The refugee daughter of the murderous late Cuban dictator and Communist regime founder Fidel Castro thinks it’s time for regime change.
Alina Fernández Revuelta fled Cuba back in 1993 for the United States, where she settled in Miami. Even though, as the daughter of the Communist dictator, she grew up as part of the elite in post-revolutionary Cuba, she quickly began to realize how unjust the system was. In a new interview with The Epoch Times, Fernández shared her perspective as Castro‘s daughter, a Cuban refugee, and a freedom lover, as the Trump administration continues to endorse regime change in Cuba.
Fernández stated, “For me, it’s been time for a regime change since the late ‘80s.” She added, “At the time Fidel Castro died, we were all thinking [his regime] had come to an end, because it was a very personalized and paternalist… narcissistic government… But it survived.”
Epoch Times showed a picture of Fernández with Castro at her wedding in 1973, but her connection to her father was not as warm as that photo might imply. “I became a dissident, I mean, publicly… in the late ‘80s. So I was scared. I was afraid for my daughter, that something might happen to her,” Fernández said.
Fernández is the daughter of Castro and Havana socialite Natalia Revuelta, Epoch Times explained, from their affair while both already had spouses. Revuelta’s husband (whose name was Fernández) raised Alina, and she found out her father was Fidel Castro when she was 10. To this day, she does not refer to him as her father, but by his name.
Discussing the potential impact of her dissidence on her daughter in the 1980s, Fernández talked about the “years of misery” following the loss of financial support from the collapsing Soviet Union. “I was on the dissident side, so it’s kind of a double burden on her. She was a teenager, and we had what we call at that time, the Special Period,” Fernández described it. “Some people say that now is worse, but back in the ‘90s, it was terrible, terrible.” Many Cubans lost food, schools, public transport, and electricity.
Angry Cuban man goes to the hotel where the Code Pink communists are staying in Cuba.
They get to enjoy electricity thanks to a generator but 99.9% of Cubans are without electricity tonight after the nationwide blackout
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) March 22, 2026
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Finally, Fernández was able to go to Spain using a sympathetic tourist’s visa and claimed political asylum at the U.S. Embassy. Soon after, Castro let her daughter leave Cuba, too, after Rev. Jesse Jackson asked the dictator to do so. The mother and daughter met each other again in America.
Fernández was still a young child when she first began to understand how contradictory and hypocritical Communism was. She recalled telling her mother she didn’t want to go to “voluntary work” and being told she had to go. “So I discovered that in Cuba, voluntary meant mandatory,” she said, talking about the forced labor of Cuban children, particularly in farming, to prop up the failing Cuban economy. “I realized very early that I was being lied to.”
After her stepfather and sister left Cuba, Fernández remembered, “So I already had to write down in my school papers and every official paper, I had to feel that I have traitors in the family.” Her mother was a radical Communist. “She was there from the beginning… since the preparation of the revolution. She’d been a sympathizer and a very, very faithful subject of the king,” meaning Castro.
During the 1980 mass exodus of Cuban refugees from the country, Fernández was disgusted by the vicious harassment of would-be refugees. “People were encouraged to go and beat those people and scream at them and humiliate them and, in some cases, kill them because they were willing to leave the country,” she told Epoch Times. “And for me, [it] was a very, very harsh turning point to see that people were treated that way officially. It killed me.”
Since becoming a refugee herself, she has returned to Cuba only once, in 2014, when she visited her sick mother with special permission. She hopes she will be able to return with regime change, however. Reflecting on how she does not communicate with her uncle and Fidel‘s successor, Raul, Fernández said, “One of the biggest Cuban tragedies… is that this madness divided families in the most dramatic way. So if you didn’t think alike, you became the enemy.” That is one more reason she hopes for regime change in Cuba.
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