At the age of ten, Alina Fernández Revuelta discovered that the man who ruled Cuba was her biological father, and from that moment on, her life became a silent condemnation that she could only break by crossing the ocean disguised as someone else.
The daughter of the extramarital romance between Fidel Castro and the Havana socialite Natalia Revuelta—both married to other people in the fifties—, Alina grew up believing that her father was the cardiologist Orlando Fernández Ferrer. When her mother revealed the truth, the weight was not only emotional: her stepfather and sister had already left Cuba, and since then, she had to state in every official document that she had to feel that she had traitors in the family, she recalled in an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times published this week.
Political awakening came even before knowing that secret. At just nine or ten years old, Alina was sent to what was called "voluntary work." "I went to tell my mother that I didn't want to go to voluntary work. She told me, 'No, you have to go,'" she recalled. The lesson was immediate: I discovered that in Cuba, voluntary meant mandatory. She added, "I realized very quickly that they were lying to me."
The definitive turning point came in 1980, during the Mariel Boatlift. Around 125,000 people fled Cuba between April and October of that year, and the regime organized mobs to beat, humiliate, and in some cases, eliminate those who were leaving. "People were encouraged to beat these individuals, to shout at them, to humiliate them, and in some cases, to kill them because they wanted to leave the country. For me, it was a very, very hard turning point to see people being treated this way officially. It shattered me," he said.
In the late eighties, she became a public dissident, which put an additional burden on her teenage daughter during the Special Period: years without electricity, food, transportation, and with schools closed. "I was on the dissident side, so it was a double burden for her. She was a teenager, and we had what we called at that time the Special Period," she explained. "Some say it's worse now, but in the nineties it was terrible, terrible."
In 1993, at the age of 37, Alina escaped from Havana using the passport of a Spanish tourist who agreed to help her. She flew to Madrid, obtained political asylum at the United States Embassy, and arrived in Atlanta on December 21 of that year. She left behind her 16-year-old daughter. A few days later, Reverend Jesse Jackson visited Cuba and secured permission from Castro for his granddaughter to leave the country, which Alina described as "divine intervention." Mother and daughter reunited in the United States shortly after.
From Miami, Alina has been in exile for over thirty years, living modestly like many other Cubans in exile. She has no contact with her family on the island, including her uncle Raúl Castro, who is 94 years old. "One of the greatest tragedies of 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 very beginning," she stated.
Now, almost seventy years later, she breaks years of media silence motivated by the most severe crisis Cuba has faced in decades and by the premiere of the documentary Revolution's Daughter on April 10 at the Miami Film Festival, in which she participates as executive producer. "I have kept silent for many, many years," she acknowledged. "I felt I had already said everything I needed to say."
However, he warns that change from within Cuba is unlikely in the short term: the communist system is deeply entrenched and power is highly centralized. "For me, it has been time for regime change since the late eighties," he said. "When Fidel Castro died, we all thought his regime had come to an end, because it was a very personalist, paternalistic, and narcissistic government. But it survived."
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