CUBA: Fidel Castro’s Confessions on Love

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Mar 24 1997 (IPS) - Cuban President Fidel Castro confessed being “eternally enamoured of the feminine sex,” and that at 70, he still fell in love “easily, but in a more platonic manner.”

“No love is the same as any other. Love has much to do with chemistry, and there are as many loves as there are chemistries,” Castro said in an interview published over the weekend by ‘Juventud Rebelde’, the weekly of the Union of Young Communists.

Castro, considered an attractive man with a magnetic personality, said he was shy in his youth, whispering flirtatious compliments to the girls, but always taking the initiative.

“Women should never show a man that they love him, because when a man finds out that they are in love with him, he gives himself airs. Indifference is the greatest stimulus in love.”

In his confessions to Cuban reporters Magda Resik and Alina Perera, Castro partially broke his long silence on his private life, but without furnishing details.

Born in 1926 in eastern Cuba, Castro headed the revolution that in 1959 overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1952-59). Thirty-eight years later he is still in power.

In Cuba he has always been imagined as a “a great lover” who fathered a number of children, the number one defender of women and their place in society. But it has never been known for certain who his wife has been or how many children he has had.

Castro agreed to the interview a month after the Spanish daily ‘ABC’ published passionate love letters he wrote to Natalia Revuelta (Natty) in the 1950s, which were made public by their daughter, Alina Fernandez Revuelta.

Both Natalia Revuelta and Castro were married at the time. Today Castro assures us that “appearances should not matter to us. What is important is what is in our conscience.”

Alina Fernandez Revuelta, who carries the last names of her mother’s husband and – according to Spanish tradition – that of her mother, is 40 years old, a well-known critic of Castro who has been living in the United States since 1993.

She reportedly received 40,000 to 50,000 dollars for the letters, which were written in the old prison on the ‘Isla de Pinos’ (Island of Pines, today’s Island of Youth) where Castro was imprisoned following the Jul. 26, 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks, considered the starting-point of the armed struggle against the Batista regime.

“There are lasting things, in spite of the meanness of life: there are eternal things, like the impressions I have of you, so unforgettable, which will accompany me to my tomb,” Castro wrote in a letter dated Nov. 7, 1953.

“Woman is the most delicate thing in the world…companion in happiness, pleasure, feeling, ideas and aims, in the past, in the present and in the future, one minute or a lifetime, woman is deserving of an irreproachable and sacred veneration in the innermost chamber of a man’s heart.”

Revuelta, who is in her sixties and lives in Cuba, said that although she had given the letters to her daughter, she had nothing to do with their publication, and she still felt “respect” for Castro.

“Sometimes letters are written, the fruit of passion arising out of distance. Distance always magnifies love. Those are letters written with great feeling,” Castro said in Sunday’s interview, without specifically stating to which letters he was referring.

The publication of Castro’s love letters met with no public comments in Cuba, just as a shroud of silence has surrounded his daughter’s departure from the country and her crusade against her father’s government.

In the interview, Castro revealed a little-known facet of his personality – jealousy. As a young man, he did not like his girlfriends “to go out much, nor to be looked at.”

Castro said “all” women have made him lose patience, that Cuban women were known for their “sweetness,” and that by contrast with local custom, he preferred falling in love in “private” places, not along the ‘Malecon’, the avenue lining the Havana coast.

“Love also needs tactics. That is a contradiction, but without contradictions we couldn’t eat. There are shorter and longer loves, and more peaceful ones…but there must always be passion,” he concluded.