A '50s Affair: Fidel and Naty
A socialite's love letters helped sustain Castro's revolution
HAVANA--Back when he was a beardless young lawyer, Fidel Castro and his conspirators gathered night after night in a columned mansion in Havana's leafy Vedado section to plot the first attack of the Cuban revolution. The year was 1953, and the house was the home of Natalia Revuelta, a green-eyed socialite, and her husband, a well-to-do physician. Opposition to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista was growing even among the upper middle class, but Naty, as Natalia was known in Havana society, went further. Drawn to Castro and inspired by his crusade for social reform, she gave him a key to her home so he might, if necessary, have a haven. Then, to finance the rebels' first assault on a government Army barracks in Santiago, she emptied her bank account and pawned her emerald earrings, gold bracelets, sapphires, and diamonds.
The recent publication of love letters that Naty Revuelta and Fidel Castro once swapped is lifting the shroud that for four decades has cloaked Castro's private life. Their love affair is long over, but Revuelta's story provides a glimpse of the young man whose charisma and ambition swept up much of Cuba. Forty years ago this month, delirious crowds cheered Castro and his rebel band for overthrowing an army 10 times bigger. Many Cubans would consider Castro's turn toward Marxism a betrayal of the revolution. But their ranks do not include Revuelta.
"He was the kind of person who couldn't be ignored. If he was in a room, people paid attention to him," Revuelta recalls. "I too had a certain charm of my own." That is readily confirmed by a glance at the '50s-era portrait of her in her hallway, plus photos of her modeling fashions at charity benefits and enveloped in jewels for a Hotel Nacional ball.
"Loving friendship." As much as she savored the social whirl of the 1950s, with its parties at the Biltmore Yacht Club and tournaments at the Vedado Tennis Club, the young wife and mother was also concerned about Cuba's brewing corruption, repression, and poverty. What she and Castro had, she says, was "a loving friendship: We had common goals, common interests, common tastes." Now 72, she reads a yellowed, '50s treatise calling for social justice, political liberties, and economic independence. "I've never given up those ideas," she says.
At dawn on July 26, 1953, when Castro and his rebels attacked Batista's troops in Santiago, Revuelta broke the news to journalists and political allies. The assault failed, and Castro was captured and imprisoned on the Isle of Pines. To let him know she was safe, she sent a book with her picture inside. For almost two years while he was in jail, they exchanged passionate letters about literature, philosophy, and love. She sent him works of Dostoevsky, Freud, and Hugo and a U.S. history, then swapped mail discussing their readings.
Her letters brought the outside world to him. "I put sand from the beach in an envelope. I sent him programs from a concert; I got the director to sign the program. I sent him photographs of a Greek folk-dance performance. With his Greek nose, the dancers reminded me of him. I wrote, 'You were there. I saw you dancing.' "
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