HAVANA – The eldest son of late Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro,Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, committed suicide on Thursday aged 68 after beingtreated for months for depression, Cuban state-run media reported.
The nuclear scientist, also known as “Fidelito”, or Little Fidel, becauseof how much he looked like his father, had initially been hospitalized andthen continued treatment as an outpatient.
“Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of doctors forseveral months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicidethis morning,” Cubadebate website said.
Fidelito, who had the highest public profile of all Castro’s children, wasborn in 1949 out of his brief marriage to Mirta Diaz-Balart before he wenton to topple a U.S.-backed dictator and build a communist-run state on thedoorstep of the United States during the Cold War.
Through his mother, Castro Diaz-Balart was the cousin of some of Castro’smost bitter enemies in the Cuban American exile community, U.S.Representative Mario Diaz-Balart and former U.S. congressman LincolnDiaz-Balart.
He was also the subject of a dramatic custody dispute between the twofamilies as a child.
Cuba scholars say his mother took him with her to the United States when hewas aged five after announcing she wanted a divorce from Castro, while hewas imprisoned for an attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago.
Castro was able to bring Fidelito back to Cuba after the 1959 revolution.
A multilingual nuclear physicist who studied in the former Soviet Union,Castro Diaz-Balart was head of Cuba’s national nuclear program from 1980 to1992, and spearheaded the development of a nuclear plant on the Caribbean’slargest island until his father fired him.
Cuba halted its plant plans that same year because of a lack of fundingafter the collapse of Cuba’s trade and aid ties with the ex-Soviet bloc andhe largely disappeared from public view appearing at the occasionalscientific conference or diplomatic event.
Fidelito had been working for his uncle President Raul Castro as ascientific counselor to the Cuban Council of State and Vice-president ofthe Cuban Academy of Sciences at the time of his death.
A former British ambassador to Cuba, Paul Hare, who lectures at BostonUniversity’s Pardee School of Global Studies, said Castro Diaz-Balart hadseemed “thoughtful, rather curious about the world beyond Cuba” at a dinnerin Boston two years ago.
“But he seemed a bit weary about having to be a Castro, rather thanhimself,” Hare said.
Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a Cuba expert at the University of Nebraska inOmaha, said Fidelito had provided him with invaluable help in the 1990swhile he was writing a book on Cuba’s nuclear program.
In 2000 they met again at a conference in Moscow and Fidelito worked “theroom full of international nonproliferation experts, diplomats andjournalists with aplomb, speaking no less than four languages -Spanish,English, Russian and French.”
Benjamin-Alvarado said he suspected Fidelito’s title as scientific advisorwas largely ceremonial as his views on energy development were notincorporated into national policies.
“He had written extensively on Cuba’s need for developing renewable energyresources,” Benjamin-Alvarado said. “And yet almost all efforts by theCuban government were geared to maintaining the status quo of oildependency.”
“I imagine that was disappointing for him.”
Fidelito’s death came just over a year after that of his father on Nov. 25,2016, aged 90. – Agencies