Castro’s eldest son commits suicide at 68

HAVANA: The eldest son of late Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Fidel Castro DiazBalart (pic), has committed suicide after being treated for months for depression, Cuban staterun media reported.

The 68yearold nuclear scientist, also known as “Fidelito” or Little Fidel because of how much he looked like his father, had initially been hospitalised and then continued treatment as an outpatient.

“Castro DiazBalart, who had been attended by a group of doctors for several months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicide this morning,” the Cubadebate website said on Thursday.

Fidelito, who had the highest public profile of all Castro’s chil dren, was born in 1949 out of his brief marriage to Mirta Diaz-Balart before he went on to topple a US-backed dictator and build a communistrun state on the doorstep of the United States during the Cold War.

Through his mother,

Castro DiazBalart was the cousin of some of Castro’s most bitter enemies in the Cuban American exile community, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart and former US congressman Lincoln DiazBalart.

He was also the subject of a dramatic custody dispute between the two families as a child.

Cuba scholars say his mother took him with her to the United States when he was five after announcing she wanted a divorce from Castro.

Castro was able to bring Fidelito back to Cuba after the 1959 revolution.

A multilingual nuclear physicist, Castro Diaz-Balart led Cuba’s nuclear programme from 1980 to 1992 and spearheaded the development of a nuclear plant on the Caribbean’s largest island until his father fired him.

Cuba halted its plant plans that same year due to a lack of funding after the collapse of Cuba’s trade and aid ties with the exSoviet bloc, and he largely disappeared from public view, appearing at the occasional scientific conference.

Fidelito had been working for his uncle President Raul Castro as a scientific counsellor to the Cuban Council of State and vicepresident of the Cuban Academy of Sciences at the time of his death.

Former British ambassador to Cuba Paul Hare said Castro Diaz-Balart had seemed “thoughtful, rather curious about the world beyond Cuba” at a dinner in Boston two years ago.

“But he seemed a bit weary about having to be a Castro, rather than himself.”