Castro’s daughter discusses book, life in Cuba

“She was totally the opposite of what I expected. I found her to be very calm, at peace, nice, funny – just very friendly and approachable. Very down to earth, and I didn’t expect that at all.”

Those words describe LaToya Gray’s impression of Alina Fernandez, Fidel Castro’s daughter, who recently spoke on campus to the VCU community. Before Gray, a the political science major, attended the lecture she said she anticipated militant and slightly aggressive behavior from the speaker.

After entering the room, Fernandez surveyed the small audience and turned to Malinda Anderson, adviser to the Student Activities Programming Board that organized the lecture.

“It’s stupid to be up there,” Fernandez said with a motion toward the podium on the stage that shook the beaded bracelets on her arm. She suggested that the audience place their chairs in a circle to transform her speech into a roundtable discussion.

Soon the audience grew to more than 30 people, so Fernandez mounted the stage.

“Let me get you to my personal experience – something I will share with you with much love and with the drive to make you know and understand a little better my Cuban fellows,” she said, after explaining that Cuba’s long revolution defied the abrupt nature that normally defines a revolution.

Summarizing the different lives her elite mother, Natalia Revuelta, and her middle-class father lead in Cuba, she told their love story and described her upbringing.

Castro, she said, met Revuelta, the wife of Orlando Fernandez, before Castro went to prison for raiding a Santiago military post. In prison Castro wrote his wife, Myrta Diaz-Balart, and Revuelta. But one day the jail censor mixed up the letters.

“A few months later,” the speaker said, “Fidel found himself free from prison and free from marriage.”

Although Revuelta remained married, she gave birth to Castro’s daughter, Alina, the VCU speaker, in 1956.

“My world went wrong one morning that I remember too well even if I was in fact 3 years old,” Fernandez said. “I was sitting quietly…when the cartoon I was watching on television disappeared….the television screen filled up with hairy people…they were called the rebels.

“We’ve had various hairy men on television in Cuba for almost half a century now…they never went away.”

She peppered her description of Castro’s revolution and regime with similar anecdotes that illustrated her perspective and made the audience laugh.

The speech touched on Castro’s relationship with Saddam Hussein and Cuba’s presence in Iraq. Fernandez warned that Cuban propaganda actively undermines U.S. policies in other countries.

“(Cuba has) more information than the CIA will ever have because they have been (in the Middle East) so long,” she said, comparing Cuban animosity toward Americans to similar feelings in the Middle East and expressing concern that what happened in Cuba could happen there.

“I’m saying this because now you are at war…you are beginning to realize how people see you,” Fernandez said.

After listening a short time to the speaker’s words, Gray said she learned more about her own community.

“She made me realize that over here in America there’re a lot of freedoms – at least from my standpoint – that people take for granted,” Gray said. “She didn’t say that exactly, but she made me realize…it could be a lot worse.”

As the speaker softly read her script containing highlights from her autobiography, “Castro’s Daughter,” her unassuming manner contrasted with her description of the passionate speeches her father delivered, the longest of which she recalled as lasting 12 hours.

“Someone who is able to speak for nine hours is not normal,” Fernandez said. “I soon discovered he didn’t listen. I was just sitting there listening to him – there was no dialogue.”

She described her relationship with Castro as bizarre, consisting mostly of visits at night. At age 10 she finally learned the night visitor was her father, but she later refused to take his name and become formally acknowledged as Fidel Castro’s daughter.

“His first gift was a doll dressed like him,” Fernandez said, motioning to her face to explain that the doll had a beard. “I began to remove the hair immediately.”

Although she does not agree with her father’s treatment of the Cuban people, she does share his nocturnal tendencies since she serves as one of Miami’s late-night radio talk-show hosts. She apologized to the audience at the beginning of her speech for potential mistakes and said she does not awaken until 11 p.m.

In closing her speech, Fernandez explained that she used a Spanish sympathizer’s passport to escape from Cuba.

How will she react when Castro no longer rules Cuba?

“I won’t be the first one on the first plane to get back,” Fernandez said. “I’ll wait a little bit because you’re a different person when you are out of the country than when you’re inside struggling and persecuted all the time.

“They (the Cuban people) have to find their own way. The exiled don’t pretend to intervene in any part of that process – we are here to help.”

Fernandez’s responses to questions following her speech included an assurance that American visitors should feel safe in Cuba, because the people need the money from tourism despite any dislike of Americans.

One audience member, Akial Mwaalkebu-Lan, a 47-year-old U.S. Postal Service employee, requested that Fernandez list the rights she wanted for Cubans. He told her that her response about freedom and the rights democracy brings is much too broad. His fellow U.S. Postal Service employee, Khaliq Abdul Wadud, agreed.

When Mwaalkebu-Lan asked for a more specific answer, Fernandez replied that “at this point, the only right that Cubans have is to say ‘Hail Fidel!'”

“I hope she wants to make some changes in Cuba, and that the changes she makes won’t be a carbon copy of the United States,” Mwaalkebu-Lan said after the speech. “If I had a choice to live over there or live over here, I think I’d be more comfortable over there than I would over here even with the faults they might have.”

Other answers evoked laughter from the crowd, including a comment that she knew the size of the infamous glove in the O.J. Simpson case because she used her television’s closed captioning to learn English after she fled Cuba in 1993.

Anderson said the APB lectures committee wanted a strong female speaker in March, and Fernandez met her expectations as their choice.

“There were a lot of good questions,” the adviser said. “I’m glad that people didn’t focus on ‘your dad’s a dictator’ and Saddam and the war….I think they were really receptive and they wanted to hear about her life.

“I was very happy with what she talked about with the students. She’s a wonderful person….I’m very happy to have had the chance to meet her.”

Fernandez, who Anderson said walked around Richmond earlier that night noting the cultural differences between it and Miami, simply retired to the hotel after her speech. There, she said, Fernandez hoped to walk on the treadmill and then eat a salad in her room.

As for her role as a speaker, Castro’s daughter described it is a great opportunity to learn from people and at the same time explain to people about your neighbor 90 miles away.