March 28, 2008

Investigation

While revolutionising Cuba, Fidel Castro had another, more personal, agenda: he was an insatiable womaniser who callously abandoned his lovers and left behind a string of illegitimate children

There are no photographs of her parents in the bungalow in Miami’s Little Havana where Alina Fernandez Revuelta lives. But she need only glance at the triangular birthmark on her left arm to be reminded of the illicit union that led to her conception. The skin blemish runs in the family of Fidel Castro.

When Alina was a few months old, Castro dispatched one of his sisters to check if the infant bore the mark. Only then did he accept she was his. Ten years later, Alina’s mother, Natalia “Naty” Revuelta, told her the man who sometimes visited their house at night, enveloping the girl in clouds of cigar smoke and, once, giving her a bearded doll dressed in olive-green uniform to look like himself, was her father. When she was 12, Castro conceded Alina could carry his name. After a childhood of neglect, of being ignored when she wrote begging him to visit, she refused. By then Castro was firmly entrenched as Cuba’s Maximo Jefe — maximum leader — a position he would hold for nearly half a century, until anointing his brother Raul president earlier this year.

The chaos Castro’s communist regime has wrought on one of the most beautiful islands in the Caribbean has seen more than 2m of his countrymen flee into exile. But it is his personal path of destruction through the lives of those closest to him, the legions of women he has slept with and the children they have borne him, that has, until now, been a closely guarded secret.

Castro’s private life has always been strictly taboo in Cuba’s state-controlled media. He has rarely been photographed with any of the women he has been involved with, and whenever such pictures have appeared, the women have been captured coincidentally, in the background.

“He was good at PR,” says Alina, a diminutive 52-year-old with doleful brown eyes. “He always portrayed himself as this lonely man with a beard and cigar, fighting imperialism 24 hours a day with nothing else on his mind.” Nothing could be further from the truth. As his countrymen brace themselves for the mandatory flag-waving that will accompany the 50th anniversary of the revolution next month, Alina and others who fled to the “city of worms”, as the Cuban strongman calls Miami, are stripping away Castro’s mask. The picture they paint is of a serial philanderer with an unknown number of progeny.

“My mother always said he was very passionate,” says Alina. Castro wooed her mother, a green-eyed high-society belle, with feverish letters written from prison, when he was incarcerated between November 1953 and May 1955 after his first attempt to overthrow Cuba’s despised dictator Fulgencio Batista. They begin, “My dearest Naty”, “My incomparable Naty”. “You’re audacious and I like that. I am on fire. Write to me, for I cannot be without your letters. I love you very much.”

“When you’re in jail you have all the time in the world to become a poet, a manipulator, a psychologist,” Alina says. She has reason to be bitter. She and her mother suffered at Castro’s hands. So did the woman he was married to when he was declaring his love for Naty. Mirta Diaz-Balart had already borne Castro a son, Fidelito, or Little Fidel, four years old when his father was jailed. Castro met Mirta through her brother, a fellow law student at Havana University, and pursued her despite opposition from her family, which had connections to the Batista regime and thought him beneath her. Castro was the third of seven children born out of wedlock to a domestic servant, Lina Ruz Gonzalez, and her master, Angel Castro, a peasant who became a wealthy sugar-plantation owner. During his early years, Fidel and his siblings lived with their mother in a shack adjoining the house where Angel lived with his wife and their two children.

At the age of five, Castro and two siblings were sent to live with impoverished Haitian foster parents. He was then sent to a Jesuit boarding school in Havana, where, though a brilliant student, he was bullied for being illegitimate and not baptised. “His psychological make-up comes from being a bastard, a second-class citizen in his own home, who grew up determined he’d never be made to feel that way again,” says Andy Gomez, assistant provost at Miami University’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. “Since he had little sense of identity as he was growing up, he created his own” — one that would always be in control, never again dependent on anyone, least of all a woman.

“I’ve a feeling that deep down he may be shy and emotionally vulnerable,” Alina concedes.

Castro was well into his teens before his father dissolved his first marriage and married Lina. From then on, it seems his parents indulged him materially, paying for a lavish honeymoon when he married Mirta in 1948. But he soon tired of his bride, who had little interest in politics. Sure that armed struggle could overthrow Batista, he was fast becoming a charismatic champion of social justice and national sovereignty, and his attempts to foment revolt were attracting followers, including Naty Revuelta. Also married, but bored, she sold her jewels for the rebels to buy weapons and sent Castro the key to her home (in an envelope laced with perfume) so that he could hold clandestine meetings there. Their relationship was still platonic when Castro was jailed. But he was infatuated with the woman once described as having the looks of a movie star “dipped by the gods into a golden oil, like Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth”.

By this time Mirta’s family connections with the Batista regime had driven a wedge between her and Castro, and in one letter to Naty he joked cruelly that at least prison gave him some peace from domestic arguments: “I’m going to write to the [prison] tribunal reproaching them for having sentenced me to 15 years rather than 200.” Two letters Castro wrote to his wife and would-be lover were switched. When Mirta read what had been meant for Naty she was devastated, filed for divorce and quickly married again, moving with Fidelito to New York. Castro vowed revenge, writing to one of his sisters from prison that he could not bear to think of his son sleeping under the same roof as “my most repulsive enemies”.

A messy custody battle over Fidelito followed the divorce. Mirta once resorted to kidnapping her son when Castro refused to return him after a visit, and was then forced to return to live in Cuba if she wanted to remain with her child. She eventually went into exile in Spain and has never spoken of her marriage to Castro, some believe because if she did she’d never be allowed back to Cuba to visit her Fidelito, now a 59-year-old nuclear scientist with children of his own.

Care of his son was not uppermost in Castro’s mind, however, when he got out of prison. He swiftly indulged his passion for Naty, and Alina was conceived. He then left for a period of exile in Mexico, to continue plotting revolution with his new comrade-in-arms, Che Guevara, before returning to Cuba and spending two years waging guerrilla warfare from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. When his rebel band overthrew Batista in January 1959, Castro paraded the streets of Havana astride a Sherman tank with Fidelito and another loyal comrade-in-arms, Huber Matos, by his side. From then, the revolutionary hero had women at his feet. “He was young, charismatic and powerful. He didn’t have to do much to attract them,” says Alina. During the Sierra Maestra years, he had acquired a new mistress. Celia Sanchez, not known for her looks, was a committed revolutionary and a born organiser. She would jealously guard Castro from other women for the next 2½ decades.

Huber Matos perches on the edge of his seat in the Miami home where he has lived in exile for nearly 30 years, his eyes blazing as he spits out the words “crook”, “unscrupulous” and “zero morals” to describe the man he once fought alongside for Cuba’s freedom. Matos is remarkably fit for a man of 90 who spent 20 years in prison — 16 in solitary confinement — for accusing Castro of betraying the democratic ideals of the Cuban revolution.

Matos and Celia Sanchez were close friends. “She was a good person, very Catholic, very passionate about social justice,” he says. “When I got there it was very clear she was sleeping with Castro. She was both his secretary and his lover. He told me she was ‘very useful’. I thought he should have treated her with more respect, but women were just instruments to Castro. I do not believe he is a man with any personal sentiment or feelings. He uses people, and once they have served their purpose he gets rid of them.”

Celia’s gatekeeping failed to prevent numerous sexual liaisons, as Castro’s prowess increased with his power. One of the few to have kissed and told on the Cuban leader is Marita Lorenz, then a naive 19-year-old German-American concentration camp survivor, whom Castro seduced in February 1959. Lorenz claims he installed her as his lover for seven months in a suite in the Havana Libre hotel, formerly the Havana Hilton, which he took over as his private residence in the months after deposing Batista. “Every day, letters came from women all over the world offering to do anything to meet him,” Lorenz, who witnessed a string of flings, has said. She was spurned, she says, after she became pregnant and had an abortion.

She returned to the US and was enlisted by the CIA to assassinate her former lover. They gave her two capsules of botulism to drop in his drink. But, waiting for him in the Havana Libre, she panicked and flushed them down the bidet. In a scene straight out of a thriller, Lorenz describes how Castro came in, lay down on the bed with a cigar and asked her: “Did you come here to kill me?” When she admitted she had, he pulled out a handgun and, with his eyes closed, passed it to her. She describes how Castro chewed his cigar, smiled and said, “You can’t kill me. Nobody can”, before sleeping with her and allowing her to flee.

The CIA failed in more than 630 attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader, while his reputation as a lady-killer flourished. There was his reputed affair with the Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, and alleged couplings with an unnamed Cuban actress who claimed he was a selfish brute for simply “putting his pants down, and quick”. One underage dancer at the Tropicana nightclub said he smoked throughout; another said he never took his boots off.

Celia didn’t put a stop to such dalliances, seeing them as little threat. But one relationship she was determined to thwart was that with Alina’s mother, barring her rival’s access to Castro at every turn. When Alina was eight, she was dispatched to Paris with her mother, who had been given a spurious mission to carry out chemical espionage, on the orders, Alina believes, of the woman she calls “La Venenosa” — the poisonous one. When they returned to Cuba, Naty was kept on the sidelines and shunted from one minor ministerial job to another.

Alina was a nervous and rebellious teenager, developing eating disorders for which her father ordered she undergo psychiatric treatment. She married four times in quick succession — her father attending only the first nuptials — and started mixing with dissidents. When Castro refused to let her leave the island, Alina sought the help of exiles and, in 1993, at the age of 37, was eventually smuggled out on a false passport.

Naty remained in Havana and has never spoken critically of Castro. “She receives no privileges now or special attention. She has gone through very hard times. I think her heart was broken by my father,” says Alina. It is the only time in our conversation she has called him that.

Drive west through Havana’s suburbs and eventually you approach what used to be a fishing village, Jaimanitas. After the revolution, the area became heavily militarised. There is a military academy here, but also a far more secret installation — bristling with soldiers and secret police — that those Cubans who know of its existence call Punto Cero, or ground zero. At the heart of the complex is a swimming pool, basketball and tennis courts, a helicopter landing pad and the entrance to a tunnel to Havana’s military airport. It is said that Castro could survive at this secret compound for two years without ever having to leave.

For years it was rumoured that, in addition to Celia, who kept an apartment in Havana, Castro had another long-term mistress living at ground zero: Dalia Soto del Valle had been a champion swimmer in her youth and had caught Castro’s eye in the early 1960s, when she worked as a teacher on his literacy campaign. Dalia, known as Lala, bore Castro five sons, all with names beginning with “A” in homage, it is said, to Alexander the Great, Castro’s hero: Angel, Alex, Antonio, Alejandro and Alexis. There were even reports that Castro and Dalia had married in 1980 (the year Celia died), though Castro seemed to dispel such rumours in an interview with Oliver Stone in 2003 when he said being married once was “more than enough”.

Images of Dalia seated several rows behind Castro at public events have surfaced over the years. Then six years ago an ex-girlfriend of their son Antonio smuggled out of Cuba a secretly filmed video of Castro with Dalia, their grown sons and several grandchildren. The Cuban leader was pictured eating breakfast in his pyjamas and chatting with his grandchildren as they played in the pool. In 2006 a young woman named Idalmis Menendez fled into exile and began talking in detail about Castro’s secret home life. Idalmis had been married to Castro and Dalia’s second son, Alex. She portrayed Dalia as a scheming spy who secretly taps her sons’ phones and passes reports of their conversations to their father; she said Castro would pore over these reports at night while watching videos of dissident activity filmed by Cuba’s secret police on a giant TV screen — one of his few luxury items — in his private quarters. While Castro, now 82, lives relatively frugally — his brother Raul, 77, being the one to indulge in the material trappings of power — Idalmis says Dalia dresses simply only in Castro’s company. As soon as he leaves, Idalmis says her former mother-in-law changes into designer clothes and smothers herself with Chanel perfume.

Very little is known about Castro and Dalia’s sons. “For some reason he secluded her from the rest of the family. It seems she [Dalia] is now more known abroad than in Cuba. Yet she is the one who has lasted. Maybe she is more patient,” Alina muses about a woman she has never met.

Alina did meet her older half-brother Fidelito, by chance, in a lift when she was 12 and he was 18 and both were going to visit their Uncle Raul. From him she learnt about the existence of another half-brother, roughly Fidelito’s age, called Jorge Angel, conceived on a train in the autumn of 1948. The three siblings eventually formed a friendship of sorts.

Within days of coming to live in Miami in 2001, after a period spent in Spain and elsewhere in the US, Alina was informed by her aunt (Castro’s sister Juanita, who fled into exile more than 40 years ago) that she also had a half-sister, Francisca Pupo, who had been living in exile in Miami for five years. She knows little more about her than that. Many of those who know about Castro’s youthful indiscretions have taken their secrets to the grave.

Lazaro Asencio, 83, also fled into exile in Miami after falling out with Castro. He recalls the Cuban leader asking to borrow his blue Buick car for the night in 1952. “He said he wanted to take a pretty local girl out,” says Asencio. Years later he was approached in the street by a woman holding the hand of a seven-year-old girl. The child, she told him, had been conceived in the back of his car that night. Castro later dispatched his brother to buy her a house and organise birthday parties for their daughter. Asencio doesn’t know if Castro ever came to visit the girl himself. The daughter was Francisca Pupo.

When I ask Alina how many siblings she thinks she has, she pauses. “There are eight,” she says, hesitating slightly before adding, “I think.”

The number could be far higher. Almost as an aside, Andy Gomez of Miami University told me the story of a German businessman he met who, in 2002, had just returned from a business trip to Cuba. At one formal dinner, in a gesture of largesse, Castro had turned to him and said, “I am going to give you a gift,” before leaning back to his doctor, always in close attendance, and instructing him to “get my German friend here a box of those pills I take on a daily basis”.

Gomez took the pills to be analysed, hoping to shed light on Castro’s secret health issues (a year before, Castro had fainted in public). “When the lab called me back, they said, ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ ” says Gomez, containing his laughter. “Those pills were the highest strength Viagra available on the market.”

December 16, 2007

Investigation

The Argentinians have a new president: the first lady has been voted into her husband’s shoes. But the combative, collagen-enhanced champion of the underprivileged they call Queen Cristina has some dirty laundry that she would rather not air in public. Christine Toomey investigates

At first it was just a ripple of sound. Old songs of resistance to the military juntas rehearsed by a middle-aged huddle in an expectant crowd. But as election results filtered into the ballroom of a grand Buenos Aires hotel confirming Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner as Argentina’s first democratically elected woman president, a wave of nostalgia was unleashed.

The woman many Argentinians refer to as Queen Cristina strode onto the stage holding the hand of the man whose job she was about to take – her husband, Nestor. The supporters of Argentina’s extraordinary power couple linked arms and began to chant songs that would once have signed their death warrant.

For the short duration of Cristina Kirchner’s victory speech, the huddle fell quiet. But when a shower of silver confetti rained down and the first couple sealed their job swap with a kiss, the group hauled aloft banners bearing the initials of once-clandestine student and worker organisations, banned by the military during its 1976-83 reign of state-sponsored terror, known as the “dirty war”.

Queen Cristina simply spread her collagen-enhanced lips into a wider smile, and coyly hugged the waist of the country’s outgoing president. Her husband was more spontaneous. He held out his arms as the banners were thrown onto the stage. One by one he kissed them and tossed them back into the cheering crowd like an ageing pop star. With that, the husband-and-wife team retired to consider how the unprecedented transfer of presidential power between them would proceed.

Who dared to imagine in the dark days of dictatorship, when tens of thousands were seized by the military for suspected left-wing sympathies and “disappeared” – the euphemism coined then for mass murder – that 30 years later the tables would have turned so decisively?

Over the four years of his presidential term, Nestor Kirchner made the prosecution of officers accused of atrocities during the dirty war a central plank of his administration; most had been granted amnesties by previous regimes.

It was this, together with his astonishing turnaround of Argentina’s shattered economy, that saw his popularity soar, to the extent that his wife has been able to take the reins of power virtually unchallenged. Following in the footsteps of her heroine Eva Peron, Cristina has capitalised on her husband’s success by promising to better the lot of the poor: Evita’s so-called “shirtless” ones. It is largely because voters believe she will continue with Nestor’s economic policies that they voted for her.

But as a veteran lawyer and politician in her own right, Cristina, 54, has vowed to continue with the prosecutions of the military, many of whom are due to go on trial in the next 12 months. One of her most emotive campaign clips featured a message of support by one of the country’s most prominent human-rights campaigners, Estela de Carlotto. She is head of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who so many years after the fall of the dictatorship are still searching for grandchildren stolen by the military. But some watched the video with a great deal of circumspection. Both Cristina and Nestor, they point out, prefer to draw a veil over much of their time in the coastal city of La Plata, where they met as students during the dictatorship. A hotbed of left-wing activism, La Plata was a place of mass arrests and widespread disappearances in the 1970s and early ’80s. In the aftermath of the military crackdown, the couple fled to the country’s remote Patagonian province of Santa Cruz for refuge. Few blame them for fleeing such a place of slaughter. But what they did in the frozen far south in the years that followed has invited intense criticism.

In the days leading up to the poll, Cristina declared she did not want to be identified with either Eva Peron or Hillary Clinton – a more obvious modern comparison, given that both women are lawyers, and both met and married men who became provincial governors and then presidents. She was being disingenuous. She has ruthlessly exploited the images of both women to help propel herself to power.

During a battle to secure a Senate seat for Buenos Aires several years ago, she said that, were Evita still alive, the wife of Argentina’s former strongman Juan Peron would undoubtedly vote for her. Like her, Cristina has a love of glamour, albeit with a modern twist. Her closest rival in the presidential race, Elisa Carrio, a staunch anti-corruption campaigner, dubbed her the “Botox queen” and derided her penchant for heavy make-up, hair extensions, stilettos and tight-fitting leather jackets. Also like Evita, Cristina favours fist-shaking when she speaks and, on the rare occasions when she ventures into the country’s most desperate barrios, whips up the crowd with similar friend-of-the-poor rhetoric.

Unlike Evita, however, Cristina had a much more privileged upbringing. The eldest daughter of middle-class parents in La Plata, she is remembered by friends as more focused on her studies than student politics at a time when the country’s youth was ablaze with indignation at social injustice. She did become a member of a Peronist youth movement strongly opposed to the military, as did her future husband. But when their friends began to disappear, they abandoned politics and fled to Patagonia.

There are skeletons in the cupboard from the time they spent in Santa Cruz, where Nestor Kirchner was elected governor three times and she was returned to the national Senate twice. Questions still persist about millions of dollars in oil royalties that the federal government paid to the province of Santa Cruz during Nestor’s time as governor, which he had transferred to secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg, allegedly to protect them from devaluation during the country’s financial collapse of 2001-2. Some of these funds, many believe, are still unaccounted for.

Reminders of these transactions surfaced in the capital when Cristina’s election posters were defaced. After part of her campaign slogan – roughly translated as “We know what’s missing” – opponents had scrawled: “The missing millions from Santa Cruz”.

More recently, Nestor Kirchner’s presidency was marred by a series of corruption scandals.

In July his economic minister, Felisa Miceli, resigned after a bag containing an alleged US$240,000 in cash (Miceli claims it was just $60,000) was discovered in the bathroom of her government office. A month later, a Venezuelan businessman was arrested trying to smuggle $800,000 into the country aboard a jet chartered by Argentina’s state energy company. Two Argentine government officials and three executives from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company were travelling with him. The discovery led opponents of the Kirchners to file criminal charges of money-laundering and bribery against the energy companies involved, amid heavy speculation that Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, who shares much of the Kirchners’ left-wing ideology, was smuggling in funds to boost Cristina’s election campaign. A slew of other alleged corruption scandals involving kickbacks to contractors of state-owned companies are also under investigation.

More troubling for many, however, is the source of the Kirchners’ considerable personal fortune from their activities as young property lawyers in the capital of Santa Cruz, Rio Gallegos, during the dirty war. When the military imposed severe financial penalties on those struggling with debt, many lost their homes to repossession. The Kirchners bought more than a dozen of these properties at knockdown prices, allegedly in association with a financial company backed by members of the military. This became the foundation of their small property empire.

“What they did may have been legal. But in the eyes of most it was morally repugnant. It makes a mockery of their claims to have been champions of social justice in their youth,” says Marcelo Lopez Masia, a journalist who spent years working on a documentary about the Kirchners’ activities only to find that no television network would air it. Media outlets critical of the Kirchners in the past have had big advertisers withdrawing their accounts.

The Kirchners’ contempt for the media is well known. Throughout Nestor’s four years in office he never held press conferences and rarely granted interviews. “Cristina is a very strong character. She is much more cold and distant than her husband. She is a woman people either love or hate. She is not someone anyone is indifferent to,” says one of Argentina’s top political analysts, Joaquin Morales Sola, who was granted a rare interview after her election.

Cristina is fond of pointing out that when her husband was elected president, in 2003, it was she who was the better-known politician. As a senator, her finger-jabbing during congressional sessions was legendary. One of her best-known outbursts came in 2003 when she pounded her Senate desk and demanded the High Court repeal amnesties for officials accused of crimes during the dictatorship. The High Court took heed. The amnesty was annulled and the way cleared for scores of prosecutions to proceed.

But opponents view the Kirchners as opportunists who seized the cause of human rights to improve their popularity, concluding that the couple had shown little interest in such causes until they had presidential ambitions. Andrew Graham-Yooll, longtime editor of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald and author of a searing personal account of the dirty war, shares this view. After years as an informant for Amnesty International, Graham-Yooll brought his family briefly to the UK following a period of arrest by the military. “I think they latched onto a very good wheeze, which has less to do with human rights and more to do with using history as a form of revenge,” he says. “I am delighted that a woman has been elected president. I think it is a good sock on the nose for the machistas – macho men – of this country. But questions need to be asked about how much money the Kirchners have salted away and how Cristina abused the apparatus of the state to get elected.” The way she used privileges, such as her husband’s presidential jet and helicopter on the campaign trail, incensed other contenders, who also said many of their potential donors were threatened with punitive tax audits.

For those who have battled for decades for justice for the disappearance and murder of their loved ones, the criticism that the Kirchners are now pursuing the military to polish their image is academic. “The fact is they are doing it, and that is all that matters,” says Estela de Carlotto. “Many of the trials have been going very slowly and Cristina has promised to speed them up. She is a woman and we support her because of that.” Cristina is not the first woman to be elected to political power in Latin America. Last year, Chile elected Michelle Bachelet president. She promptly filled half her cabinet with women. Increasingly, voters in the region seem eager for women to replace traditional politicians associated with the problems of the past. Yet throughout her campaign, Cristina assiduously avoided playing the gender card and, unlike some other prominent female politicians, has kept her two children – Maximo, 30, and Florencia, 16 – out of the spotlight. Once elected, she did profess to feel an “immense responsibility for her gender”, calling on her “sisters” to support her in the great task of government. But days later, she disappointed many of the more liberal-minded by stating that she was opposed to abortion and couldn’t believe “anyone could be in favour of it”.

However, it is not the country’s chattering classes who voted her into power. She found little support at the polls in cosmopolitan Buenos Aires and other urban centres. Most of the country’s middle class sneer at her haughty manner and tacky personal style. But since the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001-2, which wiped more than two-thirds off the value of most private savings, the ranks of the middle class have shrunk dramatically. For the country’s poor who propelled Cristina to the presidency, only one thing matters: the state of the economy.

In the rain-soaked central market of La Matanza, a sprawling satellite west of Buenos Aires where some of the capital’s poorest scratch a living, Cristina stepped onto a hastily erected stage in a cream silk suit three days before being elected and spoke about “recovering the dignity” of Argentina. “We want the decisions about our country to be made here, not in the offices of the IMF,” she thundered to rapturous applause. Her speech lasted little more than 10 minutes before she was whisked back to the first couple’s official residence in a presidential helicopter. It was the close of a campaign that many regarded as more like a coronation than an election. But it hit the right buttons with the bedraggled crowd. “At least I have work now, and some hope that my children will be educated,” said Eduardo Rivas. A variety of government job-creation schemes introduced over the past four years under Nestor Kirchner have helped cut unemployment from a 2002 high of 21.5% to around 10.4%.

“We want Cristina to follow in the footsteps of Chavez. We want more big changes in this country,” said Paciano Ocampo, 46, referring to the Venezuelan president’s nationalisation of vast sectors of the economy to fund a range of initiatives to help the poor. In recent years, Chavez has also used his country’s oil wealth to bankroll Argentina to the tune of US$3 billion in government bonds to help the country restructure its debt. It is part of a wider strategy to extend his influence in the region.

Like Venezuela, Argentina has been busy nationalising energy and utility companies, allowing the government to freeze prices and keep inflation low. This, together with favourable financial markets and high prices for Argentina’s agricultural products, has helped fuel an annual economic growth rate of 8% for the past four years and saw Nestor Kirchner’s approval rating soar to above 70%. But the government has been plagued by allegations that it has suppressed true economic figures – crucially that of inflation, officially pegged at around 10%, though widely believed to be twice that.

As the global economy worsens, years of underinvestment in Argentine industry threaten to plunge the country into a new energy crisis. This means the future looks far less rosy for Cristina’s presidency. Some believe this will play into her husband’s hands. “It is clear now why Kirchner appointed his wife candidate. It is clear her period of government will be more difficult than his and he is happy for her to pay the price for this. In some way, he is sacrificing her for his own political ambition,” argues Rosendo Fraga, a veteran observer of the country’s political scene. “Kirchner doesn’t want his wife to fail, because that would bring him down too. But he doesn’t want her to be too successful, either. That will leave the way open for him to be re-elected in four years as the one-time saviour of his country. Cristina and Kirchner are politicians first, husband and wife second. As with all such alliances, politics, power and ambition come before marriage.” Aides point to differences between the pair. Cristina is viewed as more of a negotiator. And where Nestor showed no interest in foreign policy, his wife is expected to devote much of her time to the diplomatic circuit. In the few months of her campaign, she spent more time visiting foreign leaders than travelling around Argentina wooing voters. Detractors derided much of this travel as extended shopping trips. But for a country desperate for foreign investment, such excursions are crucial.

On the trickier matters of international diplomacy, she has remained silent. Little was said when, shortly before the election, Britain confirmed its intention to file a claim to 386,000 square miles of oil- and gas-rich South Atlantic sea bed. Argentina and Chile also claim sovereignty over the area, extending out from British Antarctic Territory.

Under the 1959 Antarctic treaty and subsequent protocols, any attempt at mining and drilling in the area is banned for at least the next 40 years. But shrinking Middle East reserves make exploitation increasingly tempting.

Given the lingering bitterness over the Falklands war, such a muted response from Cristina surprised some, especially since the Kirchners’ traditional power base is in the southernmost tip of the country, closest to Antarctica. Cristina sometimes calls herself La Pinguina – The Lady Penguin – after the inhabitants of those southern reaches. Her husband was similarly nicknamed Penguin because of his southern roots and prominent nose. Analysts say they are now imitating the role-reversal behaviour of emperor penguins, who send the female out to sea in search of food while the male stays back to incubate their egg.

Asked what her husband would do after he slipped the presidential sash over her shoulders, however, Cristina joked that she does not trust him to stay at home. “He’ll do what he has always done,” she says. “He’s a political animal.” Whether this means he will continue to pull the country’s political strings behind the scenes, or if Argentina’s first couple intend to take turns passing the reins of power between them, as emperor penguins do with their chicks, remains to be seen.