Lady of the revolution

She's big, she's black and she chain-smokes cigars - but only the best Havanas. Hilda Oates, Cuba's raunchy cabaret artist and ardent patriot, is letting her seat wave, as well as her beloved national flag, over Islington's Pleasance Theatre for at least the next three months. Hilda, 75, stars in Lady Salsa, an award-winning new musical, put together by British director Toby Gough, which has transferred from a sell-out season at the Edinburgh Festival.

The show tells the story of Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution through Hilda's eyes - no wonder she has collected the highest number of theatrical awards from the world's most famous communist island. Unlike the thousands of her fellow countrymen who risk death fleeing Cuba to the United States each year across the Florida Straits, Hilda has no doubts that Castro is her saviour.

Born in Havana in 1925, the second of a family of six girls to Jamaican immigrant parents, Hilda went into service when she was 11. "Before that," she remembers, "I scavenged in the streets to find bones of dead birds and animals to sell to a man who made buttons. We went barefoot. We had nothing. How my mother fed us all I do not know."

Those were the days before the revolution, before she came to know Castro and Che Guevara.

"Mother used to take in the washing on the street and we girls used to help her. Black people were nothing, most of us slept in the streets. All the families we worked for were white - they were rich, in the government. We were like slaves. I did the cooking, shopping, cleaning and answering the telephone and kept the drive clean. I earned three pesos a month at first. When the revolution started, 20 years later, I was earning 10 pesos."

As the revolution gathered momentum and Guevara joined Castro's crusade in the Cuban mountains, Hilda risked her life in Havana running propaganda leaflets for the underground resistance. "I loved them all," she remembers. "I thought I would find a man who would take me out of danger, take care of me and give me children, that was my dream. But it never happened. I fell in love with a man who had a daughter by another woman. I told him he must marry her and look after his daughter. I have loved that man for 35 years."

Standing 5ft 10in, with her red turban accentuating cheekbones that knock your eyes out, Hilda looks nearer 50 than 75. "People ask me how I stay looking so young and I say it's because I love young men," she grins. "But it's not true, I have only loved one man."

One man and Castro, that is. Hilda is one of Fidel's favourite women, and she returns the compliment. The longest-serving dictator in the world was once, after all, the liberator who let her loose onto the stage.

"One day I saw an advert in the paper," she recalls, "and I said I wanted to be an actress, but my employers said, you're crazy, you're black. But the revolution was paradise for me. After the revolution, the schools were free. We young women in service talked about the work we wanted to do. When we stopped working for the rich people, we all got jobs, as drivers, bank clerks, anything we wanted to do."

Hilda has been described as Cuba's answer to Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, though she's an altogether hotter property. Lady Salsa is Cuban history told through dance and music, light and easy on the ear. But Hilda remains an old Cuban revolutionary at heart, worshipping her country and loathing the US.

"Cubans who go to the United States are thieves and criminals who don't want to work. There is work for anyone who wants it. Many people who go to America are too young to remember what it was like in Cuba before the revolution. I remember and I stay. I love my country. I can never forget what I was and, thanks to Commandante Castro, what I am now."