Fidel Castro’s Daughter Gets U.S. Asylum : Defection: Longtime critic of the Cuban dictator flees island. She is now in Atlanta.

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s daughter, Alina Fernandez Revuelta, has fled the Communist-ruled island and been granted asylum in the United States, the State Department said Wednesday.

Fernandez, a former model now in her late 30s, has long sought to defect and for decades has been a critic of Castro--whom she has called a “tyrant.” But Cuban authorities refused to permit her to leave the island.

She left behind a teen-age daughter.

State Department press officer Julie Reside said that Fernandez arrived in the Spanish capital of Madrid on Monday, where she applied for asylum at the U.S. Embassy. Reside said she arrived in Atlanta on Tuesday and is still there.

Fernandez will hold a news conference today in Columbus, Ga., at the home of Elena Amos, a Georgia woman who has assisted other Cuban defectors.

“This event provides one more sad illustration of the lack of freedom and lack of hope which pervades Cuba today,” Reside said.

Fernandez has long complained about Cuba’s restrictions on personal liberty.

In newspaper interviews in recent years, she expressed despair that she would ever be allowed to emigrate. She said she had not been allowed to leave Cuba since, at age 8, she accompanied her mother to Paris.

In a 1992 interview, she said: “What do I think about Cuba’s socialism? I used to believe in it when I was very little. But now, Cuban socialism is a dead-end street. In my mind, I associate it with economic collapse, with food shortages.”

Castro, who prizes his privacy, has never publicly acknowledged or repudiated Fernandez’s claim to be his daughter.

Nevertheless, his relationship with Fernandez’s mother, Natila Revuelta, is considered an “open secret” in Havana. She remains a supporter of Castro and his government.

It is unclear how many children Castro has. Castro acknowledges only Fidelito, born in the late 1940s to his former wife, Mirta.

Reside said Fernandez was admitted to the United States under an immigration procedure known as “parole.” She will be eligible for permanent resident status after a year.

“It is up to Ms. Fernandez to decide if she will try to get her daughter out of Cuba,” Reside said.

The defection was greeted with glee by anti-Castro members of Congress.

“Those in the United States who continue to believe that there should be an accommodation with Castro should listen to his own family,” said Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.). “There can be no accommodating a ruthless despot who has unjustifiably repressed his entire population, including his own family members.”

Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a staunch anti-Communist whose family fled Cuba after Castro’s revolution, said in a Miami television interview that the defection “shows the extent of the (anti-Castro) consensus.”

He praised Fernandez for “a brave position for years of denunciation of barbarity of human rights” in Cuba.

Fernandez is not the first member of the Cuban leader’s family to defect. Castro’s sister Juanita defected in 1965 and lives in Miami. She now calls her brother a traitor.

Another sister moved to Mexico later. But four other siblings remain loyal to the regime.

Castro’s brother Raul is the country’s defense minister and is generally believed to be the second-most-powerful man in Cuba.

In Havana, Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina Gonzalez said he has no details on Fernandez’s defection, Reuters news agency reported. But he said he did not consider her case to be an exceptional one because “I think that at times like this many people have defected because the situation of the country is difficult.”