Ultimate Rebellious Daughter (Castro’s) Calls Father ‘Tyrant’

Alina Fernandez Revuelta comes to the door of her apartment in a T-shirt with an American flag printed across the front. It’s a choice of apparel that would not please her father. Fernandez is Fidel Castro’s daughter.

In a country where talking back to authority constitutes a crime known as rebellion, punishable by prison, Fernandez is the ultimate rebellious daughter. Years ago she had a falling out with her father, and lately she has taken to criticizing him harshly, in public. She calls him a “tyrant.”

Her attitude toward her father has landed Fernandez in the same predicament faced by many Cubans who have run afoul of the Communist government. Her applications to travel abroad have been turned down, including a request in 1986 to accompany her Mexican husband to Mexico. The marriage fell apart when he finally returned to Mexico alone.

Last year the government denied her a visa to visit friends in Spain, even though she says she does not want to defect.

Fernandez, a 36-year-old former model, said she has not spoken to her father in years. Her main memory of him is from her childhood, in the years after Castro’s 1959 revolution. He would visit the apartment in Havana where she lived with her mother, a legendary society beauty named Natalia Revuelta who was Castro’s paramour in the 1950s and ‘60s.

As a teen-ager, the daughter repaid Castro’s scant attentions by refusing to use his surname. Castro has never publicly acknowledged her as his daughter.

The bitterness continues. When a recent American visitor brought her a well-known biography of Castro, she put it aside. “I didn’t even read it,” she said. “That’s the last thing that interests me.”

Fernandez lives in a second-story walk-up apartment with her 14-year-old daughter, who is a promising dancer. The apartment is cramped, no better than most housing in Havana. She has no job and no special privileges.

She sees little prospect of change in the one-party Communist system that her father defends with the slogan “Socialism or Death.”

“The dissidents don’t matter--no one knows who they are,” she said. “They spend all their time plotting, then the police come and tear their houses apart and haul them in for interrogation and that’s that. That’s how life is for them.”

In spite of the unraveling of communism around the globe, fundamental change in Cuba could take another seven or 10 years, she said. “It’s just impossible. . . . Nothing is permitted.”