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 meet the man of her dreams.
Over eight months their romance blossomed online, each subsequent exchange in chatrooms or via e-mail becoming less inhibited and more steamy.
But like so many relationships forged in cyberspace, all was not as it seemed. "Claudia Valencia" was re
ally a man, 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 and runs a website analysing its military and security services, said he organised the sting to "shatter the myth" of an impenetrable government and expose the hypocrisy of a country that lavishes luxuries on its leaders while repressing its own people.
"While everyday Cubans were banned from using the internet cafes in Havana hotels, this guy had a BlackBerry and unlimited access to the web," Mr Dominguez told the Miami Herald newspaper.
Mr Castro, 40, boasted in the e-mail exchanges of spending weekends in the upmarket Cuban resort of Varadero, shopping for expensive designer clothes and jet-setting overseas in his role as physician to the Cuban baseball team.
He also sent "Claudia" photographs of himself at the Beijing Olympics, addressed her as "baby" and told how he looked forward to being with her, despite being engaged to a 26-year-old television producer in Havana.
"I want something more with you … I want to kiss you, love you and make love to you," he gushed in one exchange with Claudia, unaware that he was romancing a fictitious character, and of the snorts and giggles his outpourings were causing.
When Mr Castro asked if he could see her live online via webcam, "Claudia" had to hurriedly tell him hers was broken. "Promise me you'll get a web camera, I'm dying to see you," a disappointed dictator's son responded.
In another communication, sent while he was touring Russia in January with his Uncle Raul, who now rules Cuba, he panted: "Guess where I am and I will make love to you without stopping."
Mr Dominguez said the deception sprang from a 2006 visit by the Cuban baseball team to Cartagena, Colombia, when Castro's son was seen making the most of the locals' attention.
"Antonio was like a rock star, everyone asking to take photos with him, especially beautiful women," he said.
"I got the idea that we could get close to him by posing as one of those women."
He invented the virtual persona of Claudia, a 26-year-old sports journalist with dark hair and blonde highlights, after studying photographs of Mr Castro's former girlfriends. He then set up an e-mail account in her name and sent him a message saying they had met in Cartagena.
When the young Castro stopped replying to "Claudia's" messages in May, Mr Dominguez took his story to a Spanish-language television station in Miami, which has authenticated the communications and photographs as being Antonio Castro.
One of Fidel Castro's five sons by his second wife, Dalia Soto del Valle, Antonio is not the first member of the family to fall for a prank staged by Cuban exiles. His father, who stood down through ill health last year after almost five decades as president, was fooled in 2003 by Joe Ferrero, a presenter with Miami-based radio station El Zol, who placed a personal telephone call to him pretending to be the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
After making small talk with Castro, including some chit-chat over a suitcase he claimed to have lost during his travels, Mr Ferrero suddenly challenged the Cuban leader on his human rights record and called him an "assassin".
Mr Ferrero was later fined for violating broadcast standards.
