Havana - The eldest son of late Cuban
revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart,
committed suicide on Thursday aged 68 after being treated for
months for depression, Cuban state-run media reported.
Castro Diaz-Balart, also known as "Fidelito", or Little
Fidel, because of how much he looked like his father, had
initially been hospitalised for depression and then continued
treatment as an outpatient.
"Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of
doctors for several months due to a state of profound
depression, committed suicide this morning," Cubadebate website
said.
Fidelito was born in 1949 out of his father's brief marriage
to Mirta Diaz-Balart before he went on to topple a U.S.-backed
dictator and build a communist-run state on the doorstep of the
United States during the Cold War.
Through his mother, he was the cousin of some of Castro's
most bitter enemies in the Cuban American exile community, U.S.
Representative Mario Diaz-Balart and former U.S. congressman
Lincoln Diaz-Balart.
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 aged five after announcing she wanted a
divorce from Castro, while he was imprisoned for an attack on
the Moncada military barracks in Santiago.
Castro was able to bring Fidelito back to Cuba after the
1959 revolution.
A nuclear physicist who studied in the former Soviet Union,
Castro Diaz-Balart had been working as a scientific counselor to
the Cuban Council of State and Vice-president of the Cuban
Academy of Sciences at the time of his death.
Previously, from 1980 to 1992, he was head of Cuba's
national nuclear programme, 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 because of a lack
of funding after the collapse of Cuba's trade and aid ties with
the ex-Soviet bloc and Castro Diaz-Balart largely disappeared
from public view, appearing at the occasional scientific
conference or diplomatic event.
A former British ambassador to Cuba, Paul Hare, who lectures
at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, said he
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," Hare said.
His death came just over a year after that of his father on
November 25, 2016, aged 90.