2024-07-08 10:14:12
Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, has died in Madrid at the age of 95. This was announced on July 6 by her grandson Fidel Antonio Castro Smirnov, the Russian “Izvestia” reported.
“Surrounded by much love, my dear grandmother Myrta Diaz-Balart Gutierrez passed away. A great woman has left us,” he wrote on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
Mirta Díaz-Balart was born in Havana in 1928 in an influential family, The Washington Post specifies. She met Fidel Castro while attending the University of Havana, where she studied philosophy and literature. They married in 1948 and had a son, Fidel (known as Fidelito) in 1949, who committed suicide in 2018.
In 1955, she and Castro divorced after a failed coup attempt. The politician fled to Mexico City, and Díaz-Balart and his son lived for some time in the United States. During this period, during Fidelito’s journey to his father, he did not allow his son to leave. The woman had to hire a team to kidnap the boy and take him to Cuba.
Díaz-Balart then married Emil Nunez Blanco and they moved to Spain, reports Diario de Cuba. It is known that Fidelito was sent to study in the USSR. In 1974, he graduated from the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University with a degree in nuclear physics. Blanco died in 2006, and he and Diaz-Balart had two daughters.
Mirta Díaz-Balart is Castro’s only wife with whom he has an official marriage.