A '50s Affair: Fidel and Naty
A socialite's love letters helped sustain Castro's revolution
"Every pleasure." The epistolary romance flowered, emotional vows alternating with political lessons from Castro, who was busy refining his ideas. "I want to share with you every pleasure that I find in a book," Castro wrote. "Doesn't this mean that you are my intimate companion and that I am never alone?" In solitary confinement, he chided her for not writing: "I'm going to count the days that you don't write to me." The sustenance the letters provided was mutual. With her husband immersed in his work, Revuelta was often alone. "Despite the distance," she told Castro, "you are very good company."
"There is a type of honey that never satiates," he wrote her on Jan. 31, 1954. "That is the secret of your letters. I have been meaning to ask you for several days now to stop using the typewriter once in a while and write longhand . . . I love your handwriting, so delicate, feminine, unmistakable." Nine days later, he wrote again: "I am on fire. Write to me, for I cannot be without your letters. I love you very much."
In May 1954, Castro's letters to Revuelta and to his wife, Mirta, were mysteriously switched, creating a scandal and leading Mirta to seek a divorce two months later. (The prison director, Revuelta is convinced, maliciously arranged the mix-up.) When Castro was freed the next year, he spent two months in Havana before resuming his guerrilla work, first from exile in Mexico, then from the mountains of Cuba. It was in that brief Havana interlude that he and Revuelta were lovers, and a daughter, Alina, was conceived.
"I wanted to have a part of him with me always," Revuelta recalls. "I was convinced that I would never see him again, that he would most likely be killed." Castro at that time entrusted her with the letters she had written him, some of which now appear in two books, Castro's Daughter by Alina and Havana Dreams, Wendy Gimbel's account of four generations of Revueltas.
In 1959, the victorious Castro visited Revuelta's home, eager to see her and their daughter, whose paternity was not public knowledge. Revuelta's husband suspected the affair, got a divorce, and left for exile in the United States, taking along an older daughter. But Naty Revuelta would have no future with Castro: He soon became a distant figure. His sporadic visits only caused young Alina to feel neglected and unacknowledged, and she later suffered from eating disorders and depression.
Still, Revuelta kept working at whatever revolutionary tasks Castro gave her, including a trip to Paris to study the French chemical industry. But she never considered leaving Cuba for good. "I can't think of living away from my country just because I was forgotten by him." To get over Castro, she acknowledges, "took a lot of effort and catharsis . . . It was difficult with him on the television, in the press, everywhere, every day." She focused on her jobs in various government ministries.
"I'm alone but not lonely," Revuelta insists. Indeed, she has many friends and ranks as a quasi celebrity. Now retired, she is cataloguing the work of Cuban artists and plans a bibliography of Jose Marti, Cuba's independence hero and revered poet-author. Later, she might write her own story, but the remaining letters she and Castro exchanged, she vows, will not be published until he dies. "I'm a very private person, and I respect his privacy. I never wanted the affair to be public." When Alina was 10, Revuelta told her Castro was her father. The mother had feared that Alina might unwittingly become involved with one of Castro's seven sons by other women.
Unlike her mother, Alina had no desire to remain in a deteriorating country. In 1993, she escaped by posing as a tourist with a falsified Spanish passport. Now in exile in Madrid, Alina frequently denounces her father. But Revuelta refuses to criticize him. "Not even," she says, quoting her beloved Marti, "with the petal of a rose."
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