The Untold Story of Fidel Castro’s Lavish Lifestyle

A former bodyguard spills the beans on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s luxurious way of living.

From Miami Herald (hat Tip EPJ)

With luxury homes, diamonds, women and more, Fidel Castro ‘lives in a luxury that most Cubans can’t even imagine,’ says a former bodyguard who wrote a book of memoirs on the dictator.

Fidel Castro once claimed that he lived a life of exemplary revolutionary frugality on a salary of merely $36 per month.

“Lies,” said Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, 65, who served as a bodyguard for the former Cuban leader for 17 years and has published a book of memoirs portraying Castro as a sort of feudal lord who ran the island like it was a personal fiefdom.

Castro controlled about 20 luxury homes, a Caribbean island getaway with a pool and dolphins, the 88-foot yacht Aquarama II, and several fishing vessels whose catch was sold for dollars deposited in his accounts, according to Sanchez.

“He always claims he lives frugally. Lies. He lives in a luxury that most Cubans can’t even imagine,” Sanchez told el Nuevo Herald in his first interview after writing his book, The Secret Life of Fidel Castro, published Wednesday in France.

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His 325-page book says Castro, now 87, controlled several numbered bank accounts abroad as well as the finances of several state enterprises — including a small gold mine in the Isle of Youth — that reported to him as president of the ruling Council of State. When Castro received a Cohiba cigar box full of Angolan diamonds, he told an aide to sell the gems on the international market “and you know what to do,” Sanchez said.

Two large elephant tusks that once stood in his home also came from Angola. None of the bank accounts or enterprises were in Castro’s name, but they didn’t have to be, the bodyguard said. “He didn’t have to report to anyone. He had sole control” over economic activity he estimated at “hundreds of millions of dollars” over 10 years. 

But after Forbes magazine included the Cuban ruler in its 2006 list of 10 richest “Kings, Queens and Dictators,” he declared that his salary was about 900 pesos per month, or $36. The former bodyguard said part of the book focuses on Castro’s luxurious life because so little is known about it even within the communist-ruled nation. The leader has said his personal life is a “state secret” because of the multiple attempts to assassinate him.

If true, then the communist purist used the state’s coercive machinery to siphon the nation’s resources to his account for him to indulge in a stealth hedonist lifestyle. Poor Cubans.

But this is how the world of politics has mostly worked; smoke and mirrors.