Exiled journalist publishes a “Secret Diary of the Cuban Revolution”

Miami, 25 Mar “To undress Castroism not only as a dictatorial system and as a regime, but also as a family” is the purpose of the Cuban journalist and editor exiled in the United States. Armando Añel with his recently published “Secret Diary of the Cuban Revolution: Romances, Crimes, Intrigues and Infidelities”. The director of the publishing house Neo Club Ediciones describes this book as “a job to coordinate everything scattered” about Fidel Castro and his family and “summarize it”. “The idea for the book began years ago by commissioning a biography about Fidel Castro, starting with that of his father (Ángel Castro). I already had three chapters written when the project broke down,” Añel explained in a statement to Efe. “There are independent sources, other official ones, even one source is directly Raúl (Castro) in the reports on microfraction (dissident movement at the beginning of the revolution), which appeared published in the official press,” he explains. “Secret Diary of the Cuban Revolution: Romances, Crimes, Intrigues and Infidelities” (Neo Club Ediciones, 2022) chronologically links the historical moments of the Cuban revolution with little-known passages from Fidel Castro's private life. Although apparently “everything” was said and written, comparing sources, contrasting them and incorporating new ones offers another dimension of the man who marked the days of a country for more than 60 years. One of the sources used by Añel is the memoir “The Hidden Life of Fidel Castro”, by Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, who was the bodyguard of the leader of the revolution between 1977 and 1994 and died in Miami in 2015. “I would say that of everything that has been published about Fidel Castro and his family in 63 years, Sánchez is the one that has come the most in depth on the subject of intimacy, and that is not forgiven by the Castro, not only Fidel,” says Añel. In the book he dedicates space to the deaths in “strange circumstances” of people such as General José Abrahantes, who was defended during the well-known “Ochoa case”, or the Venezuelan military man Raúl Isaías Baduel, who “replaced Chavez and was betrayed by Fidel.” He dedicates separate chapters to the deaths of Camilio Cienfuegos, the right arm of Fidel Castro and popular commander at the beginning of the revolution, and of opposition leader Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, 53 years apart. A children's episode that Fidel Castro told the Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet is one of the things that caught Añel's attention the most during his task of soaking up information. The leader of the revolution accused a primary school teacher, Euphrasia Feliu, of stealing the money her father sent her to go on vacation. “The first official repudiation of Castro's dissent rally takes place with this teacher. Ramón and Fidel Castro ambush on the outskirts of the teacher's house and begin to stone her. It struck me a lot when I read it, also, told by him”, he says. CHIEF jip/ar (photo)