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Alina Fernández Revuelta, biological daughter of Fidel Castro, broke her long media silence to demand an end to Castroism and stated that this change has been overdue for decades, in an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times published this Tuesday.
"For me, the time for a regime change has come since the late 1980s," Fernández stated. "When Fidel Castro died, we all thought his regime had come to an end because it was a very personalist, paternalistic... narcissistic government. But it survived."
The testimony of Fernández carries a symbolic weight that no regime propagandist can ignore: if the daughter of the founder of the revolution had to escape with a false passport and bear the stigma of having "traitors in the family" for years, no Cuban was safe from the system that Fidel built.
Fernández grew up within the revolutionary elite, but from the nine or ten years old, he began to understand the contradictions of the system. The first lesson came with the so-called "voluntary work."
"I discovered that in Cuba, 'voluntary' meant 'mandatory,'" he said. "I realized very soon that they were lying to me."
At that same age, she learned that Castro was her biological father. Her stepfather, the cardiologist Orlando Fernández Ferrer, left Cuba with her sister in the early 1960s, which forced her to state in all her school and official documents that she had traitors in her family.
"So I had to write on my school papers and on every official document, I had to feel like I had traitors in the family," he recalled.
She became a public dissident in the late 1980s, terrified of what might happen to her teenage daughter during the Special Period, which she described as "years of total misery" without electricity, food, or transportation.
In 1993, he fled using the passport of a Spanish tourist, leaving his daughter behind as he had no other option. He arrived in Atlanta on December 21 of that year after obtaining political asylum at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. Days later, Reverend Jesse Jackson visited Cuba and managed to persuade Castro to allow the departure of his granddaughter, which Fernández described as "divine intervention."
Today, he does not maintain contact with any family members, including his uncle Raúl Castro, who is 94 years old.
"One of the greatest tragedies in Cuba is that this madness divided families in the most dramatic way. If you didn’t think the same way, you became the enemy. It’s terrible. It has been this way from the beginning," he stated.
His statements come at a time of accelerated collapse. Following the capture of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces on January 3, shipments of Venezuelan oil to Cuba were interrupted, triggering one of the worst energy crises on the island in decades: blackouts of up to 30 hours a day, shortages of food and medicine, and massive protests with pot banging in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and other cities.
This debacle is not the result of external sanctions, but rather the predictable outcome of 67 years of mismanagement, absolute centralization of power, and a structural dependence on foreign subsidies that the regime itself never sought to overcome.
Fernández warns, however, that a significant change from within is unlikely in the short term: the protests with pots and pans won’t be enough to topple a deeply entrenched system.
The president Donald Trump was more straightforward on March 29: "It's a country that is failing, and they will be next. It will fail soon, and we will be there to help."
Fernández now participates as an executive producer in the "Revolution's Daughter" documentary, which premieres on April 10 in Miami, and with it, she raises her voice again after years of silence: "I felt like I had already said everything I needed to say."
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