Castro Family Values

Sven Creutzmann, Mambo Photography / Getty Images A first wife exiled for decades and a "tribe" of children by several women. An exclusive excerpt from Ann Louise Bardach’s new book, Without Fidel, offers glimpses into Fidel Castro's off-limits personal life.

Gossip is the national pastime of Cuba, followed by baseball and sex (although the order could well be reversed). However, speaking out of turn about Castro’s personal life guarantees banishment. “He was always very private and reserved about his personal life,” his sister Juanita told me in 2002. "The personali[ties] of Fidel and my father are very similar.” Castro’s private life is so forbidden that it was not until 2003 that state-run television offered its first glimpse of Dalia Soto del Valle, Castro’s spouse and the mother of five of his sons—just after Talk magazine mentioned her decades of being off-camera. An unparalleled master of media and public relations, Castro reads every news item about him and his country and responds accordingly.

When Fidelito mishandled Cuba’s nuclear-power program, Castro had him fired. “There was no resignation,” Castro declared. “He was fired for incompetence. We don’t have a monarchy here.”

I learned firsthand the degree of Castro’s sensitivity when I got the boot at Jose Marti Airport in Havana last year when I arrived for a visit. A senior official explained the reason a few months later. “Fidel no le gusto su libro,” he told a mutual friend. “Fidel did not like her book,” he said, referring to Cuba Confidential. Curiously, Castro was disturbed not so much about its political content, he said, but rather by some revelations in a chapter entitled Castro Family Values. “Porque unas cosas personales,” the official said. “Because of the personal things.” What is standard-issue public information for any other Western leader, is decidely off-limits in Cuba.

• Ann Louise Bardach: The Day Castro Wept

Castro had a fraught relationship with his father, Ángel Castro, who had come to Oriente, Cuba,  as a young conscript to fight for Spain. The rough-hewn Ángel stayed on, and through his ceaseless labors farming sugar cane became one of the largest landowners in Holguin province, amassing a 30,000-acre spread, including forests, a sawmill, and a nickel mine.

Ángel was as hard-living as he was hard-working; it was not long before his eye alighted on his teenaged housekeeper, the spirited Lina Ruz, while he was married to María Argota, the mother of his first two children. Ángel had seven children with Lina, Fidel being the third, before he married her.

Infidelity is as Cuban as sugar cane, and for several years Ángel Castro juggled two families. For a period, both families lived on the vast grounds of Ángel’s hacienda, with Lina’s children raised in a casita—a small house—on the grounds. According to Fidel, his father, like his mother, did not become fully literate until adulthood. In one letter written in 1948, Fidel reminds his father that “you must place a postage stamp on the letter,” adding how and where to write him: “My address is above on the left-hand side.”

There were also occasional trysts for Ángel that produced at least one other son, as first reported by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Castro has a half-brother, Martin, four years younger than him (and two years older than Raul), who is the son of a young farmhand who worked for Don Ángel. Today, the amiable Martin lives where he was born—down the road from the Castro family finca in Birán.

Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana, and Washington. By Ann Louise Bardach. 352 pages. Scribner. $30. “The dirty little secret of old Oriente,” said Manzanillo native Eduardo Santiago, “was multiple marriages, or what others would call common law marriage or even polygamy.” In the countryside during the first half of the 20th century—the query “como esta la mujer?” or “How is your wife?” was sometimes answered with another query: “Cual de ellas?” or “Which one?”

Fidel Castro would follow a similar pattern as his father: marrying two women, the latter after the birth of five sons—while navigating through scores of lesser liaisons and a few illegitimate sires. When I asked Castro in a 1993 interview I did with him for Vanity Fair how many children he had, he demurred. Then, with a cryptic smile, he said, “casi un tribo”—almost a tribe. He was not dissembling. All together, he had at least nine children, mostly sons. Along with his eldest, Fidelito, born to his first wife, Myrta Diaz-Balart, and his five sons with Soto del Valle, Castro fathered at least three other children, the offspring of several infatuations.