For 10 years, she grew up without knowing that her father was the most powerful man in Cuba. To Alina Fernandez Revuelta, now 70, the man who often showed up at her house wearing a military uniform was simply an old friend of her mother’s from the days of the Cuban Revolution.
At 37, the daughter born of the extramarital affair between Fidel Castro, “El Caballo” (The Horse), as his comrades called him, with Natalia Revuelta, decided to flee Cuba with forged documents and settle in the US, the country her father had sworn to fight.
Today, decades after her escape from Cuba, Fernandez Revuelta watches as her country experiences prolonged shortages of basic goods and constant power outages. Speaking to Kathimerini, she describes the moments she lived through alongside Castro, her “difficult” and often unapproachable father, while explaining what it is like to grow up within the Cuban communist system.
“Before the revolution,” she recounts, “we had Batista as president, who a few years later staged a military coup and took power again. At that time, the republic was beginning to flourish in Cuba; people were engaged in politics and social issues, and nobody accepted the military coup. Through the “Orthodox Party” (Partido Ortodoxo), in which my mother was actively engaged, she met Fidel Castro.”
