Castro Family Values

In domestic and personal matters, Castro is courtly and discreet, not unlike his conduct with foreign visitors. Remarkably, almost none of the many women involved with Castro have sought to publicize or to exploit their relationship to him. One such affair was reportedly with the Venezuelan journalist Isa Dobles, who in the 1980s had her own talk show on Cuban television. It was joked that “she played chess with Fidel every evening,” according to one habanera whose family worked in Cuban intelligence. Despite the fact that the outspoken Isa had a falling out with the Cuban leader, and was said to have been unceremoniously escorted to the airport in 1992, she never wrote a kiss-and-tell memoir.

Indeed, only one paramour, the eccentric Marita Lorenz, who had a brief fling with Castro in 1959 after meeting him on a cruise ship captained by her father, has sought to enrich herself from the experience. She went on to be an adviser on Oliver Stone’s film, JFK.

But it was the relationship between Castro and Myrta Díaz-Balart, his first wife and the mother of his first child, Fidelito, that was most crucial to his personal and political fortunes. From their first meeting at the University of Havana in 1946, the relationship was fraught with passion, politics and conflict. The ill will stemming from the Castro-Díaz-Balart split in 1955 poisoned relations between the two families and has played a remarkable role in the half-century stalemate between Cuba and the United tates.

A beautiful philosopy student, Myrta was the daughter of a politically powerful family. Her father, Rafael, was a well-connected attorney who represented the United Fruit Company. When a neighbor and family friend, Army Colonel Fulgencio Batista, seized power in a coup in 1952, Myrta’s father and brother, also named Rafael, were given important government ministries. Until Batista’s coup, the younger Rafael had been Castro’s devoted friend; indeed, he had introduced his sister Myrta to him and joined the couple on their honeymoon.

When Castro launched his attacks on the Batista government, Myrta broke with her own family to support her husband. But Castro’s machista pride was such that when he discovered that Myrta's brother had provided her with a meager government salary, he turned against her. “It is the reputation of my wife and my honor as a revolutionary that is at stake!" he wrote from prison in 1954. More than three decades of estrangement would follow.

As part of the spoils of ousting Batista and seizing power in 1959, Castro took custody of Fidelito. Meanwhile, Myrta went into exile with her new family in Madrid. “She would have loved to have got [Fidelito] out of Cuba,” said her childhood friend, Barbara Walker Gordon.

Fidelito attended university in the Soviet Union—matriculating with a Ph.D. in physics—then traveled extensively as a government scientist. During this period, Myrta would regularly visit with him on his trips to Europe. She also began to make quiet, discreet trips to Havana. But in the early ‘90s, the visits came to a halt after father and son had a dispute over the handling of Cuba’s nuclear-energy program. In 1999, Myrta fretted to Barbara Gordon that it had been almost eight years since she had seen her son, although they communicated by phone, letters, and email. “She was beside herself,” said Gordon.

But in 2000, Raúl Castro brokered a reconciliation between his prideful brother, Myrta, and Fidelito, who assumed another position as a senior researcher and professor at the Cuban Academy of Sciences. After her second husband died in 2007, Myrta began spending a good deal of time in Cuba, nestled in a comfortable home in western Havana arranged for her by Raúl.

Myrta’s visits infuriated the Díaz-Balarts, who had established themselves as pivotal players in Miami’s Cuban exile community and Florida politics. Two of her nephews, Rafael’s sons Mario and Lincoln, are members of Congress and are among Castro’s most dedicated foes. Both have lobbied—fiercely and unsuccessfully—the Obama Administration not to loosen travel restrictions for Cuban-American families. Curiously, neither nephew has publicly acknowledged the frequent visits of their aunt, nor the existence of their first cousin Fidelito and his five children.

Myrta’s return reportedly greatly cheered Fidel. After all, she had been his first love—but not least because of the distress it caused her Miami relatives. In a rare exception to Castro family privacy policy, Cuba released a photograph of a radiant-looking Myrta with Fidelito at the inauguration of the Nanoscience/ Nanotechnology Summit in late 2008.

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Ann Louise Bardach is author of Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington and the acclaimed Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. She is a PEN/USA award winning reporter and was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and has written for The New York Times, Washington Post Outlook, Los Angeles Times, and The Atlantic. She has appeared on 60 Minutes, Today, and CNN, among others.

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