She was the belle of Havana high society — the vivacious young wife of a renowned surgeon, a woman with expensive tastes, patrician good looks and a mile-wide rebellious streak.
He was a radical leftist with a wife, a young son, several unpaid electricity bills and an ambitious plan to overthrow Cuba’s conservative dictator.
The affair between Fidel Castro and Natalia Revuelta Clews, who died Friday at age 89, began like a Shakespearean tragedy: Two young lovers from opposing worlds drawn together amid roiling political turmoil. There were clandestine meetings and mixed-up love letters, a secret pregnancy, a spurned marriage proposal.
The relationship ended tragically, too, though on more mundane terms than any of Shakespeare’s plays. Castro had to “put his revolutionary project ahead of his personal life,” Revuelta told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia in 2008, as the Los Angeles Times reported.
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But in the beginning, it was an improbable whirlwind romance.
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Revuelta fell for Castro’s communist revolution before she fell for the man himself. The only daughter of prominent parents (though they divorced when she was a toddler), she had all the privileges of wealth — education at an American prep school, membership at a country club, a job at Standard Oil and a respectable marriage at age 22 to Havana heart surgeon Orlando Fernandez. Her blonde curls, striking green eyes and movie star curves made her “the kind of woman who stopped eyes and tongues when she entered a room,” Castro biographer Georgie Anne Geyer wrote.
But “Naty” was unfulfilled by her aristocratic lifestyle. She got little joy from her absent husband, who was 20 years her senior, or her young daughter, Nina. Cocktail parties, weekly tennis tournaments and lunches at the yacht club left what Geyer calls her “abnormally sensuous appetite for revolution and adventure” unsatisfied.
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So in the early 1950s, Revuelta began attending meetings of the Partido Ortodoxo — the left-leaning, anti-corruption party of which Castro was a member. She gave keys to her mansion to party leaders even before she met her future lover so that the house could be used as a haven.
She and Castro were introduced in November 1952 at a protest marking the anniversary of the 1871 killing of Cuban medical students by the Spanish colonial government. The two were instantly attracted to one another, and a few days later a mutual friend showed up at Revuelta’s door, according to Wendy Gimbel’s 1998 biography, “Havana Dreams.”
“Fidel wants to know if he can come visit,” the man asked.
“Of course. After five o’clock, I’m always home,” she replied.
But Castro didn’t show — he was imprisoned for his involvement in an underground movement against dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had seized power in a coup earlier that year. After his release, Castro finally followed through on his request, and Revuelta’s home soon became a nerve center for a planned attack on an army barracks in Santiago.
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Revuelta threw herself into the plot, donating her jewelry and 6,000 pesos in savings to the revolutionary cause. She typed up copies of Castro’s manifesto, which would be distributed to the news media if the assault was successful, and sewed fatigues for his ragtag band of rebels to wear during the attack.
But the 1953 mission failed, and Castro was sent to jail for another two years. He and Revuelta maintained the intellectual relationship they began during the planning sessions, exchanging letters about politics, philosophy and economics.
It was a “loving friendship,” Revuelta told U.S. News and World Report in 1999: “We had common goals, common interests, common tastes.” While Castro was imprisoned, she sent him books by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo and Sigmund Freud, photographs of a Greek folk dance performance, an envelope filled with sand to remind him of the beach.
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But their correspondence was more than merely friendly: “I am on fire,” Castro said in a 1954 letter. “Write to me, for I cannot be without your letters. I love you very much.”
That passionate language got the pair into trouble when one of Castro’s letters to Revuelta mysteriously wound up in the hands of his wife. (Revuelta believed that the prison director had a hand in the matter). Divorced after his release in 1955, Castro and Revuelta became lovers for the first time.
Castro was in Havana for only two months, during which time Alina, his daughter by Revuelta, was conceived.
Share this articleShare“I wanted to have a part of him with me always,” Revuelta told U.S. News and World Report. “I was convinced that I would never see him again, that he would most likely be killed.”
She kept her pregnancy secret from Castro until after he fled to Mexico later that year. He proposed, asking Revuelta to join him in Mexico, but she was certain he would not survive his attempt at revolution.
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So Revuelta remained with her husband, who gave Alina his last name, while Castro waged a guerrilla war from the wilderness of the Sierra Maestra mountains. It would be nearly four years before the two lovers would meet again.
In 1959, Castro returned to the Cuban capital as the victorious leader of a successful revolution. He quickly went to see Revuelta and Alina at their home, although he had not recognized his daughter as his own. But the visit roused the suspicions of Revuelta’s husband, who divorced her and fled to the United States, taking their daughter Nina with him.
Revuelta began preparing herself to become Cuba’s first lady, but Castro was distant — apparently uninterested in “anything so utterly plebian as marriage,” Geyer wrote. Eventually he took another lover and married, and Naty was all but forgotten.
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Revuelta tried to move on.
“It took many years to get him out of my heart,” Revuelta told La Vanguardia.
Though her relationship with Castro ended, Revuelta remained committed to his revolution. She gave up her house to nationalization and took several jobs in the new government, trying to ignore the constant, aching reminders of her old lover that appeared on every television and in every newspaper. She kept their affair hidden, even from her daughter Alina, who didn’t find out about her paternity until she was 10.
Two years later, Castro offered to recognize Alina (who goes by Alina Fernandez) as his own, but she rejected him, according to her memoir. Unlike her mother, Fernandez has an almost entirely negative view of Castro, blaming him for the bitter poverty she grew up with.
“Everything was turned upside down,” she told the Miami Herald in 2003.
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In 1993, Fernandez fled to the United States using an altered passport and a wig. She became a Miami radio host and an outspoken critic of her father’s government.
“For Cubans, the legacy of Castro is a country ruined and with part of its people in exile, an experience very hard and very difficult to cure,” she told the Miami Herald last year.
Fernandez’s exile strained her relationship with Revuelta, who has remained steadfastly supportive of Castro’s communist regime.
“I knew she had a life of her own,” Revuelta said in 2003 interview with the Miami Herald. “She had her choices.”
After a long pause, she added: “I couldn’t be a mother to her. She became a woman too soon.”
In 2014, Fernandez visited Cuba for the first time to see her ailing mother, who had suffered a stroke. Since then, she and her daughter have returned to Havana at least once per month to check on Revuelta.
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The Associated Press reported Revuelta fell ill after a fall last Wednesday and died two days later at a clinic in Havana. Fernandez and her daughter were both in the city for Revuelta’s cremation at a private ceremony, according to Fox News Latino.
Despite the distance between them, Fernandez has spoken of her mother fondly.
“She’s a very strong person. You will never see her failing. Or cry, you know? You could never guess if she was suffering,” she told the Miami Herald in 2003. “I used to call her ‘the sprite’ because she was so beautiful and so happy.”
Correction: An earlier version of this report misspelled the name of author Wendy Gimbel, who wrote “Havana Dreams.”
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