Naty Revuelta obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/15/naty-revuelta

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She was a beauty from Havana’s smartest tennis club. He was the burly student leader from the provinces who had already gained a reputation for violence. The relationship that formed in the early 1950s between Naty Revuelta, who has died aged 89, and the young Fidel Castro was an unlikely partnership, brought about by their mutual involvement in the fight against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The affair was short-lived but produced a daughter, who later defected to the US.

Naty was born in Havana; her grandfather was an English engineer from Newcastle under Lyme who had emigrated to Cuba at the turn of the 20th century. Naty was educated at Catholic schools in Cuba, followed by several years at college in the US. By her early 20s, she had married Orlando Fernández, a much older cardiologist, with whom she had a daughter, Natalie. Although most of the Cuban upper-middle class to which she now belonged formed the backbone of support for Batista, Naty was soon attracted to the romantic notion of rebellion against his corrupt regime.

In 1952, she began to support the young, more radical members of the opposition Ortodoxo party, providing them with funds and a place to hold their clandestine meetings. A year later, Fidel, his brother Raúl and some 160 followers took a more dramatic step, attacking the Moncada military barracks in Santiago in the east of the island. As Naty recalled in an interview in later life, she was given the responsibility of taking the revolutionary proclamation to the main radio stations in the Cuban capital once the rebels had seized the barracks and sparked a popular uprising.

In fact, Castro and his group were quickly overpowered. Many were tortured or shot. Fidel, his brother and others were captured and put on public trial. Naty supported him throughout, and when he was given a 15-year jail sentence on the Isla de Pinos (now the Isla de la Juventud), she not only began a passionate correspondence, but supplied him with books and writing material. The point at which Fidel adopted a Marxist standpoint has always been hotly debated: Naty told me she definitely sent him several of Marx’s works when he was in prison, which he studied closely.

It was when Fidel’s wife Mirta Díaz Balart got wind of the love letters between her and Fidel that Naty became embroiled in their acrimonious divorce. Then, when Fidel was released thanks to an amnesty in May 1955, the two embarked on an affair. This only lasted a few months before Fidel left the island fearing for his life and travelled to Mexico to gather support for an invasion of Cuba. The brief relationship was long enough, however, for Naty to become pregnant. In March 1956, she gave birth to her second daughter, Alina.

By the time Fidel returned to Cuba in November 1956 to begin the guerrilla struggle against the Batista regime from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, he already appeared to consider Naty as somewhat of an encumbrance. For her part, she sent the guerrillas money and supplies, and never wavered in her support as the would-be revolutionaries gradually won the battle against Batista’s army. With millions of others, she celebrated the victorious revolutionary entry into Havana early in January 1959. “There were so many people lining the streets I thought the whole island was going to tip over,” she told me.

By the early 60s, Naty and her husband were divorced. He left the island with their elder daughter as the revolution became more avowedly socialist, but Naty chose to stay on in Havana. Following several years in Paris, she worked in the Cuban foreign trade department back in Havana, and after 1980 was appointed as an assessor for the ministry of culture. She had little direct contact with Fidel during all these years, although his brother Raúl appears to have made sure that she was looked after.

Unlike her daughter Alina, who left Cuba in 1993 and poured vitriol into her book, Castro’s Daughter (1998) , Naty never complained about her treatment by Fidel. “He always put his revolutionary work above his personal life,” was the closest she ever came to a criticism of him.

She is survived by Natalie and Alina.

• Natalia Revuelta Clews, civil servant, born 6 December 1925, died 27 February 2015