Dr. Ruthless: Castro On Love, Sex

On the heels of his old love letters, recently made public by a daughter scorned, from Havana here comes Fidel, the love doctor.

Dr. Ruth, he’s not.

“Women should never show a man that they love him too much because when a man knows they are in love with him, he acts with self-importance,” Fidel Castro says in an unprecedented interview about personal matters published recently in the weekly Juventud Rebelde. “Indifference is the fuel of love.”

Talk about living behind the Iron Curtain.

The one-page, question-and-answer piece comes a few weeks after Castro’s estranged daughter Alina Fernandez published six of Castro’s letters from prison to his lover Naty Revuelta in the 1950s. Fernandez was born of their affair. In the interview, Castro appears to acknowledge the letters, saying they were written “in the passion of distance.”

“Distance always exults love,” he says.

So here is The Truth About Love and Cuban Women, according to Castro:

“No love is equal to another,” he philosophizes. “Love has a lot to do with chemistry, and there are as many loves as there are chemistries (with people). Love also needs tactics. It’s a contradiction, but without contradictions, it is not fed. There are short loves, longer ones, more peaceful ones … but there must always be passion.”

An interviewer asks him what’s distinctive about the Cuban woman?

“She is very sweet,” Castro replies.

And Cuban men?

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you … I’ve never had a Cuban boyfriend,” Castro answers and they all laugh.

Has a woman ever made him lose his patience?

“All of them,” Castro says.

Women should not romance men, he says. “I don’t recommend it, I don’t feel it is prudent, even though I must admit it’s pleasant - if you like the girl.”

Asked if he was still in love, Castro, 70, replies that he’s “an eternal lover of the female gender … I fall in love easily, but now in a more platonic way.”