The Miami Herald

October 8, 2000 Castro's Family





Alejando and Antonio Castro

Soto del Valle Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart Alina Fernández Revuelta

Fidel's private life with his wife and sons is so secret

that even the CIA is left to wonder

BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

There are no streets in Cuba named after President

Fidel Castro, no statues or peso bills bearing the

image of the ``maximum leader,'' no mention -- ever --

in the official media of his wife of 30-plus years or their

five sons.

Most Cubans, in fact, know almost nothing about the

personal life of one of the world's most private, even

secretive rulers. Not the names of his wife and sons,

not even the address of his home in Havana.

Photographs of two of Castro's sons, a niece and a

nephew-in-law that appear in today's Herald are,

indeed, the first time their faces are published

anywhere, slightly lifting the veil of secrecy that

shrouds Castro's family.

His wife, Dalia Soto del Valle, and their sons Angel,

Antonio, Alejandro, Alexis and Alex, have never been

identified in the island's media and only in a few

foreign publications not subject to Cuban censorship.

Except for brothers Raúl and Ramón and his oldest

son, ``Fidelito,'' Castro's close relatives hold no

publicly visible jobs, wield no political power, and are

unlikely to play a role in the succession to the

74-year-old ruler.

While they live comfortably, compared to the grinding

shortages faced by most Cubans, they are under

strict orders to avoid ostentatious behavior and live

austerely, far from the limelight, acquaintances say.

``They don't dress any better than anyone else,'' said

Castro's daughter, Alina Fernández, now living in

Spain. ``On the contrary, they are required to at least

project an image of austerity for the rest of the

Cubans.''

Added exile author Norberto Fuentes: ``The most

avaricious cabinet minister lives no better than the

average Cuban in Miami. He has one car, not two. An

air conditioner in the car? No air conditioner.''

Unlike other Latin dictators, he promotes no cult of

personality.

Most Latin American dictators have sought to glorify

themselves. The Dominican Republic's Rafaél Trujillo

renamed his nation's capital city and highest mountain

after himself, and Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner put

up huge posters of himself around Asunción streets.

Yet even as Castro's bearded profile has become an

icon for revolutionaries around the world after 41 years

in power, inside Cuba his desire for privacy has

generated an odd sort of reverse cult of personality.

Few public images of El Comandante are visible

around Cuba, and his Aug. 13 birthday is not a holiday

even though it's always noted by the government's

media monopoly.

His regime instead promotes dead revolutionary

heroes such as Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara and Camilo

Cienfuegos on everything from statues to key chains

and T-shirts sold to tourists.

Though his power is unchallenged, and phrases from his lengthy speeches are

often quickly adopted as national slogans, the Cuban media is strictly forbidden

from reporting on Castro's personal life.

``His private side is a completely taboo subject,'' said Lissette Bustamante,

formerly a top Cuban journalist who met several of Fidel and Raúl Castro's

children before she defected in the early 1990s.

Castro has said that his penchant for privacy largely stems from his security

concerns, given the more than 600 assassination attempts he says the CIA and

Cuban exiles have mounted against him since 1959.

``They want to know if some day I went to bathroom or not, details on how my

prostate is doing, they even want x-rays,'' Castro told reporters during a Havana

news conference in April.

But he has also acknowledged having a general propensity for ``permanent

conspiracy,'' and made a strong argument that national leaders should never mix

their public and private lives.

``In this sense, I have reserved for myself a total freedom,'' Castro said in an

interview for a documentary, Fidel, 40 Years of the Cuban Revolution and its

Leader, by Estela Bravo, a U.S. filmmaker who lives part time in Havana.

The film provided Cubans with rare glimpses of his personal life when it was

shown by Cuban television, unannounced, on Jan. 1, the anniversary of Castro's

revolution, and again at two film festivals in March.

The 75-minute documentary notes that Cubans ``know very little about the

personal life of Fidel,'' and discreetly adds: ``It is said that he has seven children

and has been married for almost 30 years.''

Its few images of a private Castro date from pre-revolution days, including his

1948 marriage to Mirta Díaz-Balart, and their son, Fidel ``Fidelito'' Castro

Díaz-Balart. They divorced two years later.

``The amount and quality of hard information on that subject is so scarce that it is

unlike any other country in the world,'' said Brian Latell, the CIA's recently retired

top analyst on Cuba and Castro.

Castro's wife and their five sons have been briefly mentioned in books by Alina

Fernández, the offspring of an affair with Natalia Revuelta in the early 1950s, and

by Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer and Castro biographer Tad Szulc, as

well as in two recent U.S. magazine stories.

But nothing at all about them has ever been published or broadcast inside Cuba.

Dalia Soto del Valle is a former schoolteacher from the south-central city of

Trinidad who met Castro during the literacy campaigns of the 1960s, said

Fuentes, a member of Cuba's inner circles who met her several times before he

defected in 1994.

Now in her late 50s, she is regarded as warm, but as austere as Castro himself,

running his household affairs and almost never attending his public functions, said

Fuentes, who now lives in Miami.

Their sons range in age from Angel, about 25 and studying medicine, to Alex, a

computer systems manager in his mid-30s. Antonio is studying to be an

orthopedic surgeon, and Alejandro and Alexis are computer programmers.

They use the surname Castro Soto del Valle, and their first names come from the

nom de guerre that Castro adopted during the revolution in the 1950s -- Alejandro,

in admiration of Alexander the Great's military feats.

Almost nothing is known about a sixth Castro son, Jorge Angel Castro, identified

by Alina Fernández as the child of a woman who died years ago. He is believed to

be 51 years old and to have four children, including triplets. The middle name

Angel may come from Castro's Spanish-born father, Angel Castro.

All but Angel and Alejandro Castro Soto del Valle are said to be married and have

children of their own, making Castro a grandfather many times over. Alejandro,

known as a computer and softball nut who always dresses informally, is said to

be the only one still living at home with Fidel and Dalia.

Alina Fernández recalled the five brothers as ``sensible, intelligent kids.'' But she

felt sorry for them, she added, ``because on the one side they are tightly watched

by guards, and on the other Cubans have a great curiosity about them.''

``There is no yellow press in Cuba to report on their lives, but of course when

people see a young guy with lots of bodyguards, they start guessing whose sons

they are,'' she said in a telephone interview from Spain.

The government takes care of their every basic need, Bustamante said, but some

do not own their own cars and must call the family's central security office when

they need rides around Havana.

``They have privileged positions but they don't seem to have many luxuries ...

certainly not like the `juniors' in Mexico,'' said Latell, referring to the Mexican

slang for rich kids.

Added Fuentes: ``They live comfortably, only comfortably. In the eyes of other

Cubans they may be living in luxury, but in Cuba eating three balanced meals a

day is a luxury.''

Most of Dalia's sons graduated from the Lenin High School in Havana, said

Bustamante, a school reserved for Cuba's brightest and children of top

government officials who require special security protection.

The children of Castro and his brother, Armed Forces commander Raúl Castro,

have specially tight security details under orders never to allow them to be

photographed or approached by unknown persons, acquaintances said.

The photographs that appear in color in today's Herald were taken by a Cuban

acquaintance who said he managed to snap them during private social gatherings

when the Castro offsprings' bodyguards were not around to stop him.

He smuggled them out of Cuba when he defected during a trip abroad last year.

The Miami Herald purchased the images and has offered them for re-sale to other

publications.

So tight is the security around Castro's children that friends of ``Fidelito'' still

sometimes call him José Raúl Fernández, the cover name he used when he

studied nuclear physics in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

Fidelito, nephew of Florida Republican Rep. Lincoln Díaz Balart, is the only

offspring who has been regularly mentioned in the Cuban media, particularly when

he served as executive secretary of the Cuban Atomic Energy Commission from

1980 to 1992.

He is belived to have divorced his Russian wife several years ago and remarried a

Cuban. A U.S. citizen who met him recently said he is now working as a

consultant for the Ministry of Basic Industries.

THE CASTRO COMPOUND

Fidel and his wife live in western Havana near Raul

Fidel Castro and wife Dalia live in a two-house complex in western Havana. The

living room of the main house is described by visitors as furnished with simple

wood and leather sofas and chairs and Cuban handicrafts.

The only luxury visible to visitors, said Fuentes, is a big-screen television that

Castro uses to satisfy his interest in foreign news reports and videos secretly

recorded by Cuba's intelligence services.

While the nature of Castro's relations with his sons is unknown, Alina Fernández

and Bustamante both said Raúl Castro is much more the family man, holding

regular Sunday dinners for his and Fidel's children at his home, known as La

Rinconada, two blocks from Fidel's own house in western Havana.

``He has a much better sense of family than any of his brothers,'' said Fernández.

It is Raúl, according to two friends of Mirta Díaz-Balart, now living in Spain, who

arranges her occasional visits to Cuba to see Fidelito.

Raúl and his wife of 40 years, Vilma Espín, a veteran of the revolution and

longtime president of the Cuban Women's Federation, have three daughters and

one son -- also never mentioned in the media.

Son Alejandro was an army officer, Nilsa was studying at the University of

Havana, Deborah was an engineer working at a government enterprise and Mariela

studied child psychology and modern dance, said Bustamante, who knew the

family well before her defection.

Mariela is considered the rebel in the family, Bustamante added, a free spirit who

performed topless in one late 1980s production and favored Soviet leader Mikhail

Gorbachev's perestroika in the 1980s.

Dancer Ruben Rodriguez, who lived with Mariela three years before he defected to

Spain in 1991, told Bustamante during an interview that Raúl had once

complained Mariela had ``brought perestroika into my home!''

Mariela is now married to an Italian and has two children with him, plus a boy

from a previous union with a Chilean, according to a former Raúl Castro assistant

who defected in 1993 but stays in touch with current aides.

The only politically powerful member of the Fidel or Raúl families is believed to be

Deborah's husband, Luis Alberto Fernández, about 40, son of an army general

and himself a lieutenant colonel in the armed forces.

Fernández heads the umbrella agency that administers the Cuban military's

multi-million dollar businesses, from scores of tourist hotels in Cuba to trade

companies in Panama, Angola, South Africa, Geneva and Cyprus.

``He isn't just Raúl's son-in-law or the son of a general. Luis Alberto earned his

position because he's smart and efficient, and he'll go far in the future,'' said the

former Raúl Castro aide.

Luis Alberto and Deborah have two children named Raúl and Vilma after her

parents, according to the former Raúl aide and two other family acquaintances.

The former aide and the acquaintances asked for anonymity out of fear that

Cuban security agents would go after relatives still on the island in retaliation for

exposing details of the families.

DOMESTIC COMFORTS

The houses of Fidel and Raúl are large but simply appointed

Fidel and Dalia's compound in western Havana is equipped with one outdoor

tennis and basketball court. It is ringed with pine trees that block off outside

views, and surrounded by electronic fences that detect intruders.

All streets surrounding the compound are marked as one-way streets heading

away from the house to deter sightseers, Bustamante said. Only official cars are

allowed to drive the wrong way into the compound.

An acquaintance who has visited both Fidel and Raúl's homes described them as

very large by Cuban standards but relatively simply appointed with Cuban-made

furniture, with Raúl's home ``a bit nicer than Fidel's.''

The Castro brothers are known to have had several other houses around the

island set aside for vacations or official visits to the provinces. But they handed

over most of them for tourist lodgings after Soviet subsidies stopped arriving in

1991 and Cuba plunged into an economic crisis.

AUSTERITY AND HYPOCRISY

The elite live better, but are required to project equality

Fuentes said the show of austerity by Castro and those near him is part of the

hypocrisy of a system in which the elite live better than the average Cuban but are

required to project an image of equality.

``You see the house of a top official all worn on the outside, badly in need of

paint, the grass all a mess,'' he said. ``But inside he'll have two television sets, a

VCR, a nice stereo, a new fridge.''

But there are limits.

``Of course, anything the hijos de papi [sons of daddy] want they get -- even if no

other Cuban ever sees this stuff. Computers, nice houses, vacations, you name

it. But luxuries? With few exceptions, not really,'' said Fuentes.

``I think that when this [Castro's rule] ends, most people in Cuba will be outraged

by the relative comforts of the leadership,'' he added, ``and most people in Miami

will be surprised by their low level of life.''

