Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Evil.

Powerful.

Uncompromising.

Ruthless.

Behind closed doors,

a private hell.

- (woman screams) - Tyrants often

deviate in their sexual behaviour.

- He fantasised about older women.

- He puts make up on.

- He had thousands of concubines.

- They were this glamourous, gun toting, sex objects.

MAN (over radio): Fire on designated targets.

NARRATOR: The psychological insights of the degenerate and deviant.

WORTHEN: He was obsessed with aphrodisiacs.

- It is typical of somebody who is sexually repressed.

- Power can change somebody.

- (crowd clamours) - (explosion booms)

- He was quite happy to precipitate World War Three.

- (air raid siren wails)

- The entire world on the edge of their seats

as the Cold War hurtled towards nuclear war.

NARRATOR: For nearly five decades, Fidel Castro ruled an island nation

just 90 miles off the coast of Miami with an iron grip,

taunting the United States with his revolutionary zeal.

- (speaking in Spanish)

NARRATOR: But behind closed doors,

another tale unfolded.

- He was a great, charismatic,

successful womaniser.

- There are numerous reports that have come out

that Castro had 35,000 lovers.

- Is that really possible?

How would you even have the time for that?

- (intriguing music)

NARRATOR: This country homestead on a vast sugarcane property

is the birthplace of one of the world's most notorious dictators.

His appetite for power

matched only by his desire for sex.

Born out of wedlock in 1930,

he was christened Fidel Alejandro Castro.

Castro's father, Angel, was a wealthy Spanish landowner.

From a young age Castro realised he was different from his siblings.

Whilst they shared the same parentage,

he was the product of his father's affair with the family cook.

A bastard child born into a rich family.

Might this have shaped the way Castro regarded marriage and sex?

- So he was growing up in a household

where his father was sleeping

with the servant who was his mother,

and I believe she didn't marry him,

she didn't marry the father until Castro was in his teens,

around 13, 14.

- Castro, I think, even though he would never admit it,

never escaped the fact that he was a bastard son

and you could see that this played a part

in his swing towards communism

because communism is, of course, anti-bourgeois society,

and bourgeois society wants husband, wife,

marriage and proper children,

not multiple polyamorous liaisons.

NARRATOR: But Castro was also born into a time of national turmoil.

1930s Cuba was in chaos.

The recession-hit government was unpopular.

The streets of Havana unsafe.

A rowdy coalition of the military and students

overthrew the government in 1933,

which began years of turmoil to which young Fidel was witness.

- His interest in sexual domination

map over very nicely onto his interests

in controlling his people,

and we can see that, sort of, each point

of his masculinity or his machismo

overlaps with these relationships

over women and over the people of Cuba.

We can't understand Fidel Castro

without understanding that ultimate drive for power and control.

NARRATOR: Educated at Jesuit schools,

Castro stood out as an athlete,

but also as a talented student with a rebellious streak.

- He went to Catholic institutions, a Jesuit institution,

and he was very much, I believe, affected by that in his upbringing.

His sense of guilt, his sense of...

..what is normal in sexual activity

and also his attitudes towards gays, which was negative.

I think that was all affected by his Jesuit upbringing.

NARRATOR: By the 1950s, post-World War Two Havana

had become once more a party town.

Tourists and movie stars flooded in from Miami,

bringing American dollars, Hollywood glamour

and their inevitable travel companions,

the mafia and corruption.

Organised crime was rife,

operating under the regime of corrupt dictator

Fugencio Batista.

- The relationship between Cuba and the United States of America

had historically been quite a close one,

especially geographically,

a matter of miles between the Cuban shoreline and Miami.

So much so that Havana was the playground

for the rich and famous of America.

People would go there to the clubs

and of course have their cigars and so on.

So, it really was the place to be.

REPORTER: The Monte Carlo of the Americas.

All this and the gaiety of a tropical night in Havana.

NARRATOR: At the same time as stars like Frank Sinatra

were living the high life in Havana,

Fidel Castro was studying law in the Cuban capital.

- Castro, being the charming guy that he was,

he quickly learned how to weaponise his power and control

and dominate anybody

that he interacted with, even from an early age.

- Castro's relationships with Western women

and his reported preference for blondes,

I think that's part of this macho, sportsman,

playboy-type image that he liked.

NARRATOR: Castro's priapic reputation started early.

At university, he juggled multiple sexual relationships simultaneously.

It's here that Castro first earned the nickname

"El Caballo", The Horse.

- And even in somewhat maybe a bit of a twisted way,

believing that he deserved that power

and utilising that dominance through the numerous women

that he engaged in many sexual relationships with.

- Tyrants often deviate in their sexual behaviour

because they can.

Because they deviate in all their other behaviours.

They deviate in the use of power.

NARRATOR: But there was one woman who caught Castro's eye:

Mirta Díaz-Balart, the daughter of a prominent Cuban politician.

He was taken by her beauty and her influence.

They married in 1948,

her father paying for their honeymoon

to the United States.

Castro's love-hate affair with America was about to begin.

COMMENTATOR: Oh, you'll hear much more about him later.

- (cheering)

COMMENTATOR: Yankee Stadium, New York.

NARRATOR: Despite their lifelong enmity,

Fidel Castro and the United States

shared a love of baseball.

He was a powerful pitcher who hated to lose.

Even after he became Cuba's national leader in 1959,

Castro never missed a chance to play ball.

COMMENTATOR: The unpredictable Castro dons a baseball uniform...

NARRATOR: And the American media always lapped it up.

COMMENTATOR: And the game is on. Castro pitching is credited

with striking out the three batters he faces.

It's one game the opposition really has to be careful.

Viva Fidel!

- Castro, when he was growing up, when he was at college,

absolutely loved sports, all sports.

He excelled at them, in particular baseball.

In fact, there is a rumour

that he was asked to play for the New York Yankees.

However, there's no documentary evidence to support this.

But he still enjoyed everything to do with sport.

NARRATOR: In 1949,

with Castro an outspoken lawyer representing the poor,

Mirta gave birth to their son, 'Fidelito'.

Castro's first "official" child.

The political turmoil in the country shows no sign of abating.

In 1952, a military coup brings the corrupt Batista

to power for a second time.

REPORTER: It was all too clear that if you doubted his intentions,

your fate would be the firing squad.

NARRATOR: As Castro became more deeply involved in radical politics,

he grew distant from his wife, Mirta.

And like his father,

openly had affairs with other women.

- He was attractive, he was a magnet,

he was charismatic,

and he would have been popular with women,

even if he had not been national leader.

- It's not like someone just wakes up one day

and says, "Oh, I'm gonna become a dictator

and I'm gonna become a voracious sexual deviant."

That's not how these things work.

We can see a long history

of emerging psychological and sociological impacts

that we can trace through someone's narrative.

NARRATOR: Fidel Castro's narrative was about to take a dramatic turn.

In 1953, he led a rebel attempt

to steal weapons from a barracks.

But Batista's forces were ready for them.

REPORTER: On July 26th, 1953,

the fortress was attacked by 165 revolutionaries.

Most of them were killed.

Fidel Castro led the detachment.

NARRATOR: Castro, the ringleader, and his brother Raul

were captured and put on trial.

Defiantly, he chose to defend himself.

At that time, under Batista's regime,

a death penalty would surely await.

But Castro got lucky.

His wife Mirta persuaded her father,

a cabinet minister in Batista's government,

to intervene.

Instead of a firing squad,

Castro was sentenced to 15 years in jail.

He would serve only two.

Castro's wife had saved his life.

He repaid her by running into the arms

of another man's wife.

Her name was Natalia Revuelta,

a charming Havana socialite whom he called Naty.

She was said to be the most beautiful woman in the capital.

- They had to be attractive. They had be seductive.

I think that he wanted intelligent women

really as a way of saying,

"You're intelligent but I'm more intelligent than you."

NARRATOR: But Naty was just a brief diversion.

In 1955, Castro fled to Mexico with his brother Raul.

It was here that Castro met a man

who would become his most trusted ally,

Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.

- Che Guevara was a Marxist doctor,

turned revolutionary,

and he shared Castro's vision for anti-imperialism,

for a revolution,

and they called themselves the 26th of July Movement.

This relationship between Che Guevara and Fidel Castro

was one of the most important in modern revolutionary history.

NARRATOR: But there was someone else

who played a key role in Fidel Castro's ambitions.

Celia Sanchez was Castro's political strategist

and, rumour has it, lover.

A year after they met, she saved Castro's life

after his failed attempt to return to Cuba.

While most of Castro's men were killed,

Celia mobilised the locals to hide Castro

and the remaining rebels lived to fight another day.

REPORTER: Castro's plan of action?

To fight by any means until the Batista regime is toppled.

NARRATOR: Castro re-grouped, living rough.

With Che Guevara, he stoked the embers of revolution

with a propaganda campaign run from his jungle office.

Town by town, the rebels took Cuba,

until the final blow came

on New Year's Eve 1958.

Realising defeat was inevitable,

Batista fled the country.

Fidel Castro became the leader of a new Cuba.

REPORTER: Then the temper of the throng changed

and an ugly mob reigns the streets,

its prime target the symbols of the overthrown regime.

The gambling casinos, the parking meters,

the homes and businesses of Batista's cohorts.

NARRATOR: Eight days later,

riding atop one of Batista's own tanks,

a triumphant Fidel Castro entered Havana.

Cuba was liberated,

and Castro was a national hero.

REPORTER: To the Cuban people and to the admiring world,

there could be no better way to start the new year.

- (singing in Spanish)

NARRATOR: Victory Castro-style included a white dove

that settled on his shoulder as he addressed his people.

Was this a sign from above or a stunt?

- He is this charismatic,

heroic, Cuban Castro,

with doves landing on him as a signal

that he is the chosen one.

REPORTER: Fidel Castro with the doves of peace

sitting on his shoulders as he surveys the crowd

that is tonight celebrating Cuba Libre.

- Now, what better image than this great man

who's now taken over from the bad dictator

and has doves landing on him?

- And this was taken as a sign by many people

of some kind of supernatural event.

What they didn't know

was that Castro and his girlfriend at the time

had practised this

and trained the doves to land on him.

So it was a staged event.

NARRATOR: But the new dictator wasn't interested in peace.

He was interested in retribution and revenge.

Soon after seizing power in 1959,

Fidel Castro went to work,

staging a mass public trial of former regime officials.

REPORTER: In Havana's sports palace the Castro Regime's controversial

showpiece trials get underway before a turbulent throng of 18,000.

NARRATOR: Castro did not attend the kangaroo court.

He was preoccupied with other matters.

- Since men have been in power,

over thousands of years, acted as dictators,

their political power

has translated into sexual power.

NARRATOR: Even as his captured enemies pleaded for their lives,

Castro's sexual conquests mounted.

REPORTER: Batista aide Major Sosso Blanco,

charged with 200 murders, faces a military tribunal.

Three judges still wearing the revolutionary jungle battle dress.

NARRATOR: During the trial of Major Blanco, a colonel in Batista's army,

a 12-year-old boy was brought forward as a witness.

The crowd, whipped into a frenzy,

erupted with chants of, "Kill him! Kill him!"

REPORTER: Emotions climb in the nine-hour trial

as the testimony piles up.

This woman charges Blanco murdered her husband.

The decision is death.

NARRATOR: The world reacted with outrage.

REPORTER: The executions, some 250 to date,

have been widely criticised by many as too hasty and summary.

- Fidel Castro treated his enemies brutally.

They were imprisoned, tortured.

They were put on public show trials.

They were even executed in public.

And his private police force, the G2,

became feared throughout the country.

REPORTER: Says Castro, the Cuban Revolutionary Government

has no reason to offer explanations to America or to anyone.

This is the biggest gathering and demonstration in Cuba's history.

Almost a million people are here.

There is Fidel Castro, the leader

and the cause of this demonstration.

The purpose of today's gathering is to show the whole world

that all Cubans are united in the rebel victory

and that all of them support the executions.

NARRATOR: Foreign leaders condemned the executions,

but that simply played into his hands.

Right or wrong, Castro now had their attention,

a formidable player on the world stage.

NARRATOR: Fidel Castro, now in power,

set up headquarters in the plush Havana Hilton.

The revolutionary leader now had a brand new propaganda plaything:

American television.

- We are against all kind of dictator.

That is our idea.

Nevertheless, class dictator, military dictator.

That is why we do not agree with communism.

NARRATOR: Communism was a dirty word in the United States

and Castro was happy to lie to their faces

if it meant victory in the court of public opinion.

- Dr Castro,

Senator Smathers of Florida says

that you have many communists in your government. Is that so?

NARRATOR: The charm offensive worked.

On a visit to New York, only four months after his victory,

the 32-year-old revolutionary received a rockstar welcome.

- In the end, he had to get an armed guard.

It took over 20 minutes to go 100 metres to the hotel doors

because everybody wanted a piece of Castro.

They wanted to meet him and talk to him and greet him.

NARRATOR: Castro was cool,

even if his dress sense was not everyone's idea of a statesman.

- What do you think of Castro?

- I think that if he follows through with the plans

that he said he will follow through, I think he will be an excellent

example of modern democracy.

However, I have one objection. I did see him on the street

the other night in front of the Times Building.

I think that he should come dressed like a gentleman

like the other government representatives do.

- You think he should wear a tie and perhaps a jacket, huh?

- Yes, I do. I really do.

NARRATOR: Castro loved the attention,

and now he had the ear of the world.

- Castro, just like all tyrants, was an extreme narcissist.

He was an egomaniac.

He was self-indulgent, hedonistic.

He would have indulged in the news stories themselves.

- Good evening, my fellow citizens.

NARRATOR: The United States soon had

its own charismatic young leader, John F. Kennedy.

He didn't trust Castro

and his closening ties with the Soviet Union.

Cuba was starting to look every bit a communist state.

- It wasn't really until he took control of Cuba

that these socialist leanings started to show,

and really, that was as a reaction to the way

that the United States reacted to him coming into power.

So it's almost like one fed the other.

Their distrust of him made him build his socialist leanings,

which made them ever more distrustful.

NARRATOR: The Cold War was in full swing

and tensions between the US and the Soviet Union

were at an all-time high.

- So Castro realised

that to really get the reins of power,

which would have been quite insecure

if he'd followed the path that was predicted,

turned to the communists.

- The politics of Cuba changed and Cuba became communist,

and of course, during the Cold War, that was a dirty word,

especially for the Americans.

And so tensions started to grow between Cuba and the United States,

and at times, all eyes were on Cuba.

NARRATOR: The United States suddenly had an unpredictable dictator

with close ties to the Soviet Union,

just 90 miles from their shores.

Cuba was now a ticking time bomb.

President Kennedy decided Castro had to go.

In 1961, the CIA, working with Cuban exiles,

began training an invasion force.

The mission? To overthrow Castro

and restore a government sympathetic to the United States.

The landing location? The Bay of Pigs.

- (explosions boom)

REPORTER: On Monday April 17th, in the early hours of the morning...

NARRATOR: The invasion was a disaster.

Castro's forces were ready for them.

He captured or killed nearly all who landed,

including American personnel.

REPORTER: The National Revolutionary Militia

took the last positions the invaders held.

The revolution was victorious,

but the victory was bought with precious lives.

- Castro's readiness was rather unexpected by the American forces

and it was just completely unexpected

that America would be defeated

and that Castro would rise triumphant.

And it really consolidated his position on the world stage

that he and Cuba were ready for anything.

NARRATOR: To the Cuban people, Castro's victory

made him an even greater hero.

He had humiliated the mighty United States.

REPORTER: The enemy suffered complete defeat.

The mercenary remnants give up their arms.

- I have decided in the last 24 hours

to discuss briefly at this time

the recent events in Cuba.

- America was completely humiliated at the Bay of Pigs.

It made Castro CIA enemy number one.

NARRATOR: Castro seemed to be enjoying his notoriety,

hiding in plain sight.

While in private, his sexual conquests

continued at a frenetic rate.

- Fidel had a voracious sexual appetite.

There are even reports that he would sleep with

at least two women a day;

one at lunch, one at dinner,

sometimes even breakfast.

Some of these women would come willingly.

He was very charming, charismatic.

Women would sort of fawn after him because of his charm.

But if they weren't, no bother to him

because he would just have his men scour the community for women

and bring them back to him.

- Well, I think he epitomised the macho male

in that he liked having lots of mistresses.

He didn't treat them very well.

And the kind of women he went for are...

well, what would you call them? They were good trophies.

They were beautiful. They were often women

you couldn't normally get in Cuban society.

Like, they could be American or they could be wealthy and glamorous.

So, all of this was to boost the image

of the super macho male.

NARRATOR: Having humiliated the United States in the Bay Of Pigs,

Castro then pursued as many American women as he could.

- And it sort of was a way of

tweaking the tail of giant America.

Saying that, "Look, I can have your women."

And it was something that I think he liked to do.

NARRATOR: As if to thumb his nose at the United States

and almost as if in competition with his young rival in the White House,

Castro mixed with some of Hollywood's biggest stars.

None bigger, at the time,

than screen seductress, Ava Gardner.

- Because of that complicated relationship

with Cuba and the United States,

many of the women that he sought after to dominate

were Hollywood starlets, American women

that he was able to realise as a symbol for his power.

- Castro, like all dictators,

image and symbolism was terribly important,

and you have to keep showing this to the world.

NARRATOR: Ava Gardner had a long-standing love affair with Cuba.

She and Frank Sinatra had honeymooned there,

and Gardner was a regular house guest

at Ernest Hemmingway's residence in Havana.

A political junkie,

Gardner was drawn to the charismatic leader

on her visit to Cuba in 1959.

One complication:

Castro was already living with another lover half his age,

German-born Marita Lorenz.

- Well, of course you've got to look at the women that Castro had.

There were always overlaps.

Cuban society gossips as much as any others, possibly even more.

So everybody had their ideas of who was doing what with whom.

They were always measuring themselves

not only against the dictator, but against the competitors.

And where do I stand and who is going to knock me off

and what have I got to do to maintain my position?

NARRATOR: The story goes that Marita confronted her rival

Ava Gardner in the lobby of the Havana Hilton.

It's not clear who slapped who,

but Castro's guards had to separate them.

Marita fled the country.

In 1960, the CIA tracked Marita down in Miami

and recruited her to attempt an assassination of her former lover.

The plan was for Marita to regain Castro's trust,

and then to slip a vial of poison into his drink.

Marita did return to Castro's bedroom,

but Castro saw through the plot.

The story goes that he handed her a gun and said,

"If you are going to kill me, do it now."

She couldn't go through with it.

- It's almost as if he couldn't handle the amount of power

that he had ultimately,

and this pushed him over the edge

into a spiralling existence

as an egomaniac, a narcissist,

a power-hungry person.

NARRATOR: The Cuban dictator's appetite for Western women

was matched only by his hunger for power.

But instead of building an alliance with the United States,

Castro chose to make friends with his enemy's greatest enemy.

- He encouraged the Soviets

to bring the nuclear bombs to Cuba.

NARRATOR: The Cold War was more than a conflict of ideologies.

In the early 1960s, it was a fast, escalating arms race,

with intercontinental nuclear technology

now at the fingertips of US President John F. Kennedy

and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

As the world held its breath,

it was Fidel Castro with his finger on the trigger of World War Three.

In October 1962,

Khrushchev and Castro made their move.

A civilian freight ship was heading towards Cuba,

secretly carrying nuclear missiles.

Soviet technicians and military construction

were detected on the island by US spy planes.

America was suddenly in striking distance of a nuclear attack.

- Within the past week,

unmistakable evidence has established the fact

that a series of offensive missile sites

is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.

NARRATOR: With US naval forces blockading Cuba,

Castro remained defiant.

WORTHEN: He wanted to be the big guy. That was his goal.

And that meant controlling the people and controlling his women.

REPORTER: As in the past, these rallies are designed

to whip up hate of what Castro calls "Yankee imperialistic war mongers."

To suggestions that a UN team inspect missile sites,

Castro has said that they had better come ready for combat.

He went on to call President Kennedy a pirate

for setting up the quarantine.

NARRATOR: On October 14,

a ballistic missile was detected at a Cuban launch site.

The world reached a nuclear flashpoint.

- It shall be the policy of this nation

to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba

against any nation in the Western Hemisphere

as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States

requiring a full retaliatory response

upon the Soviet Union.

NARRATOR: Castro put his entire population on notice.

America could invade at any moment.

But at the eleventh hour, behind Castro's back,

Kennedy and Khrushchev struck a deal.

The Soviets would remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba

in exchange for the US promise not to invade the island

and the removal of US missiles in Turkey.

The Soviet Union had sold Castro out.

- When the Soviets started saying, "Look, we're pulling back

after the whole business,"

he was the one who wanted them to stay.

REPORTER: Under Navy surveillance,

the missiles that had threatened the US

went back where they came from.

NARRATOR: Castro was left in the cold by his Soviet paymasters

and now vulnerable.

- The effective truce between Khruschev and Kennedy

was made without Castro's knowledge or say so,

and Castro was furious.

How had he been effectively left out of this international decision?

NARRATOR: Feeling betrayed, he lashed out,

calling the Soviets weak

and demanding a nuclear strike against the US.

A move that alarmed both Washington and Moscow.

- He was quite happy to precipitate World War Three

because that fitted with his self-image of megalomania.

He didn't know any restraint in that sense.

- He was quite happy to be the person who started World War Three

and almost who pressed that button.

But that control was taken away from him by the super powers.

NARRATOR: Castro was more than an upstart despot.

He had led the United States and the Soviet Union

to the brink of a World War,

and given the chance, would do it again.

NARRATOR: Through the 1960s and 70s,

the CIA is believed to have orchestrated

more than 600 plots to kill Fidel Castro.

- The CIA's attempted assassinations of Castro are interesting

not only because of the numerous attempts made on his life,

but the rather interesting and varied ways in which

they tried to take his life. - (cigar explodes)

- Yeah, somebody said, "Hey, you know, he smokes cigars.

What if we can smuggle some cigars that will explode in his face?"

Hey, let's look at it.

Yes, there were a lot of plots that came on the table.

NARRATOR: A poison-laced, flesh-eating wetsuit.

- He was a big diver, he loved scuba diving.

You know, they figured they knew the area where he would go,

that they could, you know, find some way to poison the air in his tank

or cause an embolism or God knows what.

NARRATOR: The attempts were as farcical as they were ingenious.

- These are all things that get tabled in the Agency.

You know, when people sit around and they're brainstorming,

there's a lot of stupid stuff that comes out.

There's a lot of brilliant stuff that comes out.

REPORTER: Also reports CIA involvement

in eight assassination plots against Castro.

NARRATOR: With his life in danger every day,

Castro's political life became more frantic,

and so did his sex life.

- As Castro's tenure extended,

you would expect his paranoia increased and it did increase.

You can see it from the repression of Cuba in general.

And the same thing would apply to his women.

He would have his affairs,

but I would think he would be more distant

and quicker to dispose of them,

and certainly have less trust in them.

And any suspicion that they are dealing with the other side and that

would really lead to a lot of hostility.

NARRATOR: Somehow, Castro survived.

Among the very few people he trusted was his second wife.

Someone he kept from public view for four decades.

A schoolteacher named Dalia Soto del Valle.

Few people knew Dalia even existed.

But throughout their relationship,

Castro's affairs continued in numbers that defy belief.

- It's been said that

Castro slept with 35,000 women,

and it's mathematically possible.

And if we go back to Genghis Khan and genetic testing

that has shown that Genghis Khan really did sleep with enormous...

tens of thousands of women,

yes, it's possible Castro did the same,

but I doubt it, I doubt it very much.

- Is that really possible?

How would you even have the time for that?

- Where do they get these numbers? Who knows?

It's not as if somebody was having a tally mark or a tick box

each time one of these women came through.

But it speaks to the exorbitancy of his life,

just the ultimate self-indulgence

that was Castro.

- Look at this man. What a man he is,

and of course how these acolytes would put it out to everybody.

This is part of his image. He's a superman.

NARRATOR: Whatever her reasons, Dalia stuck by Castro.

They married 20 years into their relationship

and she bore him five sons.

By 1980,

Castro's Cuba was crumbling.

US sanctions crippled Cuba's economy.

Food and basic supplies were scarce.

Frustration grew.

REPORTER: Every day in Miami,

Cuban Americans stage their anti-Castro rallies,

hoping this crisis might lead to his downfall.

- So there was a growing air of dissent in Cuba.

Castro wanted to get rid of these people,

basically saying, "If you don't like it here,

go to the United States, go to Miami."

NARRATOR: But Castro doubled down.

In April 1980,

with thousands of Cuban citizens seeking asylum

at the Peruvian embassy in Havana,

Castro made a stunning announcement:

anyone who wanted to leave Cuba

could do so from the Port of Mariel.

But as always with Fidel, there was a catch.

- He was very calculated in the people that he sent,

and effectively emptied his prisons

and sent the ne'er-do-wells

from Cuba to the United States.

It was an enormous embarrassment for the States,

and had a real long-lasting effect

on the political landscape there.

- He clears his jails of the most violent criminals that they had.

You know, until then, I had never seen a person with a tattoo on their

face or on their lips or something like that. That didn't exist.

And all of a sudden, you have thousands of these guys

coming in with some legitimate refugees,

because there were a lot of legitimate people that came.

NARRATOR: Over the next five months, more than 125,000 Cubans

set sail on makeshift craft for the United States.

REPORTER: It's estimated up to a third of the Cubans

who put to sea drowned. Now there are 50 coast guard

and Navy vessels patrolling the waters

and 30 planes are dropping food and water

to the refugees below them.

- It was known as the Mariel boatlift,

and all of a sudden, America had a very big problem.

- The level of criminality in South Florida

quadrupled within a few months.

And within three or four years,

the majority of those hoods were either dead or in jail.

So there's a movie called Scarface,

which is kind of tres surjoue,

but the Hollywood version of what was going on.

But it wasn't too far-fetched either.

NARRATOR: It was an international stunt

with far-reaching consequences.

Castro, without an international ally,

was now an empty shell of a dictator.

The tyrant was fading.

But the sexual predator was still at large.

- He had sort of a bit of a revolving door to his bedroom.

He, Castro was not interested in investing in relationships

with women for the most part,

and once he was done with them, they would go on their way.

So in terms of valuing women,

Castro had a value for them, but it was short-lived

to, in many cases, a singular sexual experience.

He ultimately couldn't handle the amount of power that he had

and he fed into it,

and became this monster to the people around him,

surely that nobody could recognise

if they had met the young university student in the years prior.

NARRATOR: In the end, ill health finally did

what no bullet or political coup had managed.

After nearly five decades in power,

Fidel Castro handed over the reins to his brother Raul

in 2008.

He died eight years later at the age of 90.

- Castro's story reminds us that

power can change somebody.

It can turn somebody into an egomaniac,

a person that lacks empathy,

and can feed into a very scary narrative,

and we see that with Castro.

- He was a revolutionary who became a staunch Marxist,

public enemy number one to the CIA,

but in the end, basically a bit of a failure.

NARRATOR: Whether he slept with 35,000 women,

bedded Hollywood starlets, or as he liked to portray,

enjoyed the simple life with his schoolteacher wife,

the line between notoriety and mythology

are never more blurred than when it comes to Fidel Castro.

- He lived the life of an elite in Cuba.

But in terms of what he did for Cuba,

I believe it was a failure.

He couldn't control behaviour the way he thought he could,

and so in the end, Cuba is nowhere near

the society he wanted it to be.

- He must have known, as his last days approached,

that on the surface he had stood up to America

and kept it going, but at another level,

he knew it wasn't going to last.

No thousand-year Reich here.

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