miami —
Like many other Cubans in their 70s, Alina Fernandez’s first memory of Fidel Castro was watching his endless speeches on TV.
“My generation sat in front of the TV praying for him to finish so they could watch our cartoons,” she recalled in a CNN interview on Monday. “That’s how I grew up.”
But few other members of her generation share the latter part of her memories. Castro, who later turned out to be her father, passed by her parents’ home in the evening to visit her mother, a former mistress.
Now, Mr. Castro’s daughter, a longtime anti-communist living in exile in Miami, worries that as the Trump administration pushes for regime change in Cuba, his adopted country is underestimating the island’s government. She warns that US military action to overthrow the government will cause great suffering.
“This is not the first time (Cubans) have been told that an invasion is imminent,” he told CNN. “We’ve been invaded or under invasion for the last 67 years. I’m sure they’ll be prepared. I don’t know how they’ll react.”
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has warned that a U.S. attack on Cuba will result in “bloodshed.” Fernandez agrees.
“We know these administrations are putting civilians on the front lines,” she said. “When you have a situation that involves military or political violence, so to speak, it’s very worrying. That’s how I feel. My joy will be disproportionate to how the solution is realized. It’s going to be very painful.”
Fernandez said he “officially” learned his true parentage when he was 10 years old. But when her mother informed her that her father was a frequent visitor to their Havana home, “it wasn’t a big surprise,” she said.
“He was an avid visitor,” she recalls.
What surprised Fernandez was that everyone seemed to know before she did.
“I told my best friend and she said she already knew,” Fernandez said. “Then, with that news came a sense of betrayal, a sense of being deceived.”
She said she could not see what her mother saw in her absentee father, and said she believed that her father did not love her mother as much as her mother loved her father. The two met during the revolution in the 1950s and began an affair. Fernández was born in 1956, three years before his father descended the Sierra Maestra mountains and overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista.
“She died talking about him,” she said of her mother, who died in 2015, the year before Fidel Castro died. “She loved as long as she lived, which is very difficult for me to understand.”
Sitting in her small kitchen in Miami, Fernandez insists she doesn’t feel special. She said she doesn’t feel like Fidel Castro’s daughter at all. Perhaps ironically, she found Miami to be “the only comfortable place” she had ever known, even in an anti-Castro environment. She lives in a small duplex decorated with colorful wallpaper and striking folk art.
“I feel like any other Cuban,” Fernandez said. “Like women, they are both exiles and victims.”
Fernandez does not sympathize with his late father’s politics. She said she became completely disillusioned with the Cuban government in the late 1980s and began criticizing it in public. She decided that it would not be easy for her daughter to grow up being raised by an enemy of the state, so she fled the country in 1993.
“I have always lived according to my truth,” she said. “I decided to leave Cuba to take my daughter with me because someone pointed it out to me and I realized that I was putting her through the same thing that was being done to my daughter.”
“My mother was very revolutionary, and I was very counter-revolutionary.”
“When you’re a kid, sometimes you notice it, and sometimes you don’t,” she recalls. “But I understood from an early age that all that glory and speech didn’t match reality.”
Mr. Fernández has been keeping close watch since leaving Cuba. She wonders if the US government’s recent bellicose comments against the Cuban government have more to do with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American, than with President Donald Trump.
“I believe it has more to do with Marco Rubio’s presence in the government than it does with President Donald Trump himself,” she said.
She also believes that the reported impending criminal charges against her uncle, Raul Castro, are a step toward further U.S. action against the Cuban government, but she would not “dare to speculate” on what that might be.
“Raul Castro is almost 95 years old,” she said. “There’s not much logic to what’s going on, other than this is part of the strategy.”
“In his personal relationships, Raúl Castro was completely different from his brother,” she recalled. “He was a family man.”
Although President Trump has said he thinks Cuba could easily collapse under U.S. pressure, Fernández cautioned against underestimating the Cuban government or its ability to respond to threats.
“It’s very difficult for people to give up,” Fernandez says. “It is very difficult for countries to admit that they have lost the war. … I think this war against imperialism was lost a long time ago.”
