Castro’s daughter: America not to blame for Cuba’s woes

[Jimmy2]

CHESTER — Love child turned critic, a daughter of Fidel Castro told a Widener University audience Monday that lifting 50-year embargoes imposed by the United States would do little to help suffering people in Cuba.

“I believe the government is going to control everything as it has always done,” Alina Fernandez said of the homeland she fled in 1993 to provide a better life for her own daughter.

Though Cubans are quick to blame America for their plight, she suggested that continuing hardships are more a result of the fall of communist Russia in the early 1990s.

“Cuba became a harder place to live in because they were subsidized by the Russians,” she said.

Fernandez was speaking during the question-and-answer portion following her 45-minute, first-person account of life both in and out of Cuba. She diplomatically shifted from controversy when a man in the audience asked her opinion about “a president trying to take control” of banks and car dealerships — an obvious reference to President Obama.

“To think Obama could be a communist,” she quipped without missing a beat, drawing loud applause inside the packed Alumni Auditorium.

Fernandez opened her talk by asking for patience with her “Spanglish.’ She proceeded to offer snapshots on Cuban society and glimpses of rebel politics. She traced her days as a child who played on the floor with the frequent night visitor — Castro — to fleeing Cuba disguised as a Spanish tourist.

“In my case, everything began with something called revolution ... the Cuban one is the main reason for everything in my personal life story,” she said. “I come from a country in which the revolution is endless ... But the Cuban revolution is a legend, that is why we are here.”

Fernandez described her mother as “a force of nature ... a toast of Havana,” a beautiful, voluptuous blonde who “if she looked at a man, it didn’t take long for a man to kneel down before her.”

Both her mother and Castro were married to other people when their love affair began. Castro was in jail when a letter to his mistress was instead delivered to his wife.

Castro found himself both “free from prison and free from marriage,” Fernandez said.

She described Castro as “enormously charismatic” and a true “political animal,” but whose presence would make her mother light up.

“Only grandma called him the devil,” she said.

Fernandez released her memoir, Castro’s Daughter: An Exile’s Memoir of Cuba, in 1998.