Fidel Castro lived like a king with his own private yacht, a luxury Caribbean island getaway complete with dolphins and a turtle farm, and travelled with two personal blood donors, a new book claims. 
 
 In La Vie Cachée de Fidel Castro (Fidel Castro's Hidden Life), former bodyguard Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, a member of Castro's elite inner circle, says the Cuban leader ran the country as his personal fiefdom like a cross between a medieval overlord and Louis XV. 
 
 Sánchez, who was part of Castro's praetorian guard for 17 years, describes a charismatic and intelligent but manipulative, cold-blooded, egocentric Castro prone to foot-stamping temper tantrums. He claims the vast majority of Cubans were unaware their leader enjoyed a lifestyle beyond the dreams of many Cubans and at odds with the sacrifices he demanded of them. 
 
 "Contrary to what he has always said, Fidel has never renounced capitalist comforts or chosen to live in austerity. Au contraire, his mode de vie is that of a capitalist without any kind of limit," he writes. "He has never considered that he is obliged by his speech to follow the austere lifestyle of a good revolutionary." 
 
 Sánchez claims he suffered Castro's ruthlessness first hand when he fell out of favour, was branded a traitor, "thrown in jail like a dog", tortured and left in a cockroach infested cell, after asking to retire. Released from prison, Sánchez followed the well-worn route of Cuban exiles to America in 2008. "Until the turn in the 1990s I'd never asked too many questions about the workings of the system … that's the problem with military people … as a good soldier, I did my job and my best and that was enough to make me happy," he writes. 
 
 The book, published on Wednesday, has been written with French journalist Axel Gyldén, a senior reporter at L'Express magazine. Gyldén admits Sánchez has a large axe to grind with Castro, but insists he has checked the Cuban's story. 
 
 "This is the first time someone from Castro's intimate circle, someone who was part of the system and a first-hand witness to these events, has spoken. It changes the image we have of Fidel Castro and not just how his lifestyle contradicts his words, but of Castro's psychology and motivations," Gyldén told the Guardian. 
 
 This is not the first time it has been claimed that Castro enjoys great wealth. In 2006 Forbes magazine listed the Cuban leader in its top 10 richest "Kings, Queens and Dictators", citing unnamed officials who claimed Castro had amassed a fortune by skimming profits from a network of state-owned companies. The Cuban leader vehemently denied the report. 
 
 Castro's long reign ended in 2006 when he was stricken with what was believed to be diverticulitis, an intestinal ailment, and handed power to his younger brother Raúl, who had served as defence minister. He officially ceded power to Raúl in 2008. 
 
 Fidel continued penning columns for the Communist party newspaper Granma but gradually vanished from public view, fuelling rumours he had died, only to surface for occasional, fleeting appearances. Raul has made cautious economic reforms but kept tight control. 
 
 Visitors such as Ignacio Ramonet, the French journalist who has interviewed Castro at length, have depicted an austere lifestyle of reading, exercise, simple meals and modest home comforts. 
 
 But Sánchez, now 65 and living in America, claims Castro enjoyed a private island – Cayo Piedra, south of the Bay of Pigs, scene of the failed CIA-sponsored invasion of 1961 – describing it as a "garden of Eden" where he entertained selected guests including the writer Gabríel Garcia Márquez, and enjoyed spear-fishing. 
 
 The former bodyguard says Castro sailed to the island on his luxury yacht, the Aquarama II, fitted out with rare Angolan wood and powered by four motors sent by the Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev. 
 
 "Castro would sit in his large black leather director's armchair ... a glass of Chivas Regal on the rocks (his favourite drink) in his hand," writes Sánchez. 
 
 Other presidential properties, he writes, included an "immense" estate in Havana complete with rooftop bowling alley, basketball court and fully equipped medical centre, and a luxury bungalow with private marina on the coast. 
 
 "Fidel Castro also let it be known and suggested that the revolution gave him no rest, no time for pleasure and that he ignored, indeed despised, the bourgeois concept of holidays. He lies," he adds. 
 
 Ann Louise Bardach, a veteran Cuba chronicler who has interviewed Castro, said that as a lifelong hypochondriac he enjoyed the best food and medical care but did not have a lavish lifestyle. He was born into money and went into politics for power, she said. "He didn't do it for the money. He's not swinging from the chandeliers." 
 
 His current home, just outside Havana, had four bedrooms and would in the west be considered middle or upper-middle class, she said. Focusing on any material advantage he may enjoy missed a larger point, said Bardach, author of Without Fidel: a death foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington. "He owns the island of Cuba. It's his personal fiefdom." 
 
 Sánchez says Castro's dolce vita was a "crazy privilege" while Cubans suffered serious hardship in the 1990s as the economy "collapsed like a house of cards" after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and eastern bloc with which Havana had done almost 80% of its foreign business. 
 
 His compatriots, he says, were also unaware of their leader's complicated love life, his womanising and subsequent tribe of at least nine children, not least because Cuban media was forbidden to mention them. 
 
 The Cuban leader kept a gun at his feet when travelling in his Mercedes and never went anywhere without at least 10 bodyguards, including two "blood donors". At home he would get up late, and start work around midday "after a frugal breakast". 
 
 "His favourite film that he saw I don't know how many times was the interminable and soporific Soviet version of Tolstoy's War and Peace … which lasted at least five hours." 
 
 He recalls how Castro bugged everyone, including Hugo Chávez, and insisted his bodyguard jot down everything he did in a notebook "for history". 
 
 Sánchez says for nearly two decades he saw more of Castro than his own family. "He was a god. I drank all his words, believed all he said, followed him everywhere and would have died for him," he writes. 
 
 He claims he finally realised that Castro considered Cuba "belonged" to him. 
 
 "He was its master in the manner of a 19th century landowner. For him wealth was above all an instrument of power, of political survival, of personal protection." 
 
 Recalling how Castro kept Angolan diamonds in a Cohiba cigar box, he writes: "Sometimes, Fidel had a little of the mentality of a pirate of the Caribbean." 
 
 La Vie Cachée de Fidel Castro is published by Michel Lafon on Wednesday. ||||| Fidel Castro once claimed that he lived a life of exemplary revolutionary frugality on a salary of merely $36 per month. 
 
 “Lies,” said Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, 65, who served as a bodyguard for the former Cuban leader for 17 years and has published a book of memoirs portraying Castro as a sort of feudal lord who ran the island like it was a personal fiefdom. 
 
 Castro controlled about 20 luxury homes, a Caribbean island getaway with a pool and dolphins, the 88-foot yacht Aquarama II, and several fishing vessels whose catch was sold for dollars deposited in his accounts, according to Sanchez. 
 
 “He always claims he lives frugally. Lies. He lives in a luxury that most Cubans can’t even imagine,” Sanchez told el Nuevo Herald in his first interview after writing his book, The Secret Life of Fidel Castro, published Wednesday in France. 
 
 Sanchez said he lost Castro’s trust after his brother escaped from Cuba in 1994. Forced out of the personal security details, he refused transfers and asked for retirement but was instead sent to prison for two years for insubordination. He spent the first three months in a scorching-hot, mosquito-riddled tiny isolation cell and dropped from 187 to 114 pounds. 
 
 After escaping aboard a go-fast boat to Mexico in 2008, he crossed the U.S. border and settled in Miami. A regular guest on South Florida’s Spanish-language television programs, Sanchez has previously alleged that Castro approved a drug-smuggling operation that led to the execution of Cuban army Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa in 1989, and commented on other Cuban secrets. Other defectors have confirmed Sanchez, a graduate of the Interior Ministry’s Higher School for Counter Intelligence Eliseo Reyes Rodriguez, spent many years on Castro’s Praetorian Guard — the last five in his innermost ring of bodyguards. 
 
 Sanchez has an inch-thick stack of photos of himself, in and out of the uniform of an Interior Ministry lieutenant colonel, and certificates of appreciation signed by Castro. However, his anecdotes cannot be independently confirmed because of their very nature. 
 
 His 325-page book says Castro, now 87, controlled several numbered bank accounts abroad as well as the finances of several state enterprises — including a small gold mine in the Isle of Youth — that reported to him as president of the ruling Council of State. When Castro received a Cohiba cigar box full of Angolan diamonds, he told an aide to sell the gems on the international market “and you know what to do,” Sanchez said. 
 
 Two large elephant tusks that once stood in his home also came from Angola. None of the bank accounts or enterprises were in Castro’s name, but they didn’t have to be, the bodyguard said. “He didn’t have to report to anyone. He had sole control” over economic activity he estimated at “hundreds of millions of dollars” over 10 years. 
 
 But after Forbes magazine included the Cuban ruler in its 2006 list of 10 richest “Kings, Queens and Dictators,” he declared that his salary was about 900 pesos per month, or $36. The former bodyguard said part of the book focuses on Castro’s luxurious life because so little is known about it even within the communist-ruled nation. The leader has said his personal life is a “state secret” because of the multiple attempts to assassinate him. 
 
 “Contrary to what he has always said, Fidel has never renounced capitalist comforts or chosen to live in austerity. Au contraire, his mode de vie is that of a capitalist,” says the book, written with Axel Gyldén, a senior journalist at L'Express magazine in France. “This is the first time someone from Castro's intimate circle, someone who was part of the system and a first-hand witness to these events, has spoken,” Gyldén told journalists. 
 
 Visitors to Castro’s home west of Havana, known as Punto Cero, have described it as relatively modest, perhaps on the level of an upper-middle-class home in the United States yet far better than what most Cubans can even imagine. But Sanchez said that away from the public eye, Castro enjoyed a life of luxury, spending a month each year in the paradisiacal Cayo Piedra south of the Bay of Pigs and often spending weekends on a duck hunting preserve in Pinar del Rio called La Deseada. 
 
 Cayo Piedra, which includes a dolphin and turtle lagoon, was serviced from a Castro-controlled marina with several hundred workers who manned three large yachts, including the Aquarama II, Sanchez said. Finished with precious woods from Angola, it was powered by four torpedo boat motors sent by former Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. 
 
 Castro also controlled two other large yachts, including one equipped as a floating hospital, and two commercial fishing vessels that supplied Cayo Piedra and sold the surplus in Havana for dollars that went into his bank accounts, the bodyguard recalled. 
 
 Only special friends were allowed on the island, according to Sanchez. Welcomed in were the late Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, CNN owner Ted Turner and Erich Honecker, head of then communist-run East Germany. 
 
 Castro also controlled a complex of Havana buildings and grounds, including a basketball court, a fully equipped medical center and rooftop bowling alley, first established for him by one of his lovers and closest aides, the late Celia Sanchez. 
 
 Castro later married the mother of five of his dozen or so children, Dalia Soto del Valle, but still had affairs later on with a flight attendant, a translator and another woman, he said. Soto del Valle had her own affair with a chauffeur, but Castro forgave both his wife and the chauffeur. 
 
 Everything the Cuban leader received, including clothes, food and even official documents, was first checked for germs and radiation, Sanchez said. And each morning an aide delivered to him a bundle of reports on Cuban intelligence activities around the world plus international news reports. 
 
 Castro moved about with at least 10 bodyguards, including two with matching blood types who could give him a direct transfusion in case of an emergency because he did not trust stored blood, according to the bodyguard. 
 
 The Cuban ruler had serious health crises in 1983 and 1992 and underwent radiation for what doctors described as anal bleeding because of intestinal cancer, Sanchez said. His refusal to have surgery contributed to another intestinal crisis in 2006, when he finally surrendered power. 
 
 “In 1992 I saw him [looking] dead, on a stretcher. The nurses were crying and everything,” Sanchez said. But Castro recovered and went to rule for another 14 years.
– Fidel Castro was not the spartan Socialist he claimed to be, says a former bodyguard. In fact, Juan Reinaldo Sanchez writes in Fidel Castro's Hidden Life that Castro lived very much like a king, reports the Guardian and Miami Herald. Among the claims: Castro enjoyed a private island, Cayo Piedra, that Sanchez calls a "garden of Eden." Maybe because of the turtle farm and pool with dolphins. He sailed there in an 88-foot yacht, the Aquarama II, which was adorned with rare wood from Angola and four motors courtesy of Leonid Brezhnev. ("Castro would sit in his large black leather director's armchair ... a glass of Chivas Regal on the rocks in his hand," writes Sanchez.) He had about 20 luxury homes, including an estate in Havana with a bowling alley on the roof. He always traveled with 10 bodyguards, and two of them had to have his blood type in case he needed an emergency transfusion. Castro didn't trust stored blood. "Contrary to what he has always said, Fidel has never renounced capitalist comforts or chosen to live in austerity," writes Sanchez. "Au contraire, his mode de vie is that of a capitalist without any kind of limit. He has never considered that he is obliged by his speech to follow the austere lifestyle of a good revolutionary." Sanchez worked as a bodyguard for 17 years before falling out of favor after asking for retirement. He ended up in prison before escaping to Mexico and then to the US, where he now lives.