Fidel Castro’s daughter has no love for the Cuban regime but warns against underestimating it

Alina Fernández holds a picture of her and her mother. (CNN via CNN Newsource)

MIAMI — As with many other Cubans in their 70s, Alina Fernández’s first memory of Fidel Castro was watching his interminable speeches on television.

“My generation used to pray in front of the TV for him to finish, so we would be able to watch our cartoons,” she recalled in a CNN interview Monday. “That’s the way I grew up.”

Yet few other members of her generation share the second part of her memory, when Castro — whom she later learned was her father — would swing by the family home in the evening to visit his former mistress, her mother.

Now, Castro’s daughter — a longtime anti-communist who lives in exile in Miami — fears that her adoptive country may be underestimating the government on the island she fled, as the Trump administration pushes for regime change in Cuba. U.S. military action to topple the government, she warns, would bring enormous pain.

“This is not the first time (Cubans have been) told that an invasion is coming immediately,” she told CNN. “We’ve been under invasion for the last 67 years, or the state of an invasion. I’m sure they are prepared. I don’t know how they are going to respond.”

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has warned that any U.S. military assault on Cuba will result in a “bloodbath.” Fernández agrees.

“We know that these regimes put civilians on the front line,” she said. “When there’s a situation involving military or political violence, so to speak, that is very worrying. That’s the feeling I have — that my joy will not be matched by the way the solution comes about. It’s going to be very painful.”

Growing up Castro

Fernández said she “officially” found out her true parentage when she was 10. Yet when her mother informed her that the frequent, nocturnal guest in their Havana home was her father, “it wasn’t a big surprise.”

“He was an assiduous visitor,” she recalled.

What did surprise Fernández was that everyone seemed to know before she did.

“I told my best friend, and she told me that she already knew,” Fernández said. “Then, along with that news came a sense of betrayal — a feeling of having been lied to.”

She said she doesn’t see what her mother saw in her absentee dad, whom she doesn’t believe liked her mother nearly as much as her mother loved him. The two met during the revolution in the 1950s and began an affair. Fernández was born in 1956, three years before her father descended from the Sierra Maestra mountains and toppled the Fulgencio Batista regime.

“She passed speaking about him,” she said of her mother, who died in 2015, a year before Fidel Castro’s death. “She lasted in love for as long as she lived, which for me is very difficult to understand.”

As she sat in her tiny kitchen in Miami, Fernández insisted that she doesn’t feel special. She said she doesn’t even really feel like Fidel Castro’s daughter. It may be ironic, but she has found Miami, among the anti-Castro milieu, to be the “only comfortable place” she has ever known. She lives in a small duplex decorated with colourful wallpaper and eye-popping folk art.

“I feel like every other Cuban,” Fernández said. “Like a woman, an exile, also a victim.”

Fernández does not share her late father’s politics. She said she grew fully disillusioned with the Cuban government in the late 1980s and began criticizing the regime publicly. She fled the country in 1993 after deciding that it may not be easy for her daughter to grow up raised by an enemy of the state.

“I have always lived according to my truth,” she said. “The moment I made the decision to leave Cuba to get my daughter out was because I realized — someone pointed it out to me — that I was subjecting my daughter to the same things that were done to me.”

“My mother, for being very revolutionary, and I, for being very counterrevolutionary.”

“There are times when you notice things as a child and times when you don’t,” she recalled. “But from a very young age I could see that that glory and those speeches did not match reality.”

Raúl Castro in the crosshairs

Fernández has kept a close eye on Cuba since she left. She thinks that the U.S. government’s more bellicose rhetoric against the Cuban government lately has less to do with U.S. President Donald Trump and more to do with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American.

“I believe it owes far more to the presence of Marco Rubio in the government than to President Donald Trump himself,” she said.

She also thinks that the reported, imminent criminal indictment of her uncle, Raúl Castro, is a fig leaf for further U.S. action against the Cuban government, though she doesn’t “dare speculate” what that might look like.

“Raúl Castro is almost 95 years old,” she said. “I don’t see much logic on what’s going on, except that this is part of the strategy.”

“In personal dealings, Raúl Castro was completely different from his brother,” she remembered. “He was a family person.”

Though Trump has said he thinks Cuba will fold easily under U.S. pressure, Fernández warns against underestimating the Cuban government, or its ability to respond to threats.

“It’s very hard for people to give up,” Fernández says. “It’s very hard for countries to admit they lost the war. … I think they lost this war against imperialism a long time ago.”

By Max Saltman, Carolina Peguero, Abel Alvarado, CNN