Did Fidel Castro Really Shag 35,000 People?

Revolutionary leader, champion of social justice or ruthless dictator? Fidel Castro doesn't fit neatly into any one box. A decade after his death, however, the shadows of his policies and politics still loom large over international relations and Cuba itself. But what of his personal life? Who was Fidel Castro to those who knew him? And could those rumours possibly be true? Kate is joined by Jonathan M. Hansen to find out! Jonathan is the author of 'Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary'. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 2:56Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwixt the Sheets. I'm very pleased to see, thank you for dropping by once again. I do have fun talking to you about all manner of historical filth. But because we are a little bit filthy round here, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way. Coming around, subjects new to being an adult too. Shall we proceed together? All right, let's do it.

• 3:23Kate Lister?

  According to a quick Google, the average man sleeps with between six and eight people in their lifetime. So what would you have to say to the idea that one man with one willy slept with 35,000 people in 40 years? Hmm, does that sound feasible? I don't even know if that's logistically possible. What if that person was also supposed to be running a country, leading a revolution and sticking it to the United States? Yes, we are talking about Fidel Castro's love life on today's episode.

• 4:14Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, History of Sex, Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. What do you think of when you think of Cuba? Brightly coloured colonial buildings lining the streets of Havana? The rumble of pristine vintage American Cadillacs and Chevys? Salsa in the streets and hand-rolled cigars? Or maybe you're thinking of the country's continuing opposition to the USA? From the missiles and warships of the Cold War to the oil blockades and horrendous sanctions of today? And of course, the impact of all this on regular Cubans. To say the history of Cuba is controversial is something of an understatement, I think. But what about its president slash dictator, depending on who you're talking to, Fidel Castro? Hero or villain?

• 4:56Kate Lister?

  Socialist or one of the richest men in the world? And what about his love life? Is it true at all that he slept with 35,000 different people? Well, today I'm joined by Dr Jonathan Hanson, who wrote a biography on the life of the young Fidel Castro in an attempt to separate fact from fiction. So if anyone can help us answer these questions, it's Jonathan. Right, let's crack on.

• 5:26Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Jonathan Hanson. How are you doing?

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Very well, thank you. I'm excited to be here.

• 5:36Kate Lister?

  I'm thrilled that you're here because Fidel Castro, I mean, that, like him or loathe him, that's an icon of the 20th century and I don't know an awful lot about him. And you are the author of Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary. Can I ask you, what brought you to Fidel Castro?

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a great question. I like to think of my work as exploring the real people and the real events of the past, not the ones that are sort of on the far left or the far right that are caricatures. I had just done a book about US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, another fascinating, complicated place. And while writing that book, I got little glimpses of Fidel Castro that I had never heard of before. That in fact, at different times, he was able to work in pretty close relations with the base. At other times, he and the base were severely at odds. But I just got a sense that there was somebody there that had more to offer than the caricatures

• 6:39Speaker 05

  that I at least grew up with, that he's either a devil or a saint. In all my work, I tried to rediscover, recreate the middle ground. I like to call it the messy middle, where most of us live our lives. So I set out to capture that and it took me a while to get access to the Cuban archives and to some other interesting archives. Eventually I did so and the result is Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary, which is a much more nuanced, I think, balanced account of Fidel than we typically get.

• 7:11Kate Lister?

  Was it difficult to get access to the archives? I mean, you just said it was, but that's something I hadn't even thought of before we got to the interview.

• 7:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I really appreciate the question because the answer is yes, it took me years. You know, of course, there's a lot of trust problems between the United States and Cuba, in part because of the history that I recount. The Cubans had known about my work. I had, I had been down in Cuba when I was researching the Guantanamo book. But relations got severely soured between the US and Cuba. They're never great. In 2006, when Fidel got sick and basically, you know, withdrew from his role as president and the Bush administration cheered that. And so I was basically sent home from Cuba while I was doing that Guantanamo work. They didn't really answer my calls anymore. But after that book was published in 2011, I reached out again and things were a little bit better.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  I convinced them that that book was a balanced book about Guantanamo and a balanced book about Cuba. And I was capable of doing this kind of work. And they, you know, very slowly, very gradually over time, they agreed to it. It took a bunch of years. It took really two or three years before I got access to this treasure trove of documents that I got in Havana. But I had a bunch of contacts in the United States and down in Havana that did some work for me. And I just convinced them that this is too important a project to let slide by. And eventually I got in. I was telling your producer that I was able to tap over 100 letters between Fidel Castro and an epistolary lover named Natty Robelta that I hope we can talk about.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  And there had been a handful of those letters published online. But Natty, after again, a lot of work and a lot of trust building, gave me the entire set.

• 8:55Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I agreed, of course, you can imagine, Kate. And I did so. I didn't want to embarrass her or embarrass him. But the letters are truly extraordinary and depict a person that I had never heard of before. So between those letters and letters from the Cuban archives and, you know, other things that I got and people sent me and many, many, many, many interviews, I was able to recreate this guy's young life.

• 9:21Kate Lister?

  Were you ever scared? I mean, because, because you're writing this, most biographers have got the luxury of their subject is, is long dead, but you're writing this within Fidel's lifetime, you're in Cuba, and, and this is somebody that has a reputation for, you know, many, many things, but violence is part of it. And you're writing a very intimate biography.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  I wasn't scared exactly. I was careful. There were a few awkward moments when some of my sources, I think, were worried about what was going on and whether or not we might be followed here or there. But again, to get to the archives, I had to build the trust of the, you know, of the government itself. And so I wasn't scared. I just was worried about being sensitive and, and not putting anybody in jeopardy, any of my sources, whether they were in Havana or outside. Because of the, the trust building I was able to do, I was able to talk to some of Castro's family members. Two of his sisters, for example, one arch enemy of Fidel, Juanita, who lived in Miami,

• 10:27Speaker 05

  and another enema who is much closer both to Fidel and, and Juanita, who lived in Mexico City. And then she introduced to me to other amazing figures in Mexico City. So it wasn't fear so much as a desire not to compromise anybody and not to compromise my own access. And yet be true to the guy, right? You know, this was not hagiography. This is not praising Fidel Castro. I don't think he's a figure you can just praise. He's a figure that has a lot of interesting stuff, you know, did a lot of interesting things, some good, some bad, who's a very complicated person. It was the complexity I was after, so I was, you know, that was a delicate balancing act for sure.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  But just to repeat, my biggest worry was that I would hurt anybody, any of my sources. And to my knowledge, I did not do so.

• 11:16Kate Lister?

  I can't imagine there's anyone listening who doesn't know who Fidel Castro is, but you know, maybe there is. Sometimes we have youngsters listening, they might not know. Could you just give us a page one question? Who is Fidel Castro?

• 11:28Speaker 05

  Well, yeah. So Fidel Castro was the leader of Cuba from the triumph of the revolution in 1959 to when he withdrew from the government in about 2006 because of his diverticulitis, which is a stomach disease that he had. He was a famous person in the Cold War. After the US tried to shut down the Cuban revolution, I could say more about that in a second, he reached out to the Soviet Union and, you know, was Cuba was the site of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs invasion, the, and the source of 50, 60, 70, so years now of Cuban-US, a kind of war. It was not exactly a cold war at all times. Sometimes it was hot, but of, of real conflict between the United States and Cuba.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  And it's now really, in fact, gotten maybe as bad as it's ever been because the US embargo is threatening to cut off food, heating oil, everything from Cuba. So Cuba is in dire straits right now. But I just want to say, let me just say one or two more things about this.

• 12:29Kate Lister?

  Sure.

• 12:30Speaker 05

  And the first is that Fidel Castro, despite the, the frothing figure screaming, talking for eight hours in the center of Havana in 100 degree heat, he's a real idealist. And I, I recreate that person. He's absolutely dedicated to the realization of a free and independent Cuba. That was his big goal. He was not in it for the money. He was not in it for the power. He accrued a lot of power and he may have used that power in some cases in ways that we don't, you know, the people don't like and that we might criticize. But he was dedicated to a free and independent Cuba. And he, he would do anything to get it. He wanted, I, I like to think of it as the three Rs.

• 13:15Speaker 05

  He sought respect for Cuba, recognition of Cuba in the international sphere, and then reciprocity or reciprocal relations between Cuba and others. And he wanted that from the behemoth to the north, from the United States. And if he didn't get that, he wasn't going to be happy. So that's who he was. He was indebted to and driven by a sense of duty to Cuban history. He thought of himself as one of the leaders of, you know, the great Cuban revolutionaries, going back to the Cuban War of Independence against Spain, and then later really the United States. And then he also thought that life was meaningless unless it was dedicated to some higher purpose.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  So again, his goal, very simple, free and end up in a Cuba. If he couldn't get that, he was going to go mad. I also call him a barn burner because he was completely uncompromising about this.

• 14:11Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  You know, his turn toward communism was really a marriage of convenience. In the, in 1958 and 59, at the triumph of the revolution, he had succeeded in overthrowing Batista and the Batista army. But he had not yet created a political platform capable of, of supporting that revolution. In my mind, it's a liberal nationalist revolution. It's not a communist revolution. Che was communist, his brother Raoul was communist, but he was not, and he insisted he wasn't to any interviewer. No, not at this time, to any interviewer who, you know, cared to listen.

• 14:52Speaker 05

  He was absolutely a liberal nationalist wanting the autonomy of Cuba. And then when the US came to shut down this revolution, and I have Eisenhower in a meeting in his office in 1958 with his National Security Council saying out loud, "Do you mean to tell me?", he's saying to the group, "that we have just decided that this revolution is dead?". And they said, "Yes". And he said, "Okay, noted". And so then, you know, the US came in, in any, in lots of different ways over the next many years to try to end the thing. And so when that happened, Fidel Castro had to reach out to somebody he couldn't rely on a liberal democratic political platform, if you know what I mean, because you always

• 15:37Speaker 05

  need both. You need the army, but you need the political platform as well. There wasn't one available, but there was one established force that could be capable of, of, of entering this, this problem and, and helping him. And it was the Communist Party. And then once, once communist, you know, once he reached out to the communists, he became more Catholic than the Pope, more communist than, than Che, and more communist than his brother. And then, you know, forever, always sort of in retrospect said, "Oh yes, we were always communist, but that's just not the case". I have that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in my book, that that wasn't Fidel.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  He was a liberal nationalist guy who wanted independence, you know, much like Ho Chi Minh, much like Lumumba in, in Zaire, much like, you know, these everyday revolutionaries, much like the American revolutionaries. He came to the United States in early 1959. Eisenhower went away, wouldn't talk to him. He talked to Nixon and he talked to a lot of senators and congressmen. He was mobbed in New York and mobbed in Boston and in Washington. He went and, you know, kneeled down before Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. And he came and tried to make an overture to the United States and we just wouldn't hear of it. On the way home from this, it was such a success and things were so hard in Cuba, you

• 16:59Speaker 05

  can imagine in the first months of the revolution, that Raoul called him and said, "Fidel, what the hell are you doing? Get out of here, get down here, we need you, like we're tottering on the edge". And he said, "In fact, what I want you to do, Fidel, is to go down to Buenos Aires, where there's a meeting of the economic ministers of the Organization of American States and go talk to them and tell them we want their support". And Fidel went down and, and asked, gave this speech that sounded like, I don't know, sounded like JFK's Alliance for Progress a couple of years later. It laid out this image of a, of a Western hemisphere and with Cuba and the United States and other countries cooperating and trading together and promoting, and I kid you not,

• 17:40Speaker 05

  the quotes are in the book, "A free market of the Americas where everybody would prosper and democracy would break out". And so this was the Fidel that, that, that I think was there at the, at the triumph of the revolution. There was also a guy who would do anything, literally anything to get, you know, to get this done. So as I say, he was a barn burner. I have a great letter that he wrote of his friend Celia Sanchez, who you may recognize, she was one of the women in the revolution. And he, he confided in her and he and she became very, very close, some thought that they might be lovers. But he wrote a letter, he said something like, "The hour has come to demand action from everyone".

• 18:21Speaker 05

  And then he writes, "And if they don't heed the reasons or the sentiments, we'll force them to do their duty with our facts.

• 18:28Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 18:29Speaker 05

  We will burn down the island from one end to the other. We'll make the entire nation confront this choice". This was in the late stages of the revolution. "Either Batista is finished or the country will be ruined and perished".

• 18:43Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 18:44Speaker 05

  So that's the guy. He will do this no matter what. And, you know, I like to say the guy that I depicted is a guy that's kind of idealistic, interesting, nuanced. And then he becomes, he becomes much more the person that you and I imagine when we close our eyes and picture the frothing bearded revolutionary. But that wasn't the guy.

• 19:15Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Jonathan after this short break.

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• 22:30Kate Lister?

  Where does he come from? What's his back? I'm guessing Cuba, that's obvious. But like, what was his, what was his background?

• 22:36Speaker 05

  It's a fabulous, fabulous story. So get this, one of the things that's so interesting about him is that, first of all, he grew up in rural Cuba. I mean, his parents had a huge plantation, but get this. His dad and mom were dirt poor. His mom came to work for his dad as a servant. She came from the eastern Cuba, Pina del Rio, which, I mean, western Cuba, which is in, in near Havana. His dad grew up in, in Lantra, in Galicia, in Spain. You can't make this up. And came to Cuba to defeat the War of Independence in 1898 with his Spanish army.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  Okay, so he came to shut down this whole thing. If his dad had gotten his way originally, Cuba would still be part of Spain.

• 23:26Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  Think of, think of that for the young revolutionary to be. And his dad fought and got sick and almost died and went home. But when he went home to, to nothing, I mean, I have a, an image I could show you of the little hovel that they lived in, in Lantra. It's incredible. It looks like a, a stable, literally. But when he got back home to this poor family, he realized there was nothing doing in Spain for him and, and that Cuba would need a lot of work because the war was very violent and tore the island apart and that there would be opportunity available. So he immediately went back to Cuba and then clawed his way out of poverty. He eventually was the provider of a plantation in the heart of Cuba's,

• 24:10Speaker 05

  the best sugarcane country in Cuba, 42 square miles broad. Can you imagine that? And he's surrounded by United Fruit Company plantations owned by Americans. So this is the young revolutionary's dad. And he didn't exactly eat dinner with them or party with them, but he respected them and them, him, they, him, and he lived around there. So Fidel grew up with parents who were dirt poor. And he says this a lot and says, this has a lot to do, to do with explaining who I am. Parents who were dirt poor, but he was the son of privilege. And yet he lived among really poor workers.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  If you think of that, there was a school, the local school was on the Castro plantation and I have visited it, the one-room schoolhouse. And Fidel's, Fidel's classmates were the poor, the, the, you know, the children of the workers at the plantation, black and white, both. So he was the son of very poor peasants. So by no means was, was the family very sophisticated. He was the first generation to go to college. He was the first of his family to graduate from college, when he graduated from the University of Anna Law School in 1950. And, and yet he was, you know, he was surrounded by all the, this poverty. And so he was, you know, that, that left a mark on him.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  And he was always interested in, in helping, doing something for Cuba. I don't know if you know anything about Cuba at the time, but Cuba at the time was this place that Americans used to love to go. JFK would fly down for his gals. And JFK was by no means alone. You know, they would go to Havana and they'd go to Santiago. They'd go to these cities that were hopping and doing great. But in the, in the rural areas, there was no medicine, no really bad education. You know, economic opportunity was there if you wanted to work like a, a animal for these rich planters and things like that. But there was a real inequality. And again, I remember I said he was an idealist. That was always on his mind. So, you know, this guy that we think of as the ranting, raving guy

• 26:18Speaker 05

  who hates the United States and really capitalism, grew up amid, you know, in, in a very interesting way, amid plenty, but also amid lots of hardship as well. It was immediately adjacent. It was part of his life. He knew it very well.

• 26:31Kate Lister?

  Shall we talk girlfriends? Because I've, because Jonathan, I've heard some truly shocking statistics about this man. And given everything that you've just told me, how he found the time is frankly, like, I read one statistic that reckoned that he had slept with over 35,000

• 26:49Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 26:50Kate Lister?

  women in his, what were they, just in a revolving door situation? How did he have time to do this?

• 26:56Speaker 05

  Well, that, so that figure of 35,000, I don't know, paramours in Fidel comes from Juan Ronaldo Sanchez, a historian or, well, former bodyguard who thinks of himself as a historian, I suppose, and published a book some, somewhere in the mid 2014. Do the math, that's something like

• 27:14Kate Lister?

  It's insane, isn't it?

• 27:15Speaker 05

  I figured he was like in office roughly 17,000 days or something like that.

• 27:22Kate Lister?

  That's two a day.

• 27:23Speaker 05

  That's two a day, just under two a day or something. But let me tell you, first of all, I would be very, very cautious about taking any of the numbers you hear coming out of Cuba, no matter what they're about.

• 27:35Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  Literally, take them with a grain of salt. This guy clearly is an enemy of Castro and wants to sell books. So I would just take that number and set it aside and never come back to it.

• 27:46Kate Lister?

  Fine, okay, I'll do that right now.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  Let me just tell you a little bit about Fidel and the women in his life because it's super interesting. First of all, he grew up in a family with women. His mother, Lena, though she was, you know, a peasant and came as a house cleaner for her dad, was revered by the family. He's one of what's, he has four sisters and then, you know, three brothers.

• 28:11Kate Lister?

  That's interesting.

• 28:11Speaker 05

  Or two brothers or something. I mean, I'm talking about the children of the couple of Lena and Angel, his mother and dad. He always, he respected them. He, he, he never condescended to them. He, as far as I know, like, his, his sense of sort of gender and sexuality was fairly progressive. There were, if you think of the, the people in the revolution who had, you know, such a big influence besides himself, Saint Che and his brother Raul and Frank Paez, and, you know, I could go on. You think, I think of the names like Melba Hernandez, Haida Santa Maria, Vilma Espen, and, and many others, and they played absolutely crucial roles.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  Celia Sanchez, in my mind, is as important a revolutionary as Fidel himself. You know, she is rumored maybe to have been a lover. They met in 1957 when Fidel came back from Mexico to launch the revolution. They met up in the Sierra Maestra, the mountains of eastern Cuba, where he had his hideout. But I'm not sure, I, I asked people, I was there, I met, I met her friends, his friends, everybody. No one could be sure exactly what that relationship might have been at one time, but it, it became a long-term political revolutionary relationship. That was what, how people describe it. But which is just to say that he doesn't seem like a guy who uses women and just sets them aside.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  That said, I'll tell you, we could focus on maybe two women that are really important. The first is Mirta Diaz-Balart. She is the famous one. She became his wife. She is the mother of his first child, Filito. And they met because her brother was Rafael Diaz-Balart and Frank Diaz-Balart. They were good friends with Fidel. They met in, in University of Havana Law School. But then they became mortal enemies of him and left the country. And Rafael's two sons became US representatives in Miami. You know, trying to overthrow Cuba, the Cuban government and make, push through those sanctions and the embargo and things like that. So this is very interesting.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  This family was a very wealthy family from very close to Fidel's in, in far eastern Cuba, in the town of Banes. And Banes was a US United Fruit Company that was like a country club. It was a beautiful place to live. And, and Mirta Diaz-Balart and Rafael Diaz-Balart's dad was a lawyer there who worked for the Americans. And they had a swish life, highly educated, very polished, and yet, yet, yet, they were friends with Fidel, right? They met Fidel again at the University of Havana. Fidel had a few, went to a few different schools in Santiago and then eventually went to a very elite boarding school named Colegio de Belen in Havana.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  The Diaz-Balarts went somewhere else that was equally distinguished. But they got together, especially Rafael and Fidel in law school, and they became bosom buddies. And Rafael was himself a critic of the Cuban corruption because Cuban government regimes were notoriously corrupt and they both hated that and they were both very idealistic. And they would hang out on, on the, at, at a beach house that the Diaz-Balart family had. And that's where he met Mirta, his, his wife-to-be, and became, and became very close.

• 31:36Kate Lister?

  How old was he when that happened?

• 31:38Speaker 05

  He went to, started going to the University of Havana around 1945. They must have met 46, 47. I have a beautiful photo, the one I sent you, by the way, which is of him and Mirta at the beach, at the Diaz-Balart beach house in December 1948, I think it is. And you can see, Mirta is 19, about to be 20, and he's 21, about to be 22 or something. So they are young.

• 32:05Kate Lister?

  Very different-looking man, the pictures that, that you sent. Very different-looking man from the one we're used to.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  I'll come back to, to the two of them for a second, but just because since you mentioned it, yeah, he was a very beautiful man and a really good athlete. He wasn't good enough, by the way, just for the record, to excel at the university level, which is why he went into politics and became deeply embroiled in a really violent, kind of vile, university political world for a while before he realized this was a dead end and might end up with him dead. A literal dead end, it could be. Yeah, no, he was quite a figure. Everyone thinks, of course, of Cuban baseball, but he, he stunk at baseball. One of my chapters opens up with him on the mound in, in, in high school, getting rocked by some local team and, and rival of his.

• 32:54Speaker 05

  But he was super good at basketball, by the way, and soccer. He wasn't exactly generous when he had the ball in his hands on the basketball court. Some friends, some people I, I interviewed said he never passed the ball. I tell that story too.

• 33:07Kate Lister?

  Interesting.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  But he is, he's a gorgeous, really gorgeous, athletic, popular figure, despite the fact that in his mind, he's always kind of isolated, always, because he grew up in the rural area, not in the sophistication of Havana, that he, you know, he had to really fight to make it. But so he, he were friends with the Diaz-Balarts. He met Mirta, they really hit it off. They got married in, I think, October 1948. You'll like this. They honeymooned in New York City, where they rented an apartment on the Upper West Side of New York.

• 33:42Kate Lister?

  I wouldn't have figured that.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  I know. I think it's 156 West 82nd Street or something, on the Upper West Side. And, you know, the thought was that they would live there. The parents sent him away with a lot of money. They're kind of hoping, go, you know, go to America.

• 33:55Kate Lister?

  Make your fortune.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  Make your fortune, get educated at Harvard, you know, the people, the, the family talked about that. But the fact is, the education he had at the University of Havana would have never let him do that. He was a very good student, kind of a polymath, in some ways a genius. He had a eidetic memory. He could memorize things that he saw and write them down later. Really, really brilliant. Valedictorian of his high school class at that hotshot school, Colegio de Belen in, in Havana. And, you know, the, the little yearbook says, "We all expect amazing things from Fidel." And, you know, he delivered on that. So they got married, they, but they came home that December. I guess, you know, Fidel can't sit still. And that, to people's surprise, but they had a baby the following year.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  And then Fidel sort of retreated to her home tan, area of eastern Cuba near Banes, where his fam, her family was, so that she could get help raising the kid and he could cram for law school exams. You didn't have to take law school classes to pass the law school exams. And he did and graduated eventually in 1950. And then opened a law office in Havana, representing, you know, truly pretty much down and out people and doing, you know, taking on some remarkable cases. And then what set him off and then what came between the two of them is that in 1952, Batista, who had been a former president and then had lost office, was running to

• 35:22Speaker 05

  return to the presidency and was not going to win. And he fomented a coup d'etat that basically succeeded and all of Cubans just sort of said, shrugged their shoulders and said, "Oh, wow, who cares?" And Fidel freaked out. He couldn't believe.

• 35:39Kate Lister?

  Fidel cared.

• 35:40Speaker 05

  He cared. Not only did Fidel care, but, you know, many, many of the young people, idealistic people of Cuba cared. They couldn't believe that this guy had done this. By the way, the Batista family was, was not, was very close to the Diaz-Balarts. And, and Batista gave the couple, the young couple, two beautiful alabaster lamps that then Fidel smashed after an argument with Mirta that I can tell you about. So, you know, when Cuba did nothing, Fidel just, as I say, he went mad. What happened was when, once back from New York, Mirta and Fidel, I guess, and Fidel's parents and, and Mirta's parents went on this, what I call this domestication campaign,

• 36:24Speaker 05

  that we can domestize this guy, right? And, and calm him down and pull him away from the violence of the polit, political scene in Havana. And maybe he could be the lawyer for the family business, right, in, in Biren. Not so. And I guess Fidel and, and the, the family had been talking about sending them to Paris and that he could go to the Sorbonne and get educated and they could live this lovely life. And he and Mirta had an argument about it one day because he came home and he said, "I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to run for office and we're going to da-da-da-da and fix the country." And she, you know, broke down in tears. And Fidel took those lamps made by Batista and smashed them on the ground and said,

• 37:06Speaker 05

  "Fuck this, Mirta, cono, cono, Mirta." And, you know, ba-ba-ba-ba. And they had this real sad sort of division. And it was this, in some ways, the beginning of the end. What happened then later is very quickly, so, so he and Mirta are doing okay. She has to get used to the fact that this guy is never going to change and she's coming to terms without raising their beautiful son, Filito. And then eventually, because Cuba does nothing after this coup d'etat Batista Castro decides, with some others, to take things into their own hands. And that that leads to, you know, it's a long story that I'll spare you of, but he eventually

• 37:47Speaker 05

  does this crazy, almost suicidal attack on a military barracks in Santiago de Cuba, near where he lived. And of course, it fails miserably. And he ends up being arrested and going to jail. And it's in jail that he then begins the, this epistolary love affair between himself and this woman, Nadi Rubelta.

• 38:11Kate Lister?

  See, I was just about to ask you if he was faithful to his first wife.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Up to this time, my guess is, I have never heard anything to suggest no, which tells you something, doesn't it?

• 38:22Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it does.

• 38:23Speaker 05

  Meaning that he was capable of fidelity and not just needed to, you know, have sex at least twice a day. But so what happens is that he's in jail. He had met Nadi Rubelta. She was a, they call her in Cuba, this is very unfeminist, right? A socialite. Her husband was a, I think it was maybe a lawyer or businessman, very successful in Havana. And she worked at some company as a, I don't know, administrative assistant, I think we would call them now. But she was somebody who, in her own mind, I talked a lot to Nadi, she was very generous with her time. She was saying, I was looking for a cause. I was looking for, for hope at the time. And so was my husband, by the way, she said Orlando.

• 39:07Speaker 05

  And one day she got to meet Fidel and, and he liked what she heard and wrote him a note. I've had someone deliver him a note from her that included the keys to their apartment or, you know, a room off their, their house in Havana. And she did this to two other potential revolutionary people too. This was, you know, just after Batista's coup, saying, if you ever need a place, a safe place to be, you know, we have an impeccable reputation and you can always come here and talk turkey with whomever, you know, you're, you're fomenting revolution with. Cause she had heard him, she had heard Fidel talking in, at a, on the campus of the University of Havana and became very impressed with him.

• 39:48Speaker 05

  Well, so when, when Fidel gets put in jail after this quixotic attack on the Moncada military barracks that I alluded to, she, Nadi, reaches out in a letter to Fidel's mom. When Fidel, the day Fidel goes in.

• 40:03Kate Lister?

  It's one way to go about it.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, very clever, right? He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He ended up spending only a couple of years in prison, but the day he went in, in October 53, she, a little bit later, wrote this beautiful note to Fidel's mom, saying, you know, I'm just thinking of you, it must be a hard time. Fidel's mom then told Fidel, and then Fidel wrote Nadi, and then we get this, this take off of these letters. He wrote and thanked her, and then she wrote back. And if you don't mind, could I read you what he wrote to her?

• 40:38Kate Lister?

  Oh, please, I'd love to know what a love letter from Fidel Castro sounds like.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, this isn't, you know, it's, again, it's for, for betwixt the sheets, it may be a little bit reserved, but it's, it conveys Fidel, I think, well at the time. He writes, "An affectionate hug from prison. I remember you faithfully and I love you, Te quiero." By the way, he doesn't say te amo, which means I'm like hot for you, but meaning I, I remember you, I miss you. Although it's been a while since I've heard from you. I treasure and will always treasure the tender card you wrote my mother." Rubelta, as I told you, had written this card. And Castro expressed relief that she was safe. He says, "If you ever have to suffer because of me in any way," because, you know, she had, had let him work, work in his house.

• 41:26Speaker 05

  He said, "Please let me know that I would happily give my life for your honor and well-being." He then likened his image of her to a reward of personal sacrifice and a noble cause. He writes, "What the world thinks doesn't matter. What matters is what's inside our hearts. There are things in life that outlast our days, daily miseries, eternal things, like the image I have of you, which will accompany me to the grave."

• 41:50Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. I want to read one more because it's, it's also, it'll be the, the last of this long, long series of letters. But what happened is, you can imagine when, when you're having a love affair in prison, you know, through Cuba, there's has to be a lot of people who are carrying these letters back to and from. And the danger of them getting crossed is obvious, right? And of course, they do. And so about six months later or so in May, one of the letters gets crossed. And, and so they have to sort of cool it. And of course, it sets off a scandal. But what, what's even worse is that Fidel later hears that Mirta was working for the Batista government. You know, here she is on her own, trying to support herself.

• 42:36Speaker 05

  Yes, her parents, parents are rich, but she's working, she got a job for the Batista, the very person who has him in jail now, right? And he goes crazy and eventually files for divorce. The flow of the letters kind of cools a little bit, but then just before Christmas, in what must have been 1954, he writes her again. It's one of the last ones, and it's his longest. In a previous letter, he, he had said that he had a photograph of her, right? In his hands. Now he writes, "Eyes big and beautiful, smile burning about me, mouth pretty and provocative, lips seeking a kiss, a million kisses. Gesture resolve the features of someone talking eloquently about love."

• 43:20Speaker 05

  This is him and her. He said, "How could, how could he be expected to write serenely?" He asks, in the face of this. "You know that I adore you," he says, "and at times lose my mind with love." Then he said, this again, final letter, he'd been thinking a lot about the two of them and, and the word from her brought to mind, "Someone who would sacrifice the opinion of others," his words, "for the love of another person, or who acts out a profound conviction, rather than egotism. Honor was not the same as selfless devotion," blah, blah, blah, he says. "He'd become devoted to what was noble, good, intelligent and humane in her. Loving that in her, he came to regard her with delirium," his words. "Nothing impure, shameful about that," he insists, right? She's married, by the way.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  He went on, as if confessing for the last time. He says, "He had found her in her spiritual essence," he says. "The feminine ideal. Her love for him calmed him, fulfilled him."

• 44:16Kate Lister?

  Uh huh.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  He says, "Only that he could not conceive anything better than to see my life one day united with yours in body and soul." He seems unlikely, he says, "But I have much faith and, and faith makes miracles." Now, coming up in 55, when, when Batista was campaigning for this, he actually did an amnesty and, and freed political prisoners. And so Fidel was freed from prison way earlier than his 23 years. And the, you know, it was very, a lot of commotion, a lot of press attachment, and he was followed and mobbed at the stations on the way home. He had been on the so-called Isle of Pines, so he had to take a boat to the train station and so on. And all along this trip, he was celebrated and, and mobbed because people knew what

• 45:02Speaker 05

  he had done and what he stood for. And of course, he wasn't idle in prison, right? He was campaigning like crazy for this new idea of a revolutionary Cuba. But as soon as he gets off, da, da, da, da, he and Nadi get together and they actually conceive a child.

• 45:18Kate Lister?

  This is, this is the lady that, that was married, that he's writing the letters to, and he's still married to?

• 45:23Speaker 05

  No, Fidel's getting divorced.

• 45:25Kate Lister?

  He's getting divorced.

• 45:25Speaker 05

  I mean, by this time, I think it was consummated, it was consummated in 1955.

• 45:29Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  He gets out in, I don't know, May or June or something. But yes, they have an affair and they spend what she calls, I have it here. Well, this is how I just, this is how I described it in the book. Rubelta described to me, "Ten blissful days and nights in Castro's company in the confines of their small apartment, attached to the larger space of her sister's house."

• 45:55Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  "The two wasted little time of sleep, moving from coffee to wine, back to coffee. They poured through old letters, soothed old wounds and clarified misconceptions. Castro, a passionate cook, recreated favorite recipes from prison, including paella, pork, grilled chicken, all devoured in the rosy glow of the rising sun. Enma Castro, Fidel's sister, remembers surprising them one day and seeing Rubelta seated at Castro's feet, staring adoringly into his eyes. Enma knew Rubelta was married and scolded Fidel. Rubelta said both she and Castro knew that this rhapsody could not last. Still, they wrung it for all it was worth, to the point of physical exhaustion. Nine months later, Rubelta gave birth to a baby girl, living proof that those 10 days were not a dream."

• 46:40Speaker 05

  This is what she, how she put it to me. "Proof was needed by then," I write, "'cause Castro was on to other things and other women. Nadi Rubelta, for all intents and purposes, discarded." So it was a sad ending. And this is a Fidel that I hadn't described yet, right? Someone who could just, you know, actually drop coldly and move on. This is how Nadi put it to me one day on her porch. I said, "Was that it?" And she said, "Ah." And then Juanita Castro, the, the sister that lives in Miami that I described, who became a mortal enemy of her brother, she reported that they're in this little, very quickly, Fidel, things weren't safe for Fidel because Batista was targeting him and he had to go to, he went in exile to Mexico where he planned the revolution.

• 47:25Speaker 05

  And Juanita says that Nadi was by no means the only woman who went to the house at this time.

• 47:41Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Jonathan after this short break.

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• 49:06Kate Lister?

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• 49:46Kate Lister?

  So there are a lot of girlfriends and affairs. It might not be 35,000, but there are a fair few.

• 49:54Speaker 05

  For sure. No question about it. And there were others. And I have some evidence of that. There was a, there's one that you may have seen if you've done your homework. A woman named Marita Lorenz.

• 50:07Kate Lister?

  I know Marita Lorenz, yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 05

  So I met her in Newark Airport, of all places. She wanted a real neutral place. She did not trust anybody or anything. And she described this whole affair. And historians, and by the way, CIA people, intelligence people, don't know quite what to do with all Marita's stories.

• 50:29Kate Lister?

  They are extreme, aren't they, her stories?

• 50:31Speaker 05

  Well, they're extreme. I don't know, for Fidel, like, a lot's extreme, but they're elaborate. You know, we don't have a lot of confirmation or corroboration for some of them. But what's so interesting is that, you know, the thing that she describes is this part of Fidel that's just a fact. Like, when people came across him, men and women, you know, they just literally swooned. In Mexico City, when he was planning to, you know, when he left after getting out of jail, as I just said, and then went over there in exile to sort of foment a revolution. Then he came back on the grandma and launched the revolution up in the Sierra Maestra. I think that this may make sense to you. But when, when he was in jail, there was a lot of attention given the Cubans, he and

• 51:15Speaker 05

  some of the Cuban, they had been found out and had been in jail. But they were allowed visitors one time, and there was this big, almost like, party. I don't know if it was Christmas, or Halloween, or Thanksgiving, or something. And there was just a bunch of them in the, in open courtyard in the, in the jail. And a former revolutionary of a previous, you know, regime, against a previous regime was there. Her name was Teresa Casuso, and she was an intellectual writer, filmmaker, very, very sophisticated, older, half a generation older than Fidel, so she wasn't going to end up in a, unlikely to end up in a relationship with him. She came upon him, and her description is unbelievable. She walked into the room, and it was like seeing a room of black and white with one

• 51:56Speaker 05

  figure in color in the middle. And it was Fidel. And he was tall, and in her telling, gorgeous, and absolutely, like, consuming. And then, you know, like, we've all met, you and I, probably, you know, very charismatic people. I remember encountering President Clinton a couple of times. And when you're talking to them, the world just fades away, right? And they lock eyes with you, and they mean it, like, they can do this. And Fidel did this with her, and she said, "I expected some bombastic something, whatever." She said, "He was extremely humble," because she had been a revolutionary herself in a smaller way, right?

• 52:32Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  "I expected him to start telling me everything." And she said, "He, all he wanted to know was about our revolution, like, our attempt to overthrow the Cuban government." Because she was in exile in Mexico, because she had been a revolutionary too. And she said, "It was extraordinary. He locked eyes with me. He was humble." You know, so here's this guy. He can be bombastic. He can be petty. He can be cold. But he can also be warm, and he's brilliant, and thoughtful, and cooperative. I have all these stories. There's another young woman who tells me a story of being with him in a revolution, in the revolution. And, you know, these are, these are, to me, the love affair stories, but they're not love affair stories. They're, they're stories of working with an extraordinary human being. She and he came together in this weird town outside of Havana, about

• 53:16Speaker 05

  35 miles away, 35 kilometers away, just because Fidel needed to go pick up some, some printed, you know, pamphlets or something, and they ran into each other. She needed a ride out there. They'd never met. And they spent the day just doing their work for the revolution. Again, the revolution hadn't happened. This was just in the planning, the so-called, they call it the movement, M26, after the Moncada attack. And she said, "It was just incredible." He's like, the perfect gentleman, unimpeachable.

• 53:46Kate Lister?

  We all know one of those.

• 53:47Speaker 05

  But this didn't result in any, any, anything. It was just, like, working together humbly. You know, the Cubans, and just like the rest of us, are very sexist, especially back in the day. And, you know, women didn't drive cars, or whatever, so Fidel was driving around. But he was exhausted, because he doesn't sleep. And he said to her, "Rosa, you drive." And she said, "I'd never heard anything, you know, the like of it, that this guy would just hang out next to me in the driver's seat, and let me go around." And we went around. We did all our work. "I took him home to meet my parents," she said. This is the kind of pull he can have on people. And her parents were conservative people. They weren't at all critics. And, you know, he just, he kind of melted them. It's not that he's trying to melt them. The thing about Fidel is, as far as I can tell,

• 54:32Speaker 05

  I mean, I'd have to think about this more, but he's not manipulative. He's authentic. He's just who he is. And, you know, this gets him in trouble, but it also makes people, you know, sort of fall, fall over him.

• 54:47Kate Lister?

  He did get married again, didn't he?

• 54:49Speaker 05

  We don't know much about this last marriage. But it happens early, for the record, so you're right to, to bring it up. Her name is Dahlia Soto de Vaye, or De Vaje, depending on how you pronounce it. She was a teacher who we met during the literacy campaign in, in the early 60s. I think it was 1961 or so. So, you know, as soon as the, the revolution happens, Fidel starts putting things into action. And remember, I called him a polymath. And this works in some ways, as it often does, to his credit, but then into his interests and then against his interests, because he thinks he can do everything. He wasn't the greatest delegator. So, I don't know if you've seen those images of him in the agricultural

• 55:34Speaker 05

  revolution, literary campaign. He's up there with his sleeves rolled up, and he's getting dirty. He's working, like, to his credit. Like, he grew up on a farm. He knows what work is. And yes, he had plenty of people to do the work, but he, he did a lot, too, and, you know, loved the outdoors. He met this lady in 1961. I'll just say, you know, we don't really know what happens, but by 63, they have a baby. And then, in the next couple of years, they have four more.

• 55:57Kate Lister?

  I think we know what happened.

• 56:00Speaker 05

  No, right, but we don't know if, if she was the only one. I mean, again, if this, if this critic is right, his former bodyguard, he's with her part of the day, and he's with somebody else the rest of the day, and then the next day, and the next day. So, I mean, I think that's preposterous. But, yeah. So, what's interesting about her is, we're not sure they got married. If you look on the web, no one knows. But I asked this question of people who really were close to them, to Fidel, both. I never met her. In Havana and even Miami, and they're not sure, the honest ones aren't sure. The ones who don't like him say, oh, no, he'd never marry her, or yes, he did. But that would have been way later, long after the kids in about 1980. And then she was with him, though, to the end.

• 56:44Speaker 05

  And once in a while, very few, but in some photos with him toward the end of his life. So whatever it was, she was very private. I'll just say this, like, if Fidel's having 35,000 relationships, right? But by the way, this person doesn't mention, like, he makes love 35,000 times.

• 57:06Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 57:06Speaker 05

  But he has 35,000 relationships.

• 57:09Kate Lister?

  Oh, could he even be bothered?

• 57:11Speaker 05

  What's he doing with the other ones while he's having, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, it's just crazy. You know, it's just a way of saying, I think that he could treat people coldly and put, throw them aside, but he could also treat, you know, the point of my other stories, sort of warmly, intimately, and authentically. So there's, you know, this is the Fidel I've been wrestling with. Two Fidels, amazing guy, and then, you know, in some ways generous and in some ways extremely cold and self-interested.

• 57:41Kate Lister?

  That leads me very nicely to the final question then, because the man that you're describing, he's very, he's super smart, he's super charismatic, he's got the charm, he can seduce people, even if just not sexually, he can pull people into his orbit. But I think it would be remiss of us not to touch on the fact that there was a huge amount of violence under his rule, that there wasn't elections, many, many people were imprisoned, there was executions. How do you square that with this, with this man who sounds really nice, the way, the way that you're talking about him?

• 58:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I don't, I don't mean to say he was nice. I was just trying to describe the relationships with the women that, you know, that I knew he knew, or that I had met, or the people I was interviewing talked about. That is, the women who are well-known.

• 58:33Kate Lister?

  Do you like him?

• 58:34Speaker 05

  No, so, so I think that's the wrong word. I said sort of tongue in cheek, but I meant it. Like, one of the reasons I stopped with young Castro was because this was an interesting person.

• 58:48Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 58:48Speaker 05

  Who was nuanced and hadn't become the fulminating, bombastic, know everything guy that he became, you know, who became so cold, as you put it. Many of the people I talked to, many of the sources, knew the person you said, knew that violent person who would, you know, execute people, as you suggest. When he went off immediately in 1959, in January, when the culmination of the revolution and when his power began, he, instead of, like, flying to Havana, where he probably would have been arrested and, you know, executed himself by the remnants of the Batista organization, he drove, he took, I don't know, two weeks, basically walking to Havana, and he brought

• 59:33Speaker 05

  all of Cuba along with him. It was a stroke of genius to do that, not to just fly there, but to, like, walk to Havana, bring the revolution and bring people. At home, he left Raul to do the dirty work, and he did, he executed, I forget how many people, in public firing squads. So, yeah, no, he's capable of extreme cruelty, and he would, again, he would do anything to protect the revolution. And as the, you know, like, probably like many of us, I don't know, he became paranoid that everything was a threat to the revolution. You know, it's interesting to ask ourselves, we know, I think, what Fidel means to people in Miami, we know what he means to the US government. There've been so many attempts at reproach from all, you know, not just the formal ones

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  of the Obama administration, but of cooperation. And there are so many mistakes made along the way between the Cubans and the Americans. Somebody would make progress on, like, getting past some of the nonsense, and then one or the other government would always intervene, as if it's in both of their interests to have this collision. In Havana, at one point, I met a wonderful young lawyer, who was a real realist, who was, at the time of the Obama reproach, always dusting off his resume and really prepared to do great if, you know, they, if Cuba, as they were, you know, opened up a little bit slowly, slowly but surely, right, to privatization and things like that. I said, well, what does Fidel mean to you?

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  He says, what Fidel means to us is that he stood up to this behemoth, Bolé to the north. Like, that's what he means to us. But he says, he also meant a lot of things that are not so positive. Like, right now, you know, if Cuba became liberal, democratic, we wouldn't really know what to do. We're not good at arguing and listening to one another, because that was never allowed. Fidel never let us express ourselves, because he, you know, shut down on civil and political liberties. So, you know, it's not to say that Cubans can't argue, they can, but he's just saying, we don't have the, the, you know, I don't know, 30, 40, 50, 60 years that you guys have of thrashing things out in public.

• 1:01:42Speaker 05

  Now, look what's happening to us, our social solidarity is declining, but, but he's saying all the paranoia, having citizens spy on one another, means that we can do very well, quietly, like, talking, talking, talking, looking over our shoulder, but that in public, we don't have a kind of tradition of expression and engagement that would let us really, you know, work on these policies. And so, you know, that's a sad indictment. I mean, no, I don't love Fidel. I think, I mean, kind of awe of who the guy was, good and bad, ambitious as all hell. Like, you can't imagine the young kid, where did he think he could do this? Where did he get this ambition? Soon as he arrived in Havana at the university, well, after high school, he immediately, once

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  he realized he couldn't be a baseball pitcher, or a basketball player, or soccer player, he went into politics and was so, I don't know what, so instrumental in trying to advance himself. I mean, partly for all the reasons I say, because he was a revolutionary, but partly because he just had this extraordinary ambition that I'm the guy. I mean, I write that, and I think I'm right, that Cuba could not have gotten where it is now without Fidel. I don't think the revolution would have succeeded without Fidel, but it also wouldn't have been driven into the ground as it's been driven without Fidel. I mean, extraordinary influence. So, no. Everyone says to me, where's the second part of the book? And I have to say, you know, I'm on to other things, but I'm not sure I want to write

• 1:03:05Speaker 05

  that second part of the book, because that's the big, bloviating guy who is, you know, just crueler and more sure of himself by the day. This is a young kid in the making who could have gone so many paths. That's sort of the point of the book, is that, you know, this could have been a revolution had the US not been so domineering, not, you know, if US imperialism hadn't been so powerful, that Cuba could be a success story. And I guess that's what the US never wanted, was that Cuba would be a success story, because somehow that would be threatening, but that's so ridiculous.

• 1:03:40Kate Lister?

  That is ridiculous. Jonathan, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so, so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 1:03:51Speaker 05

  I teach at Harvard University. I also have my own website, JonathanMHanson.com, but you can find me at Harvard, you can find me on that, and then you can find my three books in all bookstores, so I'm easy to find.

• 1:04:06Kate Lister?

  You are easy to find, and will you come back again and tell us about the other books? Because you have been fascinating.

• 1:04:12Speaker 05

  Sure, if you want to talk sex, you should explore the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, because that's a racy subject.

• 1:04:21Kate Lister?

  Oh, my God, that sounds terrifying, Jonathan. Thank you so much, we will definitely pick that up another time.

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  Thank you, Kate, great to talk to you.

• 1:04:31Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Jonathan for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review, and follow along, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And also, don't forget that you can watch us now on YouTube. Just hop over there and give us a subscribe, even if you don't really watch YouTube, it would honestly, it would help us loads. And I know I keep saying it, but I just want to have more subscribers than Dan Snow. It's petty, I know, but I don't care. And if you'd like us to explore our subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheep, History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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