With his rugged rebel look and seductive charisma, former Cuban president Fidel Castro was known not only as a giant of 20th century history, but also as quite the ladies’ man.
Rumors of Castro’s sexual prowess abounded in Cuba even before his days as a black-bearded guerrilla leader hiding out in the mountains.
And those tales lasted straight through his nearly five decades in power, even until his death on Friday last week at age 90.
Some said he had thousands of women.
The New York Post put the figure at a stunning 35,000 in a 2008 article, a figure that came from an unnamed former official.
Journalist Ann Louise Bardach wrote in a 2009 book that Castro told her he had fathered “almost a tribe” of children.
However, it is difficult to separate truth from legend.
Castro himself rarely talked about his personal life, despite his famous volubility.
“Private life, in my opinion, should not be an instrument for publicity or politics,” he said in 1992.
He reportedly had a taste for blondes, seducing a string of American, German and Italian women in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1959, just after seizing power, Castro had an affair with a young German woman, Marita Lorenz, who says the US CIA hired her to assassinate him.
She lost her nerve, flushed her poison pills down the toilet, and ended up spending their rendezvous at the then-Habana Hilton making love with him instead, she said in a 1993 interview in Vanity Fair.
Castro had a mysterious power over her from the day she met him as a wide-eyed 19-year-old, she said.
“When Fidel talks to you, he talks to you very close. He looks right in your eye,” Lorenz said, recounting how he immediately swept her off her feet. “Nothing hit me as hard as this ever — like a tonne of bricks. He didn’t let me completely undress. He was the sweetest, tenderest. I guess nobody ever forgets their first lover.”
Rumors of secret affairs and children abound; Castro had little patience for the US-style political family.
“Politically speaking as a revolutionary, I refuse to mix my family with politics. In truth, the idea of first ladies seems to be ridiculous,” he told US filmmaker Oliver Stone in a 2003 documentary.
In the film, he revealed he was never in fact married to Dalia Soto del Valle, a green-eyed blonde 15 years his junior whom he shared his life with from the 1980s on.
He met the former schoolteacher in 1961 during a massive literacy campaign launched by his new government, and had five sons with her: Alejandro, Alex, Antonio, Alexis and Angel.
According to Castro, his only marriage was in 1948, to Mirta Diaz-Balart, a philosophy student from a wealthy family. They had a son together, Fidelito, who is today a 67-year-old nuclear physicist.
The marriage unraveled when Castro was imprisoned after staging a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 — the start of his revolutionary career.
Languishing in prison, he learned that she had accepted a job at the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, where her brother was a high-ranking official. Outraged, he divorced her in 1954.
In 1952, he began an affair with Natalia “Naty” Revuelta, a pretty blonde who was also married. Together they had a daughter, Alina, in 1956.
She fled Cuba in 1993 and now lives in Miami.
Castro also reportedly had another son, Jorge Angel, from a 1955 affair with Maria Laborde, an activist in his movement.
One of the most influential women in his life was Celia Sanchez, a fellow rebel who was his confidante and personal secretary — and possibly more — until her death of cancer in 1980.
Except Alina, all of Castro’s known children still live in Cuba, where they are largely kept out of the media spotlight.
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