Miami
As with many different Cubans of their 70s, Alina Fernández’s first reminiscence of Fidel Castro was watching his interminable speeches on tv.
“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 NCS interview Monday. “That’s the way I grew up.”
Yet few different members of her technology share the second a part of her reminiscence, when Castro — whom she later realized was her father — would swing by the household residence in the night to go to his former mistress, her mom.
Now, Castro’s daughter — a longtime anti-communist who lives in exile in Miami — fears that her adoptive nation could also be underestimating the authorities on the island she fled, as the Trump administration pushes for regime change in Cuba. US navy motion to topple the government, she warns, would deliver huge ache.
“This is not the first time (Cubans have been) told that an invasion is coming immediately,” she instructed NCS. “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 US navy assault on Cuba will end in a “bloodbath.” Fernández agrees.
“We know that these regimes put civilians on the front line,” she stated. “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.”
Fernández stated she “officially” discovered her true parentage when she was 10. Yet when her mom knowledgeable her that the frequent, nocturnal visitor of their Havana residence was her father, “it wasn’t a big surprise.”
“He was an assiduous visitor,” she recalled.
What did shock Fernández was that everybody appeared to know earlier than she did.
“I told my best friend, and she told me that she already knew,” Fernández stated. “Then, along with that news came a sense of betrayal — a feeling of having been lied to.”
She stated she doesn’t see what her mom noticed in her absentee dad, whom she doesn’t imagine favored her mom almost as a lot as her mom cherished him. The two met throughout the revolution in the Fifties and commenced an affair. Fernández was born in 1956, three years earlier than her father descended from the Sierra Maestra mountains and toppled the Fulgencio Batista regime.
“She passed speaking about him,” she stated of her mom, who died in 2015, a 12 months earlier than Fidel Castro’s dying. “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 really feel particular. She stated she doesn’t even actually really feel like Fidel Castro’s daughter. It could also be ironic, but she has discovered Miami, amongst the anti-Castro milieu, to be the “only comfortable place” she has ever recognized. She lives in a small duplex adorned with colourful wallpaper and eye-popping folks artwork.
“I feel like every other Cuban,” Fernández stated. “Like a woman, an exile, also a victim.”
Fernández doesn’t share her late father’s politics. She stated she grew absolutely disillusioned with the Cuban authorities in the late Nineteen Eighties and commenced criticizing the regime publicly. She fled the nation in 1993 after deciding that it is probably not simple for her daughter to develop up raised by an enemy of the state.
“I have always lived according to my truth,” she stated. “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.”
Fernández has stored a detailed eye on Cuba since she left. She thinks that the US authorities’s extra bellicose rhetoric against the Cuban authorities recently has much less to do with US President Donald Trump and extra 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 stated.
She additionally thinks that the reported, imminent criminal indictment of her uncle, Raúl Castro, is a fig leaf for additional US motion against the Cuban authorities, although she doesn’t “dare speculate” what that may appear to be.
“Raúl Castro is almost 95 years old,” she stated. “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 stated he thinks Cuba will fold simply underneath US strain, Fernández warns against underestimating the Cuban authorities, or its capability to answer 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.”