“In my case, everything began with something called revolution. My revolution, the Cuban one, occurred in 1959, and it’s the main reason for everything in my personal life story,” said Alina Fernandez, the illegitimate daughter of former Cuban President Fidel Castro, who spoke at Whitman on Tuesday, April 1.
“ASWC wanted to bring Ms. Fernandez here because she is a different type of speaker than anyone else whom we have had,” said ASWC Speakers Committee Chair Rachel Stein.
President George Bridges echoed these feelings in his introduction. “What is so special about Ms. Fernandez is that she brings a personal story to a form of government that many Americans haven’t understood or formerly experienced.”
“I will give you what you might call an intimate portrait of Fidel Castro’s Cuba because I am an early witness and this is what happened,” said Fernandez.
She began her narrative with the story of how her mother met the young Fidel Castro. Both were members of the same political group and the correspondence that they began during Castro’s stint in jail developed into a secret romance.
Her narrative continued with her first memories of the Revolution and the country’s transition from a capitalist to a socialist society, memories that began with the cartoons on television being replaced with socialist propaganda and televised executions.
“For me, life went from white to black and stayed grey for a long, long time,” said Fernandez, as she recounted the closures of privately owned institutions, food rationing, the exodus of thousands of her countrymen, the closures of churches and the disappearance of freedom of speech and free press.
Although her relationship with her father was not a main focus of her lecture, Fernandez briefly mentioned her struggles growing up with reconciling the feelings she felt for the man she knew as her father with those she felt for the same man responsible for imposing the drastic changes in her own life and the lives of other Cubans.
The lecture concluded with Fernandez’s perspective on Fidel Castro’s recent transition of power to his younger brother Raul.
“The feeling [among Cubans] was one of hope, and people were hoping to improve their lives. Raul, for the most part, has been providing that since he took power,” she said.
Fernandez’s dissenting political views of her father’s regime lead her to flee Cuba in 1993. She currently resides in Miami, Fla. where she hosts a daily radio program that focuses on Cuban and Cuban-American issues. She is also the author of “Castro’s Daughter: An Exile’s Memoir of Cuba.”
“I enjoyed the event and I think that other people did as well. Ms. Fernandez’s talk was enlightening because I think many young Americans do not know all that much about Cuban history,” said Stein.
Although many Whitman students did enjoy the event, many also felt that it did not meet their initial expectations.
“Alina Fernandez’s speech wasn’t what anyone expected. If you listened to the questions posed to her, students asked about her father’s socialism, about the ideology and experiences of those living under Fidel’s thumb. Put bluntly, they were questions that people thought would be covered in Fernandez’s speech. Instead, we were given her life story,” said first-year Ari Frink. “We were given a woman telling her life story, and a pretty interesting one at that.”
