 HAVANA (Reuters) - The eldest son of late Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, committed suicide on Thursday aged 68 after being treated for months for depression, Cuban state-run media reported. "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 - little more than a year after the death of his father. Fidelito, who had the highest public profile of all Castro’s children, was born in 1949 out of his brief marriage to Mirta Diaz-Balart before he went on to topple a U.S.-backed dictator and build a communist-run state on the doorstep of the United States during the Cold War. Through his mother, Castro Diaz-Balart was the cousin of some of Castro’s most bitter enemies in the Cuban American exile community, U.S. Representative Mario Diaz-Balart and former U.S. congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart. His parents divorced and "Fidelito" spent some of his early years in the US before his father managed to bring him back to Cuba. A multilingual nuclear physicist who studied in the former Soviet Union, Castro Diaz-Balart was head of Cuba’s national nuclear program from 1980 to 1992, and spearheaded the development of a nuclear plant on the Caribbean’s largest island until his father fired him. Fidelito had been working for his uncle President Raul Castro as a scientific counselor to the Cuban Council of State and Vice-president of the Cuban Academy of Sciences at the time of his death. Fidelito himself was loyal to the ideals of the Cuban revolution, but was said in recent years to have grown weary - both of living in his father's shadow and having been sidelined from Cuban decision-making on energy resources, said reports. His ideas for developing renewable energy on the island were not incorporated into state policy, an academic colleague, Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, told Reuters. “And yet almost all efforts by the Cuban government were geared to maintaining the status quo of oil dependency.” 
 
 “I imagine that was disappointing for him.” 
 
 Fidelito’s death came just over a year after that of his father on Nov. 25, 2016, aged 90.
– The eldest son of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro has taken his own life after months of being treated for "profound depression," according to state-run media in Cuba. Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, nicknamed "Fidelito," was 68. Castro-Diaz Balart, who was born during Castro's brief, pre-Cuban Revolution marriage to Mirta Diaz-Balart, headed Cuba's national nuclear program from 1980 to 1992 and was serving as a scientific adviser for the Cuban Council of State at the time of his death, Reuters reports. Castro Diaz-Balart was born in 1949. His mother took him to live in the US after she divorced Castro in 1953. She sent him to visit his father after he took power in 1959 and he never returned him, CNN reports. Castro Diaz-Balart trained as a nuclear physicist in the Soviet Union and spoke Russian, Spanish, English, and French fluently. Paul Hare, a former British ambassador to Cuba, tells Reuters that Castro Diaz-Balart seemed "thoughtful, rather curious about the world beyond Cuba" when he met him at a dinner in Boston two years ago. "But he seemed a bit weary about having to be a Castro, rather than himself," Hare says. The BBC reports that he was related on his mother's side to prominent anti-Castro regime politicians in the US, including his cousin, Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart. (Fidel Castro died 14 months ago at 90.)