, in 1993, Fidel learned via the secret services that Alina was making serious plans to flee Cuba. Fidel immediately summoned the head of the escort, Col. José Delgado Castro, my boss at that time: “I am warning you: Alina must not leave Cuba under any pretext or in any way. You’ve been warned!”

But two months later, the dramatic news fell: on Christmas Eve we found out that Alina had succeeded in secretly leaving her native land, wearing a wig, equipped with a false Spanish passport, with the help of a network of international accomplices. She went first to Madrid, where she gave numerous press conferences denouncing Castrist totalitarianism, then to Miami, where she settled permanently. The announcement of the defection of Fidel Castro’s daughter was as scandalous as that of Juanita, one of Fidel’s four sisters, had once been; in 1964, she had left Cuba via Mexico for Miami. She never saw her six brothers and sisters again.

One rarely sees the
Comandante
allowing his anger to explode. In seventeen years, I saw it only twice. Generally his anger was cold and withdrawn. But when Pepín broke the unpleasant news to him that day, Fidel went mad with rage. In these situations, his gestures resembled those of a capricious child in the middle of a tantrum: standing up, he stamped his feet on the ground while pointing his two index fingers down to his toes and waving them around.

“What a band of incompetent fools!” he cried, foaming at the mouth. “I want those responsible! I demand a report! I want to know how all this could have happened!”

When Fidel got himself into such a state, you could hear a pin drop. Everybody scampered, pretending to go about their business while they waited for the tropical storm to pass.

Fifteen years later, I saw Alina again in Miami, where she lives modestly, never having set foot in Cuba again. When I reminded her of that episode, she smiled, with that touch of sadness that can be seen in the eyes of every exile in the world.

After Mirta and Naty, there was Dalia Soto del Valle, the most important but also the least known of Fidel’s women. She met him in 1961—the year of the Bay of Pigs landing—during a public event in the province of Villa Clara related to his government’s big national literacy campaign. As he was giving a speech in the open air, Fidel spotted in the first row a gorgeous girl with whom he rapidly started exchanging furtive and meaningful glances. Like Mirta and Naty, this stranger was a blue-eyed blonde who also possessed another quality essential in the Commander in Chief ’s eyes: she was thin, as slight as a ballet dancer. Thinness, much more than blondeness, was an essential criterion in Fidel’s romantic choices.

It was love at first sight. Later that day, Pepín, the aide-decamp, introduced the beauty to him and Fidel discovered she was a teacher. After three meetings, and above all after the customary checks carried out by Pepín (to make sure she was not a counter-revolutionary and that her family had not been linked to Batista’s regime), Fidel proposed that she move to Havana, where he lodged her very discreetly in a house situated on the outskirts of the capital, in Punta Brava. Some time afterward, they set up home together for good. From the beginning, their relationship was carried out under the greatest secrecy, both as a security measure in terms of the United States, who Fidel knew wanted to assassinate him, and from concern to keep the relationship from Celia Sánchez, with whom he was simultaneously involved.

Fidel and Dalia would have five children, all sons, all bearing a first name beginning with the letter A: Alexis, Alex, Alejandro, Antonio, Angelito. The first three names were all variations of Alexander, the pseudonym adopted by Fidel when he was a guerrilla fighter, in homage to his admired Alexander the Great. The five A’s grew up far from the seat of power, from other Cubans, and even from their relatives. As I have said, before they reached adulthood, they never met Raúl’s children, even though they lived nearby. The very family-minded Raúl leaped for joy the day his son, already an adult, met two of his first cousins, encountered by chance at a party. The government’s second-in-command and minister of defense had asked his aides-de-camp for bottles of vodka to raise a toast to the occasion.

During seventeen years in Fidel’s service, I encountered the five A’s almost daily. They were all intelligent but without, for the most part, any particular brilliance. They all went to the Esteban Hernández primary school that their mother had set up especially for them in 202nd Street in the Coronela district, not far from the family home. Dalia quickly became the de facto principal of this made-to-measure establishment, personally choosing the teachers in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and selecting the students who would be admitted to it, according to the solidity of their parents’ revolutionary convictions. A total of fifty or so children were enrolled, from establishment families or those of the escort. I was happy that mine did not go there: I never took advantage of the system. It was much better that way.

There was something else Fidel’s children all had in common: none of the five A’s ever did any military training or took part in any international aid mission to assist “brother countries,” contrary to what Fidel recommended for or imposed on all young Cubans. Similarly, those who were of an age to do so did not fight in the Angolan Civil War (1975–1992), even though the Commander in Chief had sent hundreds of thousands of their compatriots there, to be killed at the front.

As with all groups of siblings, the five A’s defined themselves by their differences, their personalities, and their career paths. Alexis, the tall and thin eldest child, born in 1962, was an introverted loner with no real friends who rarely socialized or flirted with women, whereas Alex, born the following year, was affable and outgoing. The eldest, trained in computer science, had the habit of wanting to impose his views on his brothers— though he did not meet with much success. The second, more well-padded, had always won people’s affection without even thinking about it. Naturally chubby, his nickname was El Buenachón
,
in other words a “good egg,” which suited him perfectly: placid by nature, he was incapable of getting into conflict with anybody, not even his ungracious elder brother, to whom he had always in fact been close. A bon viveur, he was also called El Gordito (the Little Fat One), which did not annoy him at all. Alex was also the one to give Fidel and Dalia their first grandson, increasing his popularity ratings within the family even further. Initially an engineer, he soon branched off to follow a career as cameraman for TV Cubana before becoming a photographer in 1998. In 2012, this official photographer of his father exhibited a series of twenty-seven large-format images entitled “Fidel Castro: Intimate Portraits” in a chic gallery in Mexico.

Then came the third in line, Alejandro, born in 1969. Like his older brothers, he studied computer science, but unlike them he was passionate about programming. Today he is what could be called a geek. Around 1990, El Brother—the nickname he had acquired at university—developed software that enabled Russian computer systems to be adapted for Japanese ones; he subsequently sold it to a Japanese company, earning the congratulations of his father as well as the gift of a Lada car. A party animal, his favorite pursuits were frequenting discotheques, women, and prominent artists, much like Antonio, the fourth A.

The latter, nicknamed Tony, was born in 1971 and he is the sibling I knew best. I spent much time teaching him to swim, dive, and use an underwater spear gun on Cayo Piedra. Naturally, we bonded through these experiences. I was the sole member of the escort to be invited to the party for his fifteenth birthday along with a group of his teenage classmates; I imagine this provoked a little jealousy among my colleagues. On this occasion, Fidel had asked me to accompany his son to Unit 160, where the presents received by the president were kept, to choose a watch for Tony, who had set his sights on a quartz Seiko. I remember the teenager’s radiant smile as he put it on his wrist.

Tony studied at the Lenin High School in Havana, where all his brothers had gone. I remember asking him one evening when I was on duty in the family property: “What are you going to do after high school?”

“My father wants me to study medicine, but I want to be a baseball coach. . . .”

Tony had always been mad about sports and played baseball and football whenever he could. Fidel’s desires were, however, not up for discussion.

“In that case,” I suggested to him, “choose sports medicine! That way you can have a career in the sports world while keeping on the right side of your father.”

Years later, after my time in prison, I found out that Antonio had become an orthopedic surgeon. I don’t know whether I had anything to do with it, but I have not forgotten our dialogue.

At any rate, of the five A’s, Antonio was the only one to carve out a real life for himself. An accomplished athlete (he is a talented baseball batter, an experienced underwater diver, and an excellent golfer), he is head of the orthopedic surgery unit at the Frank País Orthopedic Hospital in Havana, doctor to the national baseball team, president of the Cuban federation, and vice president of the international federation of the same sport. In short, fortune has smiled on this brilliant, handsome “ideal son-in-law” who has twice been married to beautiful women and who has become known as a sort of Prince of Havana.

Last there is Angelito (Little Angel), about whom the same cannot be said. The youngest son, born in 1974, was the only one not to have gone on to earn a higher education. I remember him as a kid who was ultra-spoiled by his mother. Going to Varadero one weekend, for example, he demanded that he be picked up from there in a Mercedes-Benz. Dalia gave in to all his whims. Mad about cars since early childhood, Angelito was always getting in our hair; in the workshop, he lifted car hoods without asking permission, sat himself in the driving seat of parked cars, and touched tools without putting them back in their place. He was so exasperating that one of the Castro family domestics christened him
El Comandantico
, the little commander. Long after I had left Fidel’s escort, I learned that he had become a senior executive at Mercedes-Benz in Cuba. Given all the talented people our country contains, I imagine that he essentially owes his position to the fact that his name is Castro. . . .

The five A’s grew up and most of them still live in the immense family property of Punto Cero in the Havanan quarter of Siboney, in conditions that are starkly different to the revolutionary austerity advocated by their father.

Punto Cero is a vast terrain of about 75 acres situated to the west of Havana, not far from the sea: to be precise, 0.8 miles south of the Hemingway marina and 6 kilometers from the presidential palace. Four gardeners look after the upkeep of this leafy estate, which, in addition to the L-shaped, two-story family mansion with a 600-square-yard footprint, included a 50-foot-long swimming pool, six greenhouses for the cultivation of fruit and vegetables, and a huge lawn for the children to play on. There was also a second two-story residential building (with a 420-square-yard footprint) situated 550 yards from the principal residence where the bodyguards of the escort as well as the whole of the domestic staff for the house were lodged.

With its orange, lemon, mandarin, grapefruit, and banana trees, the estate resembled a veritable garden of Eden— especially if one compared it with the notorious ration book that all Cubans, including members of Fidel Castro’s bodyguard, had to use to buy food: Per month, they were entitled to five eggs per person, a pound of chicken, half a pound of fish, 8 ounces of oil, black beans, powdered milk (reserved for children under seven), and a loaf of bread a day. It was impossible to keep going for more than two weeks on such a restricted diet, forcing the unfortunate Cubans to dream up all sorts of schemes to be able to satisfy their appetites.

The Castros’ huge home was tastefully decorated, in the classical style of Caribbean family homes: shutters on the windows, furniture made of wicker and tropical wood, watercolors and porcelain plates hanging on the walls. To which were added a profusion of books on bookshelves and coffee tables. One of the domestic staff, Zoraida, ensured the smooth running of daily life, keeping tidy the private apartment of Fidel and Dalia on the first floor, as well as the communal areas of living room, small living room, and dining room on the ground floor, and looking after the laundry of the whole family, apart from that of Fidel.

Particular treatment was reserved for Fidel’s clothes and underclothes. While the dirty clothes of Dalia and the children were washed by the domestics of Punto Cero, who ironed it in the laundry room, his was dealt with by the laundry in the presidential palace. Every day a chauffeur from Unit 160 went to Punto Cero to collect it and take it to the cleaners at the
palacio
. After washing and ironing, each shirt and pair of socks, boxer shorts, or trousers were subjected to a radioactivity test so as to make sure that the clothes of the
Líder Máximo
were free of any contamination. After all that, the same chauffeur did the same journey in reverse and delivered the impeccable clothes to Punto Cero, where the domestics tidied them carefully away in their place.

Two cooks, Pedro Moreno Copul (previously chef at the Habana Libre hotel) and Nicolas Mons del Llana, prepared the meals that were served at table by a liveried butler named Orestes Díaz. The Castros ate as if they were in a restaurant—in other words, à la carte. Each evening before going to bed, Dalia would draw up individual menus for the three meals of the following day for each of the family members according to his or her tastes, habits, and desires.