“I was sitting quietly in my rocking chair with my diapers and my pacifier when my cartoons disappeared from the television screen,” she said before a crowd of more than 200 in Eureka College’s Cerf Center on Thursday evening.
Fernandez recalled the “hairy men” running about and violence that, at a young age, she could not comprehend, nor did she know that their leader, Fidel Castro, was her father.
Fernandez kicked off Eureka College’s 2013 Arts and Lecture Series drawing from her 1998 book, “Castro’s Daughter: An Exile’s Memoir of Cuba.”
She didn’t learn her country’s communist leader — the man who used to visit her family in the middle of the night then disappear for months — was her father until age 10. By her late 20s she no longer spoke to the man, whose political regime she eventually fled under disguise.
“I would continue to grow up pretending to live a normal life,” she said, adding she tried to hide behind her stepfather’s name, Fernandez, though the country knew her as Fidel’s daughter. “I wasted at least part of my early years trying to do that and I never succeeded.”
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