Nicknamed “Fidelito” or Little Fidel for his family resemblance, Diaz-Balat’s suicide came a little more than a year after the death of his father, Fidel Castro.

After a long struggle with depression, late Cuban revolutionary president Fidel Castro’s elder son, Fidel Ángel Castro Diaz-Balart killed himself in Havana on Thursday at the age of 68, reported the Cuban state run media.

“Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, who had been treated by a group of doctors for several months due to deep depression, took his life this morning,” Cuba’s official newspaper Granma reported.

Nicknamed “Fidelito” or Little Fidel for his family resemblance, Diaz-Balat’s suicide came a little more than a year after the death of his father with whom he maintained a complicated relationship.

Fidelito was the first born of the late Cuban President’s first marriage to the daughter of a prominent pre-revolution politician, Mirza Diaz-Balart, and was a symbol of complexities of the Cuban experience following the historic revolution.

In a letter to his sister, Fidel Castro once wrote, “I refuse even to think that my son may sleep a single night under the same roof sheltering my most repulsive enemies and receive on his innocent cheeks the kisses of those miserable Judases.”

At the time of his death, Diaz-Balart, who was a Russian-educated nuclear physicist, had been working as a scientific counsellor to the Cuban council of state, as well as vice-president of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He had also headed Cuba’s nuclear programme from 1980 to 1992, before it was suspended after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

After the divorce of his parents, Fidelito spent some of his early years in the United States, before his father managed to bring him back to the island. Reportedly, unlike some of his maternal relatives, Diaz-Balart was loyal to the ideals of the Cuban revolution, but was kept sidelined from Cuban decision-making on energy resources.

According to a Reuters report, Castro Junior’s academic colleague, Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado said Fidelito’s ideas for developing renewable energy on the island were not incorporated into state policy.

“I imagine that was disappointing for him,” said Mr Benjamin-Alvarado.

Arturo Lopez-Levy, a former Cuban government analyst who is now a professor of political science at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley said, “He had some physical resemblance to Fidel, but that was it. He was never associated with the charisma that his father had.”

Diaz-Balart’s Father Fidel Castro was a revolutionary communist leader and one of the world’s longest serving political leaders who died at the age of 90 on 26^th November 2016.

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