Castro S Daughter

"Mommy, mommy, call him. Tell him to come here right away. I have so many things to tell him!" I had a ton of things to tell him. I wanted him to find a solution to all the shortages of clothes; of meat, so it would again be distributed through the ration books. I also wanted to ask him to give our Christmas back. And to come live with us. I wanted to let him know how much we really needed him... Fidel didn't answer my letter. I kept writing him letters from a sweet and well-behaved child, a brave but sad girl. Letters resembling those of a secret, spurned lover... As a girl growing up in Cuba, Alina Fernandez found nothing abnormal in the fact that Fidel Castro would occasionally visit her house bearing gifts just for her. At the age of ten, her mother finally told her the truth: she was Castro's Daughter.

The illegitimate daughter of Fidel Castro describes her relationship with him as a child and her decision to discontinue their relationship

Many fall for Cuba's music, its dance, the enduring strength and charm of its people. Award-winning actor Lee Brooks fell for one of its women. But how to pluck this forbidden fruit away from the so-called island frozen in time, where even romance can be illegal? Out-foxing the Castro regime's state military apparatus, only to be forced into a shady web of human smugglers and a months-long limbo at sea, Brooks and his Cuban princess show that not only does love conquer all, but that when it comes to Cuba, fact is often much wilder than any kind of fiction. Stealing Castro's Daughter is a tour de force of adventure romance set against the lush tapestry of Caribbean's crown jewel, at one of the most important junctures of the island's rich history. Surrounded by poverty, struggle and sacrifice, this is the real Cuba, and two people's real determination to overcome the odds and escape into love's lasting embrace. With its gritty hairpin turns, heartfelt honesty and sensual prose, Brooks captures the aching beauty of Cuba, and a desire that defies all obstacles. Read and be awed. Ben Corbett: Author of This is Cuba

What if John F. Kennedy´s daughter, Caroline, and Fidel Castro´s daughter, Alina, were to have a conversation? In this fictionalized novelization of a screenplay, they spar, giving their own perspectives on their fathers´ lives, their mothers´ ill-fated loves. Caroline asks, "Did he kill him? Did your father kill my father?" Later she lashes out, questioning why Alina´s evil father remains alive while her own good father went to an early grave. Alina is clear that she has little regard for either man. In her view, their mothers are the heroes and the victims.

This intimate, revisionist portrait of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world, is “sure to become the standard on Castro’s early life” (Publishers Weekly). Until now, biographers have treated Castro’s life like prosecutors, scouring his past for evidence to convict a person they don’t like or don’t understand. Young Castro challenges us to put aside the caricature of a bearded, cigar-munching, anti-American hothead to discover how Castro became the dictator who acted as a thorn in the side of US presidents for nearly half a century. In this “gripping and edifying narrative…Hansen brings imposing research and notable erudition” (Booklist) to Castro’s early life, showing Castro getting his toughness from a father who survived Spain’s class system and colonial wars to become one of the most successful independent plantation owners in Cuba. We see a boy running around that plantation more comfortable playing with the children of his father’s laborers than his own classmates at elite boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. We discover a young man who writes flowery love letters from prison and contemplates the meaning of life, a gregarious soul attentive to the needs of strangers but often indifferent to the needs of his own family. These pages show a liberal democrat who admires FDR’s New Deal policies and is skeptical of communism, but is also hostile to American imperialism. They show an audacious militant who stages a reckless attack on a military barracks but is canny about building an army of resisters. In short, Young Castro reveals a complex man. The first American historian in a generation to gain access to the Castro archives in Havana, Jonathan Hansen was able to secure cooperation from Castro’s family and closest confidants. He gained access to hundreds of never-before-seen letters and interviewed people he was the first to ask for their impressions of the man. The result is a nuanced and penetrating portrait of a man at once brilliant, arrogant, bold, vulnerable, and all too human: a man who, having grown up on an island that felt like a colonial cage, was compelled to lead his country to independence.

This may well be the most significant piece of writing to come out of Cuba in 33 years--or the life of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Since Fidel Castro has always made the claim that "History Shall Absolve Me," the author of this book, journalist, writer and human rights activist, Roberto Luque Escalona, subjects this self-inflicted judgment to the facts of real history and finds that history shall condemn rather than absolve the long-standing dictator of Cuba. The Castro regime is besieged by internal and external pressures. The worsening economic crisis in Cuba is the result of changes taking place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where nations that have begun liberating themselves from the yoke of totalitarian regimes have made it evident that the Castro government is simply ill prepared to respond to new winds of doctrine or to accept a situation in which Castro no longer is sovereign ruler. How Castro got the way he is is at the heart and soul of this extraordinary memoir--filled with a level of intimate details unrivaled in any other analysis. Robert Luque Escalona is not a persecuted figure or a world-famous dissident--or at least he was not until the publication of "The Tiger and the Children. "Nor is this a prison memoir. He belongs to the immense anonymous majority that suffers in silence the consequences of a disastrous dictatorship. The author has defied Fidel from his position as a free man--free at least in spirit--conscious of the consequences of such a bold statement. This is a consummate work of social history, political analysis, and moral judgment. It will be read by everyone from Latin Americanists to those interested in the real character of comparative politics.

"The first complete and comprehensive work on these important, unique programs. . . . An interesting, humane, yet tragic component of the post-1959 Cuban experience and the Cold War in general."--Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Amherst College "The ordeal began [for the children] when their parents told them they had to travel alone and that they had to keep the upcoming trip a secret. The most powerful parts of the book are their accounts. . . . Through interviews with many of the participants—the children and their parents, the coordinators of the airlift, those in the underground in Cuba and the Catholic sponsors in the United States—Triay attempts to answer many of the questions the exodus raised."--Miami Herald A stirring account of the covert effort to smuggle Cuban children into the United States in the aftermath of Fidel Castro's rise to power, Fleeing Castro brings to light the humanitarian program designed to care for the children once they arrived and the hardship and suffering endured by the families who took part in Operation Pedro Pan. From late 1960 until the October 1962 missile crisis, 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban children left their homeland, the small island suddenly at the center of the Cold War struggle. Their parents, unable to obtain visas to leave Cuba, believed a short separation would be preferable to subjecting their offspring to Castro's totalitarian Marxist state. For the children, the exodus began a prolonged and tragic ordeal--some didn’t see their parents again for years; a few never did. Until now, this chapter of the Cuban Revolution has been relatively obscure. Initially the result of an effort by James Baker, headmaster of an American school in Cuba who worked closely with the anti-Castro underground, Pedro Pan quickly came to involve the Catholic Church in Miami and, in particular, Father Bryan Walsh, who established the Cuban Children's Program, the nationwide organization that cared for those children without relatives or friends in the United States--almost half of them. The latter program, in effect until 1981, was the first to allot federal money to private agencies for child care, an action with far-reaching repercussions for U.S. social policy. Victor Andres Triay traces this story from its political and social origins in Cuba, setting it in the context of the Cold War and describing the roles of the organizations involved in Cuba and in the United States. Making use of extensive interviews with Baker, Walsh, and influential underground figures, as well as personal letters that document the fears and dreams of both the parents and the children, Triay presents this history of Pedro Pan--the largest child refugee movement ever in the Western Hemisphere--with the drama of an international thriller and the pathos of a heartbreaking family drama.