Fidel Castro son fooled by internet romance

I too was fooled by my Cuban Shotoutterm but this is worse... It shows the dangers of "internet" romances or even QL romances :))

For Fidel Castro's playboy son Antonio, it seemed the perfect opportunity for another female conquest.

An attractive Colombian woman was pursuing him over the internet, smitten by his wealth and power and keen to travel to Cuba to meet the man of her dreams.

Over eight months their romance blossomed online, each subsequent exchange in chat rooms or via email becoming more passionate and sexually charged.

But like so many relationships forged in cyberspace, all was not as it seemed. Claudia Valencia was really a prankster in Miami named Luis Dominguez, whose public humiliation of the communist dictator's Lothario son has caused much merriment among South Florida's sizeable Cuban-American community.

Mr Dominguez, who was born in Cuba, says he organised the sting to expose the hypocrisy of a country that lavishes luxuries on its leaders while repressing its own public.

"While everyday Cubans were banned from using the internet cafés in Havana hotels, this guy had a BlackBerry and unlimited access to the web," Dominguez told the Miami Herald newspaper, which ran transcripts of 'Claudia' and Castro's chat room conversations in its Saturday editions.

In them, Castro, 40, boasts of spending weekends in the upmarket Cuban resort of Varadero, of shopping trips for expensive designer clothes and of his travels across the world in his role as physician to the Cuban baseball team.

He also sent 'Claudia' photographs of himself at the Beijing Olympics, and said how he looked forward to being with her, despite being engaged to a 26-year-old TV producer in Havana.

Mr Dominguez said he invented the virtual persona of Claudia, a 26-year-old sports journalist with dark hair and blonde highlights, after studying photographs of Castro's former girlfriends.

Source : Telegraph