Spain becomes the refuge of the Castro family

The descendants of Fidel and Raúl Castro have been able to live, do business, and evade U.S. sanctions in Spain, Idalmis Menéndez, former daughter-in-law of the deceased dictator told the newspaper El Español.

Two of Fidel's sons, Alexis and Alejandro Castro Soto, travel to the peninsula relatively frequently to do business with Spanish businessmen from Catalonia and Galicia, claimed Menéndez.

"The Castro family's interests have been in Spain for many years, because they can't in the United States. They are also in Panama. They have been moving their assets for years because they are at risk," added the former wife of Alex Castro Soto del Valle.

Alexis and Alejandro own a textile company in Havana's elite residential area of Punto Cero "that pays neither electricity, water nor taxes," she added. They manufacture T-shirts like the ones used in demonstrations in support of the revolution, printed with slogans.

Fidel's first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, who at 93 still lives in Madrid with her daughter Mirta Núñez, has traveled to Cuba in recent decades to see her son Fidelito. The trips trips are organized by her former brother-in-law Raúl Castro.

Upon the death in 2016 of her first husband, Mirta Díaz-Balart broke her silence in a brief statement to El Mundo where she specified that she had never seen Fidel again since their divorce and that she regretted his passing

Her son often came to Spain on scientific, business, or family purposes and had an affectionate relationship with his mother's sisters.

At least five of Fidel Castro's grandchildren have been trained as scientists and technicians with postgraduate scholarships in Spanish public centers, according to El Español.

Two of the four children of Jorge Angel Castro Laborde, another of the dictator's offspring, studied in Salamanca: Lydia Amalia Castro Odio and Guido Jorge Castro Odio.

Lydia Amalia, a Hispanic philologist, was in Madrid at the Centro de Estudios de la Real Academia Española and the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, before becoming head of department at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Havana.

Software engineer Guido Jorge continues to live in Salamanca, as the head of his company, Global PC Desarrollos Informáticos.

Physicist Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, who committed suicide in 2018, had three children with Russian Natalia Smirnova, and all of them pursued graduate studies in Spanish universities and scientific centers.

The eldest, Mirta, born in 1974, is a full professor of mathematics at the University of Seville and has three children with a Spanish colleague (she has kindly declined to make a statement for this report).

Her younger brother, José Raúl (1985), did his PhD in Seville like Mirta and then settled in Madrid, where he is a researcher at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Nanoscience Foundation (IMDEA-Nanoscience).

The middle brother, Fidel Antonio, graduated in Nuclear Physics from the Institute of Applied Sciences and Technologies InSTEC in Havana. He then traveled to Spain, did a postgraduate degree in Cantabria, completed his doctoral thesis in France, and returned to the island, where he is a professor of Nuclear Physics and a researcher at the University of Computer Sciences.