As a young child, Alina Fernandez experienced the island of her birth as a beguiling, intoxicating place.

There was magic in Cuba's cobbled streets and heady tropical air, she said. But nothing was quite what it seemed. And at the age of ten, the foundations on which this idyll was built were shattered.

That's when Fernandez found out that the man who was raising her – a kind, upper-class heart surgeon – was not her father.

That role, her mother confessed, fell to a very different figure. Cuba's ruler, a man with whom she was familiar only as a figure on the television, 'omniscient, omnipresent, all powerful, like God,' – Fidel Castro.

Sixty years later, the shock and sense of betrayal Fernandez felt in that moment remains raw. Thirty years of living in the United States has done little to lessen the blow.

'At the beginning, I was conflicted because of my mother's desire to have him close, and my own discovery of the fact that he was never really going to be a father to me,' she told the Daily Mail. 'I knew that from the beginning.'

Now she is adamant that the rulers of her homeland - her relatives - need to go, by force if necessary.

'Every dictatorship needs a little bit of a push from the outside to get established and get strong, and I'm convinced that to implode, it needs another little outside push,' she said. 'I think it's happening now.'

It's a surreal turn of events, advocating for the overthrow of your family from afar.

So, is she calling for an invasion?

'Have you ever seen a dictator step away out of his own goodwill?' she asked. 'I have never seen that in history. These regimes establish themselves so well, they have roots so well in place that they don't implode just because people are banging on saucepans at night. It's impossible. People cannot overthrow this regime by themselves. They need help.

'In principle, of course, I wouldn't pray for a US invasion. But I know Cubans inside Cuba that are doing so, because their situation is unbearable.'

Fernandez's own situation is particular – an exile who disavows her famous family yet understands that she cannot escape their legacy regardless of how many miles or years she puts between herself and them.

The title of her new documentary makes that clear. Revolution's Daughter premiered in Miami in April and is currently touring the film festival circuit. Now 70, Fernandez is thrilled at the movie's reception.

The film features 13 Cuba-born exiles - among them singer Gloria Estefan - aged from 25 to 92 and living in Miami. Fernandez is the fulcrum. 'We live here, but our home is there,' she is seen saying at one point.

She admitted she is 'tired' of talking about her family but understands the curiosity. And her story is quite something.

Born in Havana, she grew up believing that her father was that upper-class heart surgeon, Orlando Fernandez. He was married to her mother, Natalia Revuelta, a glamorous and wealthy socialite 20 years his junior.

The couple, a mainstay of the Havana Country Club's tennis and yacht scene, had two daughters: Natalia, who went by Nina and Fernandez, four years Nina's junior.

But their mother had a secret.

Bored by the cocktail party circuit, she had become an ardent supporter of the students seeking to overthrow Cuba's dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

She emptied her accounts and sold her diamonds to bankroll the revolutionaries, opening her home to the rebels as a place to meet and plot. When Castro and his allies were caught and imprisoned, he and Revuelta began exchanging passionate letters.

One was mistakenly sent to Castro's wife, Mirta Diaz Balart, and she soon filed for divorce.

On Castro's release, he and Revuelta embarked on a brief affair, which resulted in Fernandez's birth.

But her parentage was kept a secret from her until finally her mother confessed. Fernandez had lived in ignorance but her mother's relationship with Castro and the truth of her paternity was, she later learned, something of an open secret.

She was about to move schools and her mother, fearing that Fernandez was bound to find out sooner rather than later, decided it was time to admit the truth.

Her marriage did not survive the revelation. Orlando moved to the United States, taking Nina with him. Fernandez never saw him nor her sister again but to this day she still sees Orlando as her 'real' father.

Fernandez and her mother remained in Havana and the Cuban leader, who had overthrown Batista in January 1959, shortly before Fernandez's third birthday, was a sporadic visitor.

'Fidel Castro was never a permanent presence in my life,' she said. 'He used to visit very often, mostly at night. And he suddenly could stop and then disappear for one year or show up one day and then disappear again.

'He had attacks of fatherhood, I would say.'

Castro offered to give her his surname but she refused, wanting to be able to distance herself from him. In reality, of course, he proved inescapable.

'He was always moving around, and you would see him on TV for hours almost every day. He gave speeches that would never last less than five hours,' she said.

'So, the fact that he showed up in the living room at night was kind of unexpected and odd. But that was the type of relationship we had.'

From an early age, she objected to her father's doctrine.

Her mother demanded she participate in 45 days of forced labor in the fields, which was termed 'voluntary work.'

When she refused, pointing out it was 'voluntary,' she had a furious row with her mother.

'It's a dichotomy in the language that always existed in Cuba, where what is called voluntary results in being mandatory,' she said. 'I always had a feeling of being uncomfortable, that things are not what they seem to be, or what you're told they are.

'And then, of course, you get to be an adolescent, and you start developing rebellious attitudes. It was quite difficult like that. You were living in that atmosphere where words meant the opposite. You suddenly realized that you were wearing a mask, in a way. And I always liked to have an independent mind. Independence in Cuba is punished.'

She remembers confronting her father over his ban on craftspeople selling their wares in one of Havana's plazas: She insisted there was no harm in it but he denounced it as capitalism and anti-revolution.

'It's one of the Cuban tragedies,' she said. 'Ideology divided families right from the beginning. And if you don't think like them, you become the enemy. There is zero tolerance for ideological differences.'

'I had conversations with Fidel, of course. But I soon discovered that he was a monologue person. So, whatever I could tell him, it wasn't important. It was more important what he thought about it, or what he wanted to speak about. Confrontations were not welcome.'

Fidel acknowledged 11 children but the true figure may be much higher. His private life was considered a state secret. He is believed to have married for a second time to Dalia Soto del Valle in 1980 but the relationship was never confirmed.

In 2024, Donald Trump revived a long-debunked theory that Justin Trudeau was Fidel Castro's son, writing in a coffee table book that Trudeau's mother Margaret was 'somehow associated' with Castro and 'a lot of people say that Justin is his son.'

Trump wrote: 'He swears that he isn't but how the hell would he know! Castro had good hair, the "father" didn't, Justin has good hair and has become a Communist just like Castro.'

Fernandez shrugged when asked whether she thought the former Canadian prime minister was her half-brother.

'I've heard about Justin Trudeau being one of Castro's sons, but I'm going to leave the affirmation or denial to him,' she said. 'Because if you dig a little bit into the date he was born, it's not coincidental with the time his parents visited Cuba. And it's a sensitive subject.

'My skin is rough. I'm used to all those things. I was born a bastard, and I'm proud of that, but not everybody can deal with it. I don't want to become a specialist on Mr Trudeau's parenthood.'

In 1993, at the age of 37, Fernandez had enough of the repression and severe economic hardship, so fled her homeland disguised as a Spanish tourist - leaving behind her then 16-year-old daughter, who told her she must take the chance to escape.

Jesse Jackson traveled to Havana several weeks later and successfully lobbied Castro for the teenager's travel permit. That daughter is now 49, living in the US and a mother herself to a nine-year-old daughter.

Fernandez, who worked as a lab technician in Miami, did not set foot in Cuba for over 20 years, finally returning in 2014 to care for her ailing mother.

Revuelta, loyal to Castro until the end, died in Havana in 2015 at the age of 89.

'She was in love with him until the day she passed, which is something I can't fathom, you know?' said Fernandez. 'It's a feeling that I will never, ever understand, so that also separates us.'

Castro himself died the following year at the age of 90.

Is there anything he did that his daughter is proud of?

'He was a person who profited from his circumstances,' she said. 'Independence movements were blooming all over the world, and Cuba was there with them, in all the guerrilla warfare in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America. So, he really has been pivotal to that ideology.

'That doesn't mean I'm proud of him. I'm proud of myself. Because to be independent from a legend like his is difficult. It's a daily struggle.'

Fernandez admires Trump and is full of praise for Marco Rubio, the Cuban American Secretary of State.

She hasn't met Rubio but warned him not to be 'naive' about Havana's rulers.

Fernandez said the US could easily carry out 'surgical strikes' on the island, but feared that the regime, hardened by almost 70 years of resistance to US pressure, could use its people as human shields.

'My take on this is controversial, but I believe you cannot wipe the slate clean, and flatten the place,' she said. 'You have to make sure that you're not going to have a humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people.'

Her uncle, Castro's younger brother Raul, now 95, was president from 2008 to 2018. He was indicted by the United States on May 20 on four counts of murder in relation to the 1996 downing of two planes belonging to a Miami-based group of Cuban American exiles, Brothers to the Rescue.

Prosecutors claim that Raul, at the time Castro's defense minister, gave the order to shoot them down.

Does she think Raul is still running the country behind the scenes? Most likely not, she said: 'I'm racking my brain over who is in charge.'

In February, Rubio was reported to be in discussions with Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the elder Raul's 41-year-old grandson and bodyguard.

He was also reported to be talking to Raul's son Alejandro Castro Espin, 60.

Fernandez has not seen her cousins since they were children and says she has no idea which way the wind in Havana is blowing.

'I didn't have the feeling that I belonged to that family, so I was never too much in touch with the rest of them,' she said. 'And my mother was never welcome.'

But if change comes, she wants to go home to the magical island of her childhood.

'It was amazing when I went back for the first time - the feeling of returning to a place that you always wanted to leave,' she said. 'It was magical. The feeling, the energy, the beauty.

'I dream of going back to live there one day. Which is something I've never expected when I escaped.'