Standing high above this sexual maelstrom is a tall bearded figure in a green army uniform. He seems to be the last of the ascetics. Certainly no woman shares the spotlight with him. How different it could all have been. Over the years, there have been one or two prime candidates for the position of First Lady of the Republic of Cuba.
Fidel Castro is the illegitimate son of Angel Castro, a successful sugar planter, and a fifteen-year-old scullery maid, Lina Ruz. Angel had a wife back home in Galicia, so he could not marry Fidel’s mother. It was not uncommon for Spanish immigrants to have a second family in Cuba.
Although Fidel was not baptized, he was brought up by priests who instilled in him a fear of sex, masturbation and homosexuality. He never had a girlfriend until he went to university to study law. There, he was dating two sisters when his friend and classmate Rafael Dmaz Balart introduced him to his sister, Mirta. She was a philosophy student. They met in the cafeteria. It was love at first sight.
Castro was still very shy with women and he hated dancing, but he broke off from political meetings to go out on dates with Mirta. They were chaperoned wherever they went. She had green eyes and dark blonde hair, and was his first sweetheart.
Mirta came from one of the wealthiest families on Cuba and were extremely well connected. Her parents were a little worried when they realized that they were about to acquire a son-in-law who had the reputation on the campus of being a gangster. He had led a protest against fare increases that had resulted in the burning of buses and he had twice been accused of murder. But Fidel and Mirta were very much in love and they married in 1948. Castro’s father Angel was delighted that his son had made such an advantageous union and paid for a lengthy honeymoon in America. Castro even considered staying on in the U.S. to study at Columbia University, but the politics of Cuba drew him back.
Back in Cuba life was hard, and Castro soon had a new mouth to feed, a son named Fidelito. Mirta was constantly frustrated by Castro’s refusal to work. He spent his tame politicking; he even slept with a woman with a badly pock-marked face because she controlled key Party votes, casting her aside when her usefulness was over. But Mina stood by him, intervening to save his life when he was arrested for armed insurrection.
However, he was already having an affair with another woman, Natalia “Nati” Revuelta. A fellow student at the university, she was a striking green-eyed blonde who moved in aristocratic circles. During her life she had scarcely put a foot wrong. She had studied at a Catholic girls” school in Philadelphia, worked at the U.S. embassy and Esso. She was a member of the Havana Yacht Club and Country Club, and was married to a prominent heart specialist, Orlando Fernandez. Now she wanted some excitement. She first saw Castro when he was addressing a political meeting at the university and found him charismatic and sexy.
After an unsuccessful uprising in 1953, Castro was sentenced to 15 years” imprisonment, but he was released under an amnesty within the year. During his time in jail, Castro wrote passionate love letters to Nati.
“Love is like a diamond,” he wrote, “the hardest and purest of all minerals, able to scratch anything; it is not perfect until all its edges have been cut and shaped. Then it sparkles from all angles with an incomparable radiance. The metaphor would be perfect if the diamond, once buffed and polished, would grow bigger and bigger. A genuine love is based on many feelings, not just one, and they gradually balance each other off, each reflecting the light of the others.”
While Castro was pouring out his heart to Nati, Mirta was using her influence to have his conditions improved. Then Castro did what every prisoner knew you should not do — he wrote to Nati and Mirta on the same day. To no one’s surprise, the two letters got mixed up.
Although Mirta was hurt by Castro’s passion for another woman, she tried to woo him back during prison visits, but he divorced her on his release — for political reasons, he said. Her family was too close to the Batista regime he was seeking to bring down. Her brother, his former friend and classmate Rafael, was Minister of the Interior in charge of public order and Mirta herself had taken a botella — a government job which earns pay without any work having to be done — to support herself and their son while Castro was in jail.
Castro’s relationship with Nati became very public, but when they had a baby, Alina, they gave her Nati’s husband’s surname, Fernandez. Back in the 1950s, Cuba’s attitude to illegitimacy was not nearly as liberal as it is now.
After spending some time in the U.S., Castro headed for Mexico in 1956 where he assembled a small band of men and a cache of arms ready for the overthrow of Batista; but when the Mexican authorities found out, he was arrested. In jail, he was visited by Teresa Casuso, a Cuban woman who had lived in exile in Mexico for more than a decade. She was a writer. Her husband had been killed, fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. She was forty and was attracted to the young Castro, who she saw as a romantic young renegade. When she met him, she thought that here was a man who needed someone to look after him.
Although her feelings were in some way reciprocated, Teresa had made a mistake in bringing with her a young house guest, sixteen-year-old Isabel Custudio. Her parents, both famous Cuban actors, were touring the country.
“She looked like an elegant model, with the rims of her enormous, innocent, greenish-brown eyes darkly accented in the Italian fashion,” Teresa said. “On that day, her hair was its natural colour of dark gold.”
Castro was immediately smitten. After his release from jail, he visited Teresa Casuso’s house regularly. They talked endlessly about revolution. When she agreed to keep a few things for him, she found him stashing guns in her closets. But Teresa suspected the real reason he was coming around was to see Isabel.
“He sought her out with a youthful effusiveness and impetuosity that both startled and amused her,” Teresa said.
Isabel was busy though, studying at the university in the mornings, working in the afternoons and attending political meetings in the evenings. When Castro turned up at Teresa’s house, she was often out. In fact, Isabel was avoiding him. He soon twigged and, one morning, he turned up really early, before she had left.
“When I started to leave the house, he was there waiting,” she recalled later. “We looked at each other and laughed, because his trick was just as obvious as mine. It was a very funny encounter, and he offered to drive me to the university.”
From then on, they were almost never apart. He always wore clean shirts and his suits were freshly pressed, and he made his advances with all the tenacity of a guerrilla leader.
“He treated me like a princess,” Isabel said, “with a fine and delicate love, just as a man should. I was like a doll, or porcelain. And he was very pre-occupied with the image that I projected. He told me that it was important that I maintain an image equal to his.”
After securing the approval of her parents, he asked her to marry him. She accepted.
Using money that had been donated to the revolution, he bombarded her with expensive presents — new clothes, shoes, French perfume and a modest bathing suit to replace her rather revealing bikini (which infuriated him). He also planned to take her on the reckless assault on Cuba he was organizing. One day, she would be the “First Lady of Cuba” his men said.
But Isabel wanted romance not danger. Sailing across the Gulf of Mexico with a boat-load of guerrilla fighters was not her idea of a honeymoon. So when a former fiance returned to Mexico City and asked her again to marry him, she accepted. She left the next day and, for years, Castro could not even bring himself to mention her name.