Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

  The famous Korean movie actress Hong Yung-hui was introduced to Kim Chong-il by an aide who knew his boss’s tastes. Consenting to become his mistress earned her the leading role in the revolutionary opera A Flowerselling Maiden and she was designated “a people’s actress” — the highest accolade that the profession can bestow. She also acted as hostess at his parties and eventually married a man that Kim Chong-il picked out for her.

  In 1990, he seduced the nineteen-year-old daughter of the director of the North Korean Judo Association. She was a member of the Mansudae Art Troupe and produced another daughter for Kim Chong-il.

  In May 1991, a new actress, a twenty-year-old named Chung Hye-sun, appeared in a leading role in a drama series, Skylark, on Pyongyang’s Central TV station. She bore an uncanny likeness to Kim Chong-il’s mother, Kim Jong-suk. Kim Chong-il had her installed in a luxurious villa near Mount Daesung in an exclusive suburb of Pyongyang. She now drives around in a MercedesBenz that he provided.

  But Kim Chong-il was not always so kind. He had one lover, pretty young actress Wu In-hui, executed by firing squad in front of a crowd of five thousand. She had been charged with having affairs with other men, against Kim Chong-il’s specific instructions.

  However, Kim Chong-il’s real passion is for foreign relations. In 1991, he invited a number of female Russian singers and bands to North Korea. They were paid large sums of foreign currency to perform for him at his villa. A Russian girl and her vocal group, who were employed to amuse Kim Chong-il at his villa during Kim 11-Bung’s eightieth birthday celebrations, reportedly had group sex with him and his aides. Scandinavian women have also been offered large sums of money to attend Kim Chong-il at his villa.

  But Kim Il-sung and Kim Chong-il’s crowning achievement was to turn the entire Korean Communist Party into a huge pimping system. Women were recruited from all over the country and assigned to various “song and dance”, “happiness” and “satisfaction” teams. They were housed in secluded villas for the exclusive use of Kim Il-sung and Kim Chong-il.

  Each of these different “pleasure” teams had its own function. As its name suggests, the “song and dance” teams would sing, play musical instruments and dance for the Kims. The “happiness” teams relieved their fatigue by means of massage, while the “satisfaction” teams provided sexual fulfilment. At any one time, there were about two thousand young women in these pleasure teams, housed in villas or special hotels around the country.

  The General Bodyguard Bureau was in charge of recruitment. Selection teams, appointed by local branches of the Communist Party, picked out good-looking women around the age of twenty and over the height of 5 feet 3 inches. The girls had to have a “pure ideological and social background”. Once picked for a pleasure team, a woman had no option but to accept, even if her parents were Party officials; she was not allowed to complain.

  Candidates were also selected annually from the students of city and provincial art colleges. One eighteen-year-old student studying music at Kimhyonjik Teachers” College was forcibly “enrolled” as a member of a pleasure team around 1980. She was sent to Pyongang Music and Dance University to study the violin before being assigned to a “song and dance” team. Another girl, on her way home from work, was enrolled off the streets by a Party official. Around 1989, the National Sports Commission was instructed to provide ten girls from the gymnastics team to become pleasure-team members. Later foreign women were recruited from Hong Kong, Macao and the Middle East. Some were paid; others were simply kidnapped. They were confined to villas and gave up all hope of returning home.

  Once local Party organizations had supplied their annual crop of recruits, Central Party Headquarters sorted out the most promising candidates to send to the Namsan Dispensary, where they underwent rigorous physical and ideological examination.

  The selection of “happiness” teams first began when a special one year course in massage was organized at the Red Cross hospital in Pyonyang. Thirty young women were enrolled. Later, “happiness” team members were sent to the Soviet Union for training, before being assigned to one of the Kims” residences.

  The “satisfaction” teams and “song and dance” teams were given six months” training. They had to perform every Saturday night at parties hosted by Kim Chong-il. Each party had a geographical theme — Tokyo night, Parisian night, Persian night, Indian night — and the teams had to act as if they came from those places.

  After six months in the pleasure teams, the women were promoted to the rank of second lieutenant in the General Bodyguard Bureau and sent abroad for two weeks.

  Members of pleasure teams lived in luxurious quarters and ate only the best food imported from Japan. Those who had sexual contact with Kim Il-sung or Kim Chong-il were presented with a Swiss watch with their partner’s name engraved on it. Special favourites were given cars and were, it was said, treated better than cabinet ministers.

  Pleasure-team members had to serve until they were twenty-five, when they were allowed to marry bodyguard officers or holders of national-merit medals. They were, of course, instructed to keep quiet about their pleasure team activities, but everyone knew what was going on. When pleasure-team members were allowed home visits, Kim Chong-il would alert local Party members who would treat the girl like a princess.

  Towards the end of his life, Kim Il-sung made an even more sinister use of this system of recruitment. The Party were instructed to supply him with young virgins. They were forced to donate blood which would be transfused into Kim Il-sung’s body in the hope that it would prolong his life.

  8. CUBA’S CASANOVA

  Cuba is a sexy place. Forget baseball, sex is Cuba’s national sport. It is the only real escape from the hardships of daily life. Promiscuity and extramarital sex are rife. Partners are swapped so often that few bother to get married. In 1989, 61.2 per cent of babies were born out of wedlock and there are over 160,000 abortions a year, a third of them performed on teenagers.

  Posadas — so-called “lovers” hotels — are everywhere. For five pesos, the equivalent of fifty U.S. cents, you get three hours of privacy. When your time is up, the phone rings and someone on the other end says: “Turno.”

  Prostitution is widespread, overt and mostly amateur. Women will go to bed for a bottle of shampoo or a new pair of jeans. Businessmen in their sixties can be seen with beautiful brown-skinned girls young enough to be their granddaughters.

  Standing high above this sexual maelstrom is a tall bearded figure in a green army uniform. He seems to be the last of the ascetics. Certainly no woman shares the spotlight with him. How different it could all have been. Over the years, there have been one or two prime candidates for the position of First Lady of the Republic of Cuba.

  Fidel Castro is the illegitimate son of Angel Castro, a successful sugar planter, and a fifteen-year-old scullery maid, Lina Ruz. Angel had a wife back home in Galicia, so he could not marry Fidel’s mother. It was not uncommon for Spanish immigrants to have a second family in Cuba.

  Although Fidel was not baptized, he was brought up by priests who instilled in him a fear of sex, masturbation and homosexuality. He never had a girlfriend until he went to university to study law. There, he was dating two sisters when his friend and classmate Rafael Dmaz Balart introduced him to his sister, Mirta. She was a philosophy student. They met in the cafeteria. It was love at first sight.

  Castro was still very shy with women and he hated dancing, but he broke off from political meetings to go out on dates with Mirta. They were chaperoned wherever they went. She had green eyes and dark blonde hair, and was his first sweetheart.

  Mirta came from one of the wealthiest families on Cuba and were extremely well connected. Her parents were a little worried when they realized that they were about to acquire a son-in-law who had the reputation on the campus of being a gangster. He had led a protest against fare increases that had resulted in the burning of buses and he had twice been accused of murder. But Fidel and Mirta were very much in love and they
married in 1948. Castro’s father Angel was delighted that his son had made such an advantageous union and paid for a lengthy honeymoon in America. Castro even considered staying on in the U.S. to study at Columbia University, but the politics of Cuba drew him back.

  Back in Cuba life was hard, and Castro soon had a new mouth to feed, a son named Fidelito. Mirta was constantly frustrated by Castro’s refusal to work. He spent his tame politicking; he even slept with a woman with a badly pock-marked face because she controlled key Party votes, casting her aside when her usefulness was over. But Mina stood by him, intervening to save his life when he was arrested for armed insurrection.

  However, he was already having an affair with another woman, Natalia “Nati” Revuelta. A fellow student at the university, she was a striking green-eyed blonde who moved in aristocratic circles. During her life she had scarcely put a foot wrong. She had studied at a Catholic girls” school in Philadelphia, worked at the U.S. embassy and Esso. She was a member of the Havana Yacht Club and Country Club, and was married to a prominent heart specialist, Orlando Fernandez. Now she wanted some excitement. She first saw Castro when he was addressing a political meeting at the university and found him charismatic and sexy.

  After an unsuccessful uprising in 1953, Castro was sentenced to 15 years” imprisonment, but he was released under an amnesty within the year. During his time in jail, Castro wrote passionate love letters to Nati.

  “Love is like a diamond,” he wrote, “the hardest and purest of all minerals, able to scratch anything; it is not perfect until all its edges have been cut and shaped. Then it sparkles from all angles with an incomparable radiance. The metaphor would be perfect if the diamond, once buffed and polished, would grow bigger and bigger. A genuine love is based on many feelings, not just one, and they gradually balance each other off, each reflecting the light of the others.”

  While Castro was pouring out his heart to Nati, Mirta was using her influence to have his conditions improved. Then Castro did what every prisoner knew you should not do — he wrote to Nati and Mirta on the same day. To no one’s surprise, the two letters got mixed up.

  Although Mirta was hurt by Castro’s passion for another woman, she tried to woo him back during prison visits, but he divorced her on his release — for political reasons, he said. Her family was too close to the Batista regime he was seeking to bring down. Her brother, his former friend and classmate Rafael, was Minister of the Interior in charge of public order and Mirta herself had taken a botella — a government job which earns pay without any work having to be done — to support herself and their son while Castro was in jail.

  Castro’s relationship with Nati became very public, but when they had a baby, Alina, they gave her Nati’s husband’s surname, Fernandez. Back in the 1950s, Cuba’s attitude to illegitimacy was not nearly as liberal as it is now.

  After spending some time in the U.S., Castro headed for Mexico in 1956 where he assembled a small band of men and a cache of arms ready for the overthrow of Batista; but when the Mexican authorities found out, he was arrested. In jail, he was visited by Teresa Casuso, a Cuban woman who had lived in exile in Mexico for more than a decade. She was a writer. Her husband had been killed, fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. She was forty and was attracted to the young Castro, who she saw as a romantic young renegade. When she met him, she thought that here was a man who needed someone to look after him.

  Although her feelings were in some way reciprocated, Teresa had made a mistake in bringing with her a young house guest, sixteen-year-old Isabel Custudio. Her parents, both famous Cuban actors, were touring the country.

  “She looked like an elegant model, with the rims of her enormous, innocent, greenish-brown eyes darkly accented in the Italian fashion,” Teresa said. “On that day, her hair was its natural colour of dark gold.”

  Castro was immediately smitten. After his release from jail, he visited Teresa Casuso’s house regularly. They talked endlessly about revolution. When she agreed to keep a few things for him, she found him stashing guns in her closets. But Teresa suspected the real reason he was coming around was to see Isabel.

  “He sought her out with a youthful effusiveness and impetuosity that both startled and amused her,” Teresa said.

  Isabel was busy though, studying at the university in the mornings, working in the afternoons and attending political meetings in the evenings. When Castro turned up at Teresa’s house, she was often out. In fact, Isabel was avoiding him. He soon twigged and, one morning, he turned up really early, before she had left.

  “When I started to leave the house, he was there waiting,” she recalled later. “We looked at each other and laughed, because his trick was just as obvious as mine. It was a very funny encounter, and he offered to drive me to the university.”

  From then on, they were almost never apart. He always wore clean shirts and his suits were freshly pressed, and he made his advances with all the tenacity of a guerrilla leader.

  “He treated me like a princess,” Isabel said, “with a fine and delicate love, just as a man should. I was like a doll, or porcelain. And he was very pre-occupied with the image that I projected. He told me that it was important that I maintain an image equal to his.”

  After securing the approval of her parents, he asked her to marry him. She accepted.

  Using money that had been donated to the revolution, he bombarded her with expensive presents — new clothes, shoes, French perfume and a modest bathing suit to replace her rather revealing bikini (which infuriated him). He also planned to take her on the reckless assault on Cuba he was organizing. One day, she would be the “First Lady of Cuba” his men said.

  But Isabel wanted romance not danger. Sailing across the Gulf of Mexico with a boat-load of guerrilla fighters was not her idea of a honeymoon. So when a former fiance returned to Mexico City and asked her again to marry him, she accepted. She left the next day and, for years, Castro could not even bring himself to mention her name.

  After Isabel left, he stopped washing. His clothes were no longer kept clean and neat. He did not go out. All he did all day was to aim his favourite rifle at the TV antenna across the way.

  Castro wrote to Mirta, asking her to let him see sevenyear-old Fidelito. He promised to return him to her custody within two weeks, but he had no intention of doing that. In a letter to the Mexican newspapers he said that he could not return Fidelito “into the hands of my most ferocious enemies and detractors, who… outraged my home and sacrificed it to the bloody tyranny which they serve”. When Castro and his men set off on their antiquated wooden yacht, the Granma, on their historic mission to liberate Cuba, Mirta came to Mexico and snatched Fidelito back.

  In December 1956, Castro landed his eighty-two-man expeditionary force on Cuba. They were annihilated in their first attack. The few survivors scattered and Castro took refuge in the Sierra Maestra. From there he got word to Nati, asking her to join him in the mountains. She, too, could become the “First Lady of the Cuban Revolution”. She refused, saying that she could not leave their baby.

  One woman who did join him was Celia Sanchez. She was the daughter of a doctor from Manzanillo who had helped coordinate the underground movement in eastern Cuba. She came to the Sierra Maestra to organize the camp and control the millions of dollars the guerrillas had collected in “revolutionary taxes”. She also shared Castro’s bed. Their letters are full of affection though none of the passion that he displayed in his correspondence with Nati. Their time in the Sierra Maestra together was the beginning of a relationship that lasted for twenty years. After the revolution, she took the apartment below his in Havana, but Castro would be found, as often as not, sprawled out on her bed. If anyone deserves to be called “First Lady of the Cuban Revolution”, it is Celia Sanchez.

  After two years in the mountains and a ceaseless guerrilla campaign, Castro successfully launched a full-scale offensive against Batista’s police state. He celebrated by having an affair with Gloria Gaitan, known
as “the Dark Rose of Bogota”. She was the beautiful daughter of the murdered Bolivian revolutionary leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Castro had first met her in Bogota in 1948. The affair continued for several years, even though she was married to a university professor. One day Castro asked: “What do you do in bed with this Greek philosopher who is your husband?”

  “He is a very intelligent man,” she replied.

  “Obviously, but if Karl Marx were a woman, I would not marry him.”

  When Castro came to power, Nati’s husband left for exile in the United States. Castro would visit Nati and as he now openly admitted — his daughter in their mansion, or stay with them in their beach house in Varadero. He gave Nati a number of government jobs and a veteran’s pension. When the relationship cooled, he sent mother and daughter to Paris to work in the Cuban embassy there. They returned two years later.

  Castro continued seeing Alina, though they began to fall out. She married four times and he did not approve of her choice of husbands. Alina wanted to leave Cuba and pursue a career elsewhere, but the authorities would not give her an exit visa.

  In power, Castro also made things difficult for Mirta, who had married a Spaniard, Emilio Nufiez. One night in Varadero, he came across them eating in a steakhouse. He ordered the owner to throw them out. He, bravely, refused. Soon after, Mirta and her second husband left to live in Madrid. Thirty years later, there are still some in the Castro family who maintain that Mirta was the only woman he ever really loved.

  Soon after the revolution, Castro met a young German woman called Marita Lorenz. She was seventeen and had black hair and green eyes. They met when the M.S. Berlin, the ship her father captained, pulled into Havana harbour while Castro was on board the Granma which he was renovating. Castro, always on the look-out for chances to win over foreigners, contacted the Berlin. Marita’s father invited him on board for dinner.