Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

8. CUBA’S CASANOVA

Cuba is a sexy place. Forget baseball, sex is Cuba’s national sport. It is the only real escape from the hardships of daily life. Promiscuity and extramarital sex are rife. Partners are swapped so often that few bother to get married. In 1989, 61.2 per cent of babies were born out of wedlock and there are over 160,000 abortions a year, a third of them performed on teenagers.

Posadas — so-called “lovers” hotels — are everywhere. For five pesos, the equivalent of fifty U.S. cents, you get three hours of privacy. When your time is up, the phone rings and someone on the other end says: “Turno.”

Prostitution is widespread, overt and mostly amateur. Women will go to bed for a bottle of shampoo or a new pair of jeans. Businessmen in their sixties can be seen with beautiful brown-skinned girls young enough to be their granddaughters.

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.

After Isabel left, he stopped washing. His clothes were no longer kept clean and neat. He did not go out. All he did all day was to aim his favourite rifle at the TV antenna across the way.

Castro wrote to Mirta, asking her to let him see sevenyear-old Fidelito. He promised to return him to her custody within two weeks, but he had no intention of doing that. In a letter to the Mexican newspapers he said that he could not return Fidelito “into the hands of my most ferocious enemies and detractors, who… outraged my home and sacrificed it to the bloody tyranny which they serve”. When Castro and his men set off on their antiquated wooden yacht, the Granma, on their historic mission to liberate Cuba, Mirta came to Mexico and snatched Fidelito back.

In December 1956, Castro landed his eighty-two-man expeditionary force on Cuba. They were annihilated in their first attack. The few survivors scattered and Castro took refuge in the Sierra Maestra. From there he got word to Nati, asking her to join him in the mountains. She, too, could become the “First Lady of the Cuban Revolution”. She refused, saying that she could not leave their baby.

One woman who did join him was Celia Sanchez. She was the daughter of a doctor from Manzanillo who had helped coordinate the underground movement in eastern Cuba. She came to the Sierra Maestra to organize the camp and control the millions of dollars the guerrillas had collected in “revolutionary taxes”. She also shared Castro’s bed. Their letters are full of affection though none of the passion that he displayed in his correspondence with Nati. Their time in the Sierra Maestra together was the beginning of a relationship that lasted for twenty years. After the revolution, she took the apartment below his in Havana, but Castro would be found, as often as not, sprawled out on her bed. If anyone deserves to be called “First Lady of the Cuban Revolution”, it is Celia Sanchez.

After two years in the mountains and a ceaseless guerrilla campaign, Castro successfully launched a full-scale offensive against Batista’s police state. He celebrated by having an affair with Gloria Gaitan, known as “the Dark Rose of Bogota”. She was the beautiful daughter of the murdered Bolivian revolutionary leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Castro had first met her in Bogota in 1948. The affair continued for several years, even though she was married to a university professor. One day Castro asked: “What do you do in bed with this Greek philosopher who is your husband?”

“He is a very intelligent man,” she replied.

“Obviously, but if Karl Marx were a woman, I would not marry him.”

When Castro came to power, Nati’s husband left for exile in the United States. Castro would visit Nati and as he now openly admitted — his daughter in their mansion, or stay with them in their beach house in Varadero. He gave Nati a number of government jobs and a veteran’s pension. When the relationship cooled, he sent mother and daughter to Paris to work in the Cuban embassy there. They returned two years later.

Castro continued seeing Alina, though they began to fall out. She married four times and he did not approve of her choice of husbands. Alina wanted to leave Cuba and pursue a career elsewhere, but the authorities would not give her an exit visa.

In power, Castro also made things difficult for Mirta, who had married a Spaniard, Emilio Nufiez. One night in Varadero, he came across them eating in a steakhouse. He ordered the owner to throw them out. He, bravely, refused. Soon after, Mirta and her second husband left to live in Madrid. Thirty years later, there are still some in the Castro family who maintain that Mirta was the only woman he ever really loved.

Soon after the revolution, Castro met a young German woman called Marita Lorenz. She was seventeen and had black hair and green eyes. They met when the M.S. Berlin, the ship her father captained, pulled into Havana harbour while Castro was on board the Granma which he was renovating. Castro, always on the look-out for chances to win over foreigners, contacted the Berlin. Marita’s father invited him on board for dinner.

Castro could hardly take his eyes off the beautiful young Marita. Before dinner, she showed him around the ship. In the elevator down to the engine room, a wave buffered the ship and she fell against him. He took the opportunity to kiss her.

Over dinner, she was impressed by his stories of derring-do in the Sierra Maestra. At one point, her mother recalled, he spread his arms like a messiah, looked to the heavens and said: “I am Cuba.”

Castro suggested that Marita stay in Havana and work for him, but her father said she had to go to school in New York. Castro made her promise she would come back.

Back in New York, Marita got a phone call from Castro. He said he missed her. Her parents were away for a month and she agreed to go down to Cuba for a week. The next day, three officials from the Cuban embassy turned up and took her to Idlewild — now JFK airport. Once in Havana, she was taken directly to the Hilton Hotel, Suite 2406-8. After an hour, Castro arrived. He put his cigar in the ashtray and grabbed her. He hugged her and kissed her and made her promise that she would stay with him forever.

“Always, always,” the young Marita sighed.

They spent the rest of the day together, making love. She complained that she never saw him completely naked — even when he took all his clothes off, he still wore his beard.

Although Marita was quickly accepted by Celia Sanchez and Castro’s personal guards, she soon grew lonely because she did not speak Spanish very well. He was busy and left her alone for long periods. One night he came in at 4 a.m. with some tropical orchids. She was crying and threatened to leave.

“Don’t go, my love,” he said. “We will get married now.”

Then he knelt on the bed in front of her, made the sign of the cross and said: ” Do you, my Alemanita, Marita Lorenz, want to marry Fidel Castro?”

She said: “I do marry you, Fidel Castro, forever.”

They laughed and hugged, and Castro said that, in Cuba, he was the law, he was God. So they were now married legally and in the eyes of the Lord. He said that he knew she was lonely and that, from now on, as his wife, he would take her with him, everywhere. A week later he bought her a diamond engagement ring engraved: “3/59, de Fidel para Marita, Siempre.”

Marita went to work for him as a secretary and interpreter. She accompanied him on his fifteen-day visit to the United States but soon found that she was left behind in hotel rooms while he took care of business. Marita was already pregnant and her nerves were frayed. She became jealous when she noticed the effect his charisma was having on attractive female journalists and others. He was bombarded with letters, notes and messages from women who wanted to meet him. One of them was from Ava Gardner.

According to Marita, Ava Gardner turned up at their hotel, drunk. She forced her way into the lift with them, called her “the little bitch who’s hiding Fidel” and slapped her. Captain Pupo, one of Castro’s guards, pulled his gun.

Later that night, Castro told her that he had fixed Ava Gardner up with one of his aides, who had orders to satisfy her, compliments of the Republic of Cuba.

Back in Havana, the pregnant Marita became ill. An hallucinogenic drug had been slipped to her by an unknown source. In her delirious state, she remembered her stomach suddenly being flat. The baby had gone and, somewhere in the distance, she heard a baby crying.

Marita had a fever. She was suffering from blood poisoning and the doctors could not stop her bleeding from the womb. Castro gave orders for her to be taken back to America where she would be able to get the best medical attention and her own doctor would be on hand.

Back in New York, Marita was taken into protective custody. She was told that her baby had been born prematurely and died. Castro had killed it, she was told repeatedly.

Confidential magazine broke the story. The front page headline read: “An American Mother’s Terrifying Story — “Fidel Castro Raped My Teenage Daughter”.” A smaller headline ran: “Lured to Cuba by Castro, Marita Lorenz, 18, was kidnapped, raped and then cruelly aborted.”

The story went on to tell the story of the “rape” in melodramatic detail, right down to Castro tearing the crucifix from the naked girl’s neck before he had his evil way with her. Meanwhile, Marita’s mother filed a suit against the Cuban government for $11 million. As Marita overcame her trauma, she realized that this was all black propaganda designed to discredit Castro who, having declared himself a Communist, had become a public enemy in the United States.

She was allowed out of hospital, but the FBI kept her under guard. Back home, she received a telegram from Castro, asking her to call him. She went out to a pay phone. When she got through, Castro told her that the child was alive. At that point her FBI bodyguard grabbed the receiver and hung up.

A few weeks later, she received another telegram. This time she gave her bodyguard the slip — rather too easily she thought in retrospect — and went to use the pay phone again. This time she was shot at. Confidential magazine ran a story that Castro had sentenced her to death.

The CIA went to work on her. They managed to convince her that her life was in danger and eventually persuaded her to take part in a half-baked assassination attempt on Castro. They wanted her to poison him. On her way to Cuba she hid the poison capsules in ajar of Ponds cream, which partially dissolved them. When she arrived in Havana, she went straight to his suite in the Hilton. First, she checked it for stray blonde hairs. She found stacks of fan mail from lonely women who wanted to meet him. Then she checked the poison capsules, found that they were ruined and tried to flush them down the bidet.

When Castro arrived, they hugged. She asked for news of her baby, but he said he was tired. He lay on the bed and asked her if she had come to kill him. She said she had. He handed her his revolver, the one he had carried with him throughout the revolution.

She pointed it at him and pressed the release, removing the clip of .45 calibre bullets. He tensed, thinking she had retracted the hammer, ready to fire, but he made no attempt to get out of the way, or defend himself.

“It’s rusty,” Marita said. “It needs oiling.”

“Nobody can kill me, Marita,” he said. “Nobody.”

And he turned his back and went to sleep.

Next morning, they made love. He drank a Coke, without checking to see if she had put anything in it. In the bathroom, she found the remains of the poison capsules still floating in the bidet. She crushed them up and flushed them away, properly this time.

On her knees, she begged for news of her child. It was a boy, he said. He loved the child and she would only be able to see him if she lived with them on Cuba. This was impossible, Marita knew. If she stayed, the CIA would come after her too.

She left the $6,000 the CIA had given her in Castro’s room. When she flew back to Florida, her bosses were furious. Not only had she blown two chances to kill Castro — once with the poison, once with the gun — she had paid him $6,000. It was government money, too. On the other hand, they had proved he was vulnerable. They now knew they could get a potential assassin right to the target. Marita never returned to Cuba and never discovered the truth about her child.

This was not the end of Marita’s association with dictators. As part of her CIA duties, Marita went on to become the mistress of General Marcos Perez Jimenez, the failed dictator of Venezuela and sworn enemy of Castro. From his comfortable exile in Miami, he would phone Castro and taunt him about Marita. But soon after Marita gave birth to the General’s daughter, Monica, Jimenez was extradited back to Venezuela to stand trial.

Since Marita, Castro’s love life has been a series of one-night stands. His security guards were charged with finding him bed partners. He was not the most considerate of lovers — a dancer from the Tropicana complained that he read while he was making love to her; a French actress, that he smoked the whole time; another woman, that he never took his boots off.

A Cuban actress said: “You can’t imagine what a brute he is, what a selfish monster. He just pulled down his pants, and was quick.”

The most common complaint, though, was that he talked incessantly, on such romantic topics as the future of the revolution or agricultural reform.

Castro’s affairs are widely known about in Cuba. Those who he slept with could expect flowers on their birthdays and valuable gifts — a rare paella or a lobster, all despatched with coldhearted efficiency by Celia Sanchez, who was never very far from the leader.

Only one other women has occupied Castro for any length of time. She was another green-eyed, black-haired aristocrat, Dalia Soto Del Valle Jorge, known as “la mujer de Trinidad” — the woman from the city of” Trinidad. Her father, Enrique, was the owner of a large cigar factory and she worked as a secretary at the sugar workers” union, where Castro met her in 1962 or 1963. She had been primed for the affair by a fortune-teller who told her: “You will have the love of a great man.”

When she took up with him, her family considered her to be Castro’s prisoner and her father told friends that he had “lost a daughter”. But the affair endured and Dalia had five sons by Castro. All of them bear his middle name, Alejandro, and he sent them to be educated in the Soviet Union, along with his other, legitimate son, Fidelito.