"For Love Of Fidel" - Obituary Of Naty Revuelta Clews

Obituary: Naty Revuelta

For love of Fidel

Natalia Revuelta Clews, Havana socialite and mistress of Fidel Castro, died on February 27th, aged 89   

Mar 21st 2015  

WHEN she had been married four years to Orlando Fernández, a cardiologist twice her age, Naty Revuelta grew restless in the big, beautiful house in Vedado. Each morning, when the shutters were opened on the smell of jasmine, her baby Nina would be taken away by the nurse to be fussed and dressed in lace. In the late afternoons, after an unsleeping siesta, her sparkling company might be sought for tennis and canasta parties. Naty was so lovely, with her emerald eyes and dark blonde hair and tiny dancer’s waist, that men would kneel at her feet. Her natural home appeared to be the Biltmore or the Havana Yacht Club, dining on oysters and sweet omelettes from plates of gold. Yet much of her day was spent watching television in the darkened house until the moment when Orlando would return from work and fall asleep in his chair. It was around then, in the spring of 1952, that she sent her house key to Fidel Castro.

Although she wrapped the key in a linen envelope, lightly scented with Lanvin’s “Arpeggio”, she did not know him. They had met, by moonlight, at a demonstration on the grand stone staircase at the University of Havana. With her elegant dress and gold cigarette case, she was plainly no student. He asked if he could indoctrinate her—the words having, for him, no other meaning. She told him, with a shiver of flirtation, that she was free any afternoon after five. That March Fulgencio Batista had launched his coup d’état and delivered Cuba to gangsterism; Fidel, and two other members of the Orthodox Party to whom she also sent keys, were his most energetic opposition. Now the three of them, polite and in starched guayaberas, sat among her imitation French furniture and fine English tea sets to plot their revolution.

Social convention and the “sentence” of her marriage stopped her going with them into the mountains. That frustrated her, for like her English grandfather, Herbert Clews, she liked the romance of adventure in rough country. The attack on the Montcada barracks on July 26th 1953 had to happen without her. She would help in other ways. Her fingers grew rough from typing manifestoes and sewing military fatigues. Stealthily she withdrew all her savings, $6,000, from the bank. Her diamonds, emeralds and sapphires, in their plush boxes, disappeared from the bedroom drawer, pawned to buy rifles. Then when the attack failed, and Fidel was jailed on the Isle of Pines, she wrote to him.

Their correspondence revolved at first around books. She sent him the French writers she most admired, Rolland, Victor Hugo, Balzac. He responded enthusiastically, his tiny writing also filling the margins of the one page he was allowed. She sent him the works of Dostoevsky; he was impressed, but preferred Marx. The letters became playful: they discussed oil lamps, cake-dough, hats, goldfish. She sent an envelope filled with sand to remind him of the beach. And though he too was married, they became amorous. Her phrases were like kisses, he told her, or honey that never cloyed. In return she loved him more wildly than anyone since her playboy father, kicked out of the family when she was three for his addiction to mojitos.

A silken ribbon

Fidel said he longed to hold her “tight in my arms, so tight that I will press you like a flower”. That was not true for long. When their correspondence was found out, he asked her not to write again. In 1955, on his release, they met and made love at last; she conceived her daughter Alina, but after two months he left. Four years later he came to power in Havana, but did not send for her. He barely communicated with his daughter, and with Naty not at all, beyond returning her letters to him. She who had dreamed of being First Lady of Cuba, svelte, gracious, fluent in English from her education at elite girls’ academies in Washington and Pennsylvania, was now another nobody in a country that was impoverished, grey and falling into ruins.

And yet as before she would help in other ways, for her love of Fidel was unaltered by his behaviour. She joined volunteer labour brigades and worked for the government. The beautiful house, from which Orlando had now fled, with Nina, to the United States, was handed over to become an embassy, and she moved into somewhere uglier and smaller. There, uncomplaining, she lived from a ration book like the rest of Cuba, queuing for hours for half a kilo of black beans which Chucha, the one remaining maid, would serve with rice on a silver tray. Her stubbornly tyrannical mother, Doña Natica, never forgave her “treachery” of aiding communism. Her daughter Alina bickered and defied her before leaving, in her turn, for America.

In the house in Nuevo Vedado, behind heavy metal grilles against robbers, often in candlelight when the power was cut, Naty Revuelta lived without bitterness. Her small alligator-covered address book seldom had a new entry of interest, but portraits of her past self, the toast of high society, covered the walls and sideboards. As always, cigarettes from the slim gold case and black coffee from tiny cups kept her going. If anyone asked—and even if nobody did—she would fetch from her stocking-drawer in their blue satin case, tied with a blue silk ribbon, Fidel’s letters, and read them aloud. Then she would sit, no longer restless, almost content.