Humble, working man hero, Fidel Castro, living like a billionaire hustler!!!

Fidel Castro lived like a king with his own private yacht, a luxury Caribbean island getaway complete with dolphins and a turtle farm, and travelled with two personal blood donors, a new book claims.

In La Vie Cachée de Fidel Castro (Fidel Castro's Hidden Life), former bodyguard Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, a member of Castro's elite inner circle, says the Cuban leader ran the country as his personal fiefdom like a cross between a medieval overlord and Louis XV.

Sánchez, who was part of Castro's praetorian guard for 17 years, describes a charismatic and intelligent but manipulative, cold-blooded, egocentric Castro prone to foot-stamping temper tantrums. He claims the vast majority of Cubans were unaware their leader enjoyed a lifestyle beyond the dreams of many Cubans and at odds with the sacrifices he demanded of them.

Sánchez says Castro's dolce vita was a "crazy privilege" while Cubans suffered serious hardship in the 1990s as the economy "collapsed like a house of cards" after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and eastern bloc with which Havana had done almost 80% of its foreign business.

His compatriots, he says, were also unaware of their leader's complicated love life, his womanising and subsequent tribe of at least nine children, not least because Cuban media was forbidden to mention them.

[link to www.theguardian.com]