Fidel Castro’s Daughter Visits AU

Alina Fernández was 10 years old when she learned the truth: Her biological father was not the man whose surname she shared. It was Fidel Castro.

While that discovery charted the course of her life, the news did not arrive as a complete surprise. Growing up, Castro had been a “frequent night visitor” to her mother, a Cuban socialite and political activist married to a cardiologist.

Nor did the revelation bring her closer to a figure the US government plotted to assassinate hundreds of times across several decades.

“I never called him father,” Fernández told American University students on October 20. “He could be a very assiduous visitor, but then he’d disappear for months. I grew up in the habit of not counting on him.”

Fernández, an outspoken critic of the communist regime her father installed, visited campus for an event hosted by the Kennedy Political Union. She was joined in conversation by KPU director Sahib Kaur, SPA/BA ’27.

Fernández was born in 1956, three years before the revolutionary Marxist leader seized power, which he held for nearly five decades.

While living in Cuba, she sought to avoid being known as Castro’s daughter. As a girl, she prayed his hours-long, televised speeches would end. As economic conditions worsened under communist rule, her disillusionment grew. By high school, she realized the state-mandated “voluntary work” for youth in agricultural fields was anything but optional. By the 1980s, these experiences turned her into an active dissident.

The fall of the Soviet Union plunged Cuba into an acute economic depression, prompting Fernández to plot an escape out of concern for her daughter’s safety and her own.

“Times were very rough,” Fernández said. “We had no electricity. Children couldn’t go to school. There was no food, there was no medicine.”

In 1993, at age 37, Fernández used a disguise and a counterfeit Spanish passport to flee the island for Madrid. She was later granted political asylum in the United States, eventually settling in Miami.

In exile, being Castro’s daughter “became my identity,” she said. “You see, you make lemonade with your lemons.” For years, she hosted a Miami-based radio program, using the airwaves to condemn Castro’s regime.

Following Castro’s death in 2016, Fernández turned her attention toward advocating for her homeland's democratic future. Today, the island faces a compounding economic and humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by tight US trade sanctions and severe energy shortages.

“Cubans that live on the island are told every day that we are gusanos [worms]—that we are traitors, that we betrayed the country, that we are bad,” Fernández said. “Nevertheless, we are the ones that keep them alive. . . . It’s difficult because [the people of Cuba] keep being the victims. We are privileged, and the difference [in] our ways of life is tremendous.”

Asked whether the US should apply greater pressure on the island nation 90 miles off the Florida coast, Fernández did not hesitate: “Of course.”

“I’m convinced that every dictatorship gets established with a little help—a push from the outside,” Fernández said. “When it implodes, it needs that help, that little push from the outside, too.”

Now 70, Fernández said she will continue to beat the drum for Cuban democracy.

“It’s a very personal crusade,” she said. “I’m sitting here because I would like to share what Cuba has been through and I [want] to make people conscious of the situation we have now.”