Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, December 23, 1993                   TAG: 9312230116
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

CASTRO'S DAUGHTER FLEES CUBA

Alina Fernandez Revuelta arrived Tuesday in Atlanta on a flight from Spain after her asylum request was granted by the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, said State Department spokesman David Johnson.

Fernandez, 37, is personally and politically estranged from her father, who conceived her out of wedlock when he was a young revolutionary.

She has sought to leave Cuba for years, denouncing her father as "a tyrant" and describing Cuban communism as "a dead-end street." She fled alone, leaving her 15-year-old daughter in Havana.

Her flight is a small but significant political statement against Castro and his increasingly bedraggled 35-year-old government.

Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, Cuba's economy, which relied heavily on subsidies from the Soviet Union, has been in a steep decline.

This year's sugar harvest was the smallest in 30 years. Annual export revenues have fallen from more than $5 billion to $1.6 billion.

The CIA reported this summer that "the impact of the economic crisis on the populace has been devastating." Food shortages have caused malnutrition and disease, public transportation has collapsed and half the labor force is looking for work, the agency reported.

Political resistance to Castro is becoming louder and freer. On Friday, witnesses said, thousands of demonstrators shouting "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" marched 12 miles from Havana to a shrine devoted to Lazarus, the biblical figure who rose from the dead.

"This is not just an economic crisis," said Jose Cardenas, a spokesman for the Cuban American National Foundation, a Washington research group opposed to Castro.

"It's something more profound. There is a political, spiritual, social crisis on the island. And that is why Alina Fernandez is important. She needed something more and that was freedom."

Castro has neither acknowledged nor denied fathering Fernandez, who never took his surname or had a relationship with him, according to biographers of the Cuban leader.

Her mother, Natalia Revuelta, a wealthy, socially prominent and well-educated woman still living in Cuba, met Castro in November 1952, according to Tad Szulc's biography, "Fidel: A Critical Portrait" (William Morrow and Company, 1986).

Though married to a prominent surgeon, a heart specialist, Revuelta fell in love with the young revolutionary as well as with his revolution.