Castro's rebellious daughter leads vitriolic radio attack from Miami

As Cuba's communist regime enters its twilight years, a family feud is fuelling democratic hopes

A savage new voice of opposition to Fidel Castro's regime is being beamed into Havana from a Miami radio station. The owner of that voice is Fidel's daughter.

Over the past month Alina Fernández Revuelta has become the latest talk-show host to hit the cacophonous airwaves in Cuba's fin-de-communist epoch.

'Buenas noches, amigos' - good evening, friends - she kicks off the show, entitled Simplemente Alina - Simply Alina. The programme makes no mention of who she is - 'people just know,' she says.

Of all the dissidents hovering over Castro's final years, Fernández may be among the most damaging. 'I do not refer to Mr Castro as my father,' says Fernández. 'I do not love him, I am his exile.'

Fernández's opposition to her father's regime is the stuff of heated family drama. It is also the story of the child who came to hate her father and everything that he represented, and defected to ally herself with his bitterest enemies, a group that has for years plotted in Miami for his downfall.

Disgusted with Cuban politics as a young woman, Fernández joined the opposition, only to find herself persecuted by her father's government. She defected to the US in 1993, travelling on a false Spanish passport and heavily disguised via Madrid, before introducing herself to the Cuban exile opposition - literally, across a table in its unofficial headquarters, the Versailles restaurant in Miami's Little Havana.

In 1997 Fernández published a memoir describing visits by her father engulfed in 'stinking' cigar smoke and his omnipotent presence in her early life. She recalls one box-wrapped gift of a doll for her to play with: of himself, with full beard, military fatigues, red star epaulettes, cap and boots.

The emergence of the soft-spoken Fernández as the new star of Cuba's exile radio comes hot on the heels of the revelation last year that Castro had another love-child, Francisca Pupo, also living in Miami.

Fernández was also born illegitimately, the fruit of a summer fling between Castro and a Havana socialite, Natalya Revuelta, while both were married. She communicates only by letter with her mother and is harshly denounced by her aunt - Castro's sister, Juanita Castro, who also lives in Miami.

'I would like to be in touch with family members' in Havana, Fernández says, 'but I just can't do it, I'm the enemy. It's ridiculous, but that's the way it is.'

In the dynastic politics of Cuba, the personal is political. When Castro dies, his brother Raúl, Defence Minister, is slated to take over.

Fernández is of a younger generation, and at 46 is unhappy with the way her father and his relations have kept power. She is 'doing whatever I can to spread the reality of life in Cuba'.

Last week Fernández - whose show began six weeks ago - led a debate on how Mexico handed back to the authorities a bus-load of asylum-seekers who poured into its Havana embassy. 'We cannot forget what happens to Cubans who have been returned to the regime,' she said.

Another show gathered together survivors of the infamous Mariel boatlift in 1980 of 125,000 refugees, her guests recounting their ordeals at home and at sea. She has even invited members of the hated right-wing Cuban American National Federation on to her programme.

Her hope for change, she says, lies in 'democracy, not charismatic leaders, because some dynamic leaders become dictators', she says. 'Gandhi was a good leader. Nehru was a good leader. But Fidel has ruined his own country. My generation has been the victim of the manipulation of Cuban history.'

The station's programming director, Chuny Montaner, said: 'She has a soft approach, but that doesn't mean she's soft at all.'

A recent interview shows Fernández to be a nervous, complex woman, prone to biting her nails. Other accounts detail four marriages and a battle with anorexia.

I'm sorry that you were personally offended by the fact that the Cuban flag was waved, or that you were blamed for being a gringo (although I think it was more because you are a blatant bigot based on your statements).

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Oh, am I? Well, if being for reduced immigration and not wanting the part of the country I live in to turn into another banana republic makes me a "bigot," then so be it. I'm certainly no more of a "bigot" than, say, a National Review editor who calls for all Americans of Chinese descent to be placed into internment camps, under the ridiculous pretense that every single one of them might be commie fifth columnists, or vile neo-cons like William Kristol who believe all Arabs (both Muslim and non-Muslim alike) are evil and should be nuked off the face off the earth. Similar views are shared by many people here at Free Republic. So tell me, who's the real bigot here, hmm? It's ironic seeing certain Republicans playing the race card just like any other typical Democrat when it suits them.

And I most certainly did NOT make my feelings on the Cuban immigration issue known to them, they harassed me first. Besides, doing so is not a safe thing to do here where I live.

By the way, I didn't feel "threatened" by this "large group of brown people" at all. In fact, a couple days after ABC aired that "interview" Diane Sawyer did with Elian Gonzalez, I met a group of Cuban Americans who were protesting outside our city's ABC affiliate. It turns out they were a dissenting faction of my city's Cuban exile community who wanted Elian Gonzalez to go back with his father and they thought Sawyer's actions were beyond reproach. I shook their hands and said I totally agreed with them, then I took a flier.
So as you can see, I don't hate *all* the "brown people" you speak of, and certainly not all Cubans or Hispanics. And seeing how my own father was a Peruvian citizen for the first three years of his life, I think it's pretty low for you to accuse me of all people of anti-Hispanic bigotry, although I've seen quite a lot of Cubans who are guilty of it themselves, mainly expressing bigoted views against Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. But hey, I'm sure you'll just give some paranoid, knee-jerk response that the people I met were really part of some covert disinformation campaign and Castro planted them there for that purpose, so what it does matter what I think, right?

Nice straw man argument Rick, but I didn't see you make any statements about being for reduced immigration or any such thing.

What I read was a blanket statement made about a select group of people based on personal dislike. There was nothing you stated that mentioned that you disagreed with a few Cubans about Elian until now. You basically grouped them all as mental defects sent over on rafts to leach off of the government teat while they wave Cuban flags and harrass gringos. What nerve!

As for your comparisons based on political pundits who want internment camps for the Chinese and to nuke the Arabs, there is none. We are not at war with Cuba nor are there Cubans flying airplanes into buildings on US soil for misguided religious purpose. Again, nice try.

Please re-read the first post you wrote that I responded to, and see if some of that language doesn't sound a bit like those Kristols and National Review editors you denounce.

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