My friend, the dictator: Swim hero Susie Maroney reveals her lifelong bond with Fidel Castro after her daring Caribbean crossing – and what shocked him about Australia

Susie Maroney’s face is blistered, her lips swollen, her every muscle screaming out in agony, as Fidel Castro’s gun-toting guards march her out of her hotel and motion her into a waiting car.

The Australian marathon swimmer has been in the Cuban capital of Havana for less than 24 hours after making an audacious – and world record-breaking – crossing to the communist enclave from Mexico, and her presence hasn’t gone unnoticed.

The government agents sent to collect Susie and her accompanying family refuse to divulge where they are taking her or why, and the then 23-year-old has neither the courage nor the Spanish to push the point.

Nonetheless, she has her suspicions.

‘We knew that the second I stepped foot on the island, Castro would know about it,’ the retired athlete tells me.

‘Nothing happened in Cuba in those days without him knowing about it – we just didn’t expect anything would happen so fast.

‘One minute, I’m in my room recovering, the next thing I know, Mum is running in and saying, “The whole of the hotel downstairs has been cleared – everyone checking in has been evacuated and there’s nobody in the foyer at all. The hotel is in lockdown”.

‘That’s when they came for us.

‘The government agents led us down through the lobby and outside to some cars that were waiting for us and they told us to get in: my brothers, my mum and myself.

‘I was so nervous; no one would tell us where we were going but we just knew it had to be Castro.

‘Who else has that sort of power? To completely shut down the Capri Hotel in the middle of the day just to pick up a few Aussies?’

As Susie and her new-found entourage weaved their way through Havana’s light downtown traffic, her intuition soon proved correct – they were heading to the dictator’s famed seat of power, the Palacio de la Revolución.

Even now, a quarter of a century on, Susie can recall every twist and turn of that journey – and the trepidation that comes with being summoned by the man simply known as ‘El Comandante’.

‘Nervous doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt,’ she says. 

‘I’m just some kid from Cronulla who has spent more time with their head under water than above it.

‘When we eventually pulled up outside the palace, we were taken through all these security checkpoints and through a garden and up to this marble entrance.

‘And that’s when I first laid eyes on him: Fidel Castro.’

It was meeting that would spark an unlikely bond between the duo that would last a lifetime.

SEALED WITH A KISS 

As Cuba’s ‘Líder Máximo’, Castro became a towering international figure in both politics and pop culture following his rise to power as a guerrilla leader in 1959.

For almost half a century, the communist commander defied the United States, frustrating 11 successive presidents, and briefly brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Even as his critics in Washington denounced him as a ruthless tyrant who ruled through fear and repression, he found fame and fandom among the global left.

By the time he ceded power in 2006, he had become the second-longest reigning head of state in history, after Queen Elizabeth II, and outlived hundreds of attempts on his life – including a CIA-backed plot to assassinate him with an ‘exploding cigar’.

Although he died eight years ago, his legacy lives on and continues to polarise. 

In June, a Florida billboard comparing Donald Trump to the late Cuban despot ignited widespread controversy in the US before it was taken down a month later following a string of complaints.

When Susie met Castro at the palace in 1997, the dictator’s iconic beard had already begun to grey, though his tight grip on power was far from fading.

For all his infamy, what struck the young Aussie most about Castro was the softer, more paternal side she saw in the military hardman.

‘He was standing there, and he’s got the green uniform on, he’s got the beard, and he looks everything that you imagine him to be,’ she says.

‘But nothing can prepare you for what his presence is like. He has this aura around him. It was completely disarming, he made me feel like I was “safe” – that’s the only word I can use to explain it.

‘I felt strong when I was next to him and I felt safe when I was with him.’

As Castro welcomed her into his palace, where he had prepared a star-sudden reception to mark her successful swim, Susie was soon overcome with emotion.

‘I couldn’t believe it, he even had all these Olympians there – Cuban Olympic swimmers, Cuban Olympic boxers – there were so many people waiting to see me,’ she recalls.

‘He’s looking at me and really studying me – my skin was burnt raw, my face was all puffy from being stung by jellyfish and my lips were split from the sun and the sea.

‘Then he’s giving me a hug, giving me a kiss on the cheek and taking my pulse and saying he wanted to make sure I was okay.

‘I can honestly say my heart was racing – I was so overcome by all of it I nearly started crying… then Fidel started crying, so I started crying too.

‘He just had this feeling of someone that really cared about me and what I had just done.’

CONQUERING CUBA

Susie’s long journey to Castro’s Havana palace began more than 7,000km away – and six years earlier – in the south of Britain.

She was just 17 and starting to make her mark on the world of marathon swimming when she became the fastest woman to complete a two-way crossing of the English Channel, with a time of 17 hours and 15 minutes, in 1991.

Within hours of stepping out of the Channel’s frigid water, Susie and her mother Pamela were already plotting their next conquest.

‘Mum had read this article about another person who had attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida, and we got the map and went, “Okay, why don’t we try and do that?”‘ she recalls.

Given the strict trade and travel embargoes between the rogue communist country and the US, and the extreme physical demands of such a crossing, it would take almost five years of planning and training before Susie was ready to attempt the daunting 179km swim.

After setting off from the Cuban capital in June 1996, she spent a gruelling 38 hours battling her way across the Florida Straits and, while she made it into US waters, she had to be hauled from the ocean vomiting and hallucinating.

Disappointed but undeterred, Susie returned 11 months later for a second attempt.

‘When I arrived back in Havana, I was overwhelmed by how excited everyone was that I had come back to try again – it felt like the whole country wanted me to make it,’ she says.

‘I even had members of Cuba’s national swim team come and swim with me each day while I was training in the marina.

‘And every night, while we were waiting for the right weather to attempt the swim, the TV weather report would give me a personal update, saying, “And Susie, we don’t advise you swim tomorrow”.’

She eventually got the all-clear on May 12, 1997, swimming out of Havana’s Marina Hemingway a little before noon as crowds of Cubans flocked to cheer her off.

‘You’ve got to go out really fast at the beginning so that you don’t get stuck in the gulf stream,’ Susie says.

‘At first it was magical, I spotted a sperm whale and swam alongside with it for about an hour before it got a bit too close and I was ushered into my shark cage.

‘But by the time night fell, the weather turned bad and it started getting really rocky in the cage.’

As the sides of the mesh-lined enclosure seemed to close in around her, Susie says she started feeling seasick – right in the middle of her ocean swim.

‘I was getting smashed by the cage and the stung by the jellyfish and I just started vomiting and I couldn’t stop,’ she says.

After about 17 hours, the hallucinations returned.

‘I started seeing Santa Claus sitting on the side of the cage and dancing monkeys and they were all telling me to give in because I wasn’t going to make it,’ Susie recalls.

‘There’s no easy time in a swim like that – you’re fighting the whole way – but when you’re about 20 hours in and you still can’t see land, every part of you starts telling you to pack it in.

‘That’s when you have to dig deep and take it hour by hour… stroke by stroke. You can’t stop. You won’t stop. The only way is forward.’

By the time Susie finally dragged herself from the water, she was savagely sunburnt, covered in welts and her tongue was so badly swollen she struggled to eat… but she had also become the first person in history to make the perilous crossing – accomplishing the feat in 24 hours and 31 minutes.

It only whet her appetite for more Caribbean challenges.

Little more than a year later, on June 1, 1998, she set the then world record for the longest ocean swim without flippers after fighting her way across the Yucatán Channel from Mexico to Cuba in 38 hours and 33 minutes.

If Castro had not already been intrigued by her success, she captured his attention now.

CASTRO’S SECRET HEALTH KICK

‘Fidel had travelled through there himself, of course – so he was really interested in the precise route we had taken – so he could compare it to his own passage,’ Susie says. 

The dictator had been a young revolutionary commanding leading a ragtag group of 81 insurgents – including friend Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara – when he made the crossing in the yacht Granma in 1956 after returning from exile in Mexico in a bid to overthrown the then Fulgencio Batista regime.  

‘He wanted to know exact directions and he was saying, “Yes, Che and I, we went the same way when we were starting the revolution”.’

It turned out, the Cuban president had no issue with casually name-dropping his famous friends. 

After hosting the public reception for Susie, he took her on a private tour of the palace.

While showing her through his office, Susie says he pointed to ‘a big TV on one wall that always had CNN on and told me all about his friendship with [billionaire CNN owner] Ted Turner’.

Then, over dinner, conversation veered to the Clintons.

‘I remember we started dinner with grapefruit because Fidel was on a health kick,’ Susie says of the then 70-year-old tyrant.

They then enjoyed ‘Cuban-style chicken’ before the evening festivities ended with a selection of pastries, coffee and cigars.

‘But he didn’t have one,’ Susie says. 

‘In fact, he said he removed all the ashtrays from around the palace because he had giving up smoking.

‘He said he had heard that Hillary Clinton had done that after moving into the White House and he’d decided to try doing it too.

‘(Giving up cigars) was part of his plan to live healthier – which probably wasn’t a bad idea given the CIA had tried to kill him with one.’

Dinner talk soon drifted towards politics, with Castro peppering Susie with questions about the land Down Under.

‘He was really interested in what life was like for young families in Australia and how it worked: How much did a young family pay for electricity? Who was the head of the family? Who looked after you when you got old?

‘It was all about family and you could see his mind just ticking over as he was taking it all in.

‘He also wanted to know about our prime minister: Did I know him? Would he help look after me when I got home?

‘When Mum told him that we’d had to mortgage our house to pay for my swims, he was shocked that the government hadn’t looked after us better.

‘He also had a wicked sense of humour, and he wanted to know if kangaroos really boxed. He thought that was hilarious.’

From kangaroos it was a small leap to sharks and shark cages.

‘Mum might have said something like, “Yeah, we’re thinking of maybe swimming to Jamaica next”, and he got really excited and wanted to help,’ Susie recalls.

‘He’d seen the bruises on my hands from hitting the sides of the shark cage on the swim from Mexico, and he was saying, “I can help you with the cage, I can improve it so it doesn’t hit your hands”.

‘And he did. By the time I returned to Cuba two years later, he had built me a new shark cage – he’d been quite hands-on with ideas for how it should be made – and even had it spray-painted pink for me.’

PENPALS AND PUTDOWNS

The 160km swim, which Susie completed in 34 hours and 50 minutes in September, 1999, would see her feted once more at Castro’s palace – but prove her last marathon effort involving his island nation.

Still, the two would remain firm friends, trading emails each Christmas and Australia Day, until Castro’s death at the age of 90 in November 2016.

Each personal correspondence remains among Susie’s most treasure mementoes, along with a signed box of cigars he gave her, while a photograph of the unlikely duo together still takes pride of place on her living room wall.

‘It’s the one where he’s taking my pulse actually because I think it’s so cute,’ she says.

‘I found Fidel really inspiring and he still inspires me now.’ 

The feeling was clearly mutual.

When the ABC snagged an audience with ‘El Presidente’ in 2004, reporter Lisa Millar noted his enduring affection for the Australian swimmer. 

‘We got half a dozen questions and he answered each, offering observations for an Australian-only audience and remarking more than once on his admiration for swimmer Susie Maroney,’ she wrote at the time. 

‘Finally he was done with indulging us and he was gone.’

Susie smiles when I mention this to her.

‘I hadn’t heard that before,’ the now 49-year-old says. 

‘But that’s lovely to hear.’

As someone who has spent much of her life swimming against the tide, she’s unabashed about her feelings for the late Cuban leader and has firm views on the dictator’s long-standing detractors.

‘When people say the nasty thing about him, they clearly don’t know the real Fidel Castro and what he was really like,’ she says.

‘Obviously, I clicked with him from our very first meeting at the palace and I always found him kind and caring.

‘I’m probably the only person in the world who’d say, “I’m happy to have been locked up in a cage by a dictator”.

‘But, as I say, Fidel had a way of making you feel safe.’