Juanita Castro / The Times 5.12.2023

Initially Juanita Castro, Fidel Castro’s younger sister, supported her brother’s revolution in Cuba in the late 1950s. 

She smuggled food and weapons to Castro, their brother Raul and their fellow revolutionaries as they fought the dictatorial, US-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Aged 24, she visited America to seek funds for the rebels. She described the day Castro’s force seized Havana, Cuba’s capital, in 1959 as the happiest of her life. She expected there to be “a cleaning of the country - no more thieves, no more influence-peddling. I was dreaming of a better country”. 

The disillusionment came swiftly. Castro’s new regime began passing oppressive laws and executing political opponents. It suppressed the Roman Catholic church. It aligned itself with the Soviet Union, and Castro declared himself to be a Marxist-Leninist.

Nor did Castro spare his family. He briefly locked up a second sister, Angelita, for trying to help a jailed friend. He refused to let a third, Emma, get married in Havana’s cathedral because “all the priests there are counter-revolutionaries”. He insisted that his father’s extensive landholdings be distributed to the people as part of his “agrarian reform” programme, and was furious when Juanita tried to sell some cattle.

That was the least of her subversive activities. Unknown to her brother, she was recruited by the CIA in 1961 and risked her life by working for his arch-enemy for the next three years.

The approach had come through the Brazilian ambassador’s wife. The CIA “wanted to talk to me because they had interesting things to tell me, and interesting things to ask me, such as if I was willing to take the risk, if I was ready to listen to them. I was rather shocked but I said yes,” she recalled.

She met a CIA agent, Tony Sforza, during a visit to Mexico shortly after the failed, US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. She agreed to provide information about her brother, but refused to accept money or be complicit in bloodshed.

Juanita was given the codename Donna, a shortwave radio and a codebook. She agreed on two pieces of music - Madame Butterfly and a waltz, Fascination - that she would play on the radio to signal whether she had information to hand over. She began smuggling money and messages to US agents in Cuba in cans of food.

That was not all. Of her own volition she sent food to political prisoners and sheltered opponents of her brother’s regime in her Havana home. She helped more than 200 leave the Caribbean island, according to some reports. Castro evidently had some inkling of what she was doing. “Fidel stopped coming to our house because he complained we were protecting what he called ‘worms’, she wrote nearly half-a-century later. 

The last time she saw Castro was in 1963 when their mother died of a massive heart attack in Juanita’s home. “One afternoon, at about 3pm or 4pm, he showed up with Raul and all the bigwigs of the government,” she told America’s National Public Radio (NPR) in 2006. “I had an argument with him, and after that I never spoke to him again.”

Her position became increasingly perilous. She was protected from arrest only by the fact that she was the leader’s sister. Finally, in 1964, she fled to Mexico where her sister, Emma, had lived since marrying a Mexican. 

Given that she took 21 pieces of luggage with her on a commercial flight it appeared that Castro let her go. If he did, he came to regret it. Ten days after her flight, Juanita gave a press conference in Mexico City in which she tearfully denounced her brothers’ regime.

“I cannot longer remain indifferent to what is happening in my country,” she said. “My brothers Fidel and Raul have made it an enormous prison surrounded by water. The people are nailed to a cross of torment imposed by international Communism.” 

Juanita’s defection was deeply embarrassing for the revolution, especially in Latin America. Castro responded by summoning reporters to a reception that he was attending at the Canadian embassy in Havana. He read them a statement. His sister’s words “were written by the US embassy in Mexico City,” he claimed. “They include every infamy that the imperialists have created against the Cuban revolution. They did not have any scruples in resorting to low and repugnant procedures which go beyond the limits universally respected.”

Juanita’s defection was “personally very bitter”, he said, and told the reporters never to ask him about it again. But he also noted that several of Abraham Lincoln’s close relatives had supported the confederacy in the American Civil War.

Juana de la Caridad Castro Ruz was born in the tiny village of Biran in Holguin province in southern Cuba, in 1933. She was the fifth of seven children of a well-off sugar farmer, Angel Castro y Argiz, and his common law wife, Lina Ruz Gonzalez. Her father also had five children by his first wife, Maria Luisa Argota and a son by one of his farmhands.

Her upbringing was not overtly political. “When it was summer, we’d go to the beach together,” she told NPR. “We bathed in the river together. We had picnics on the shore. We celebrated our life and our youth when we were just kids. We were happy.”

Nor did she remember Fidel, who was six years her senior, caring about the plight of Cuba’s poor. “He used to chide my father for being too generous with the guajiros who worked for us.” Even after he launched his revolution it was “hard for me to find even a hint of Communism…his motives seemed pure.”

She and her siblings all helped the revolution in any way they could. Following her brother’s victory she ran a hospital and some clinics for a year. Then it all went sour. “He has betrayed the revolution which was as democratic and as Cuban as palm trees, as he himself used to say,” she lamented after her flight to Mexico.

Juanita moved to Miami later that same year. There she opened a small neighbourhood chemist in a district of the city called ‘Little Havana’ for its dense concentration of Cuban exiles, and ran the Mini Price Pharmacy for 35 years until it was bought by a national chain in 2007.

She became a US citizen in 1982. She never married or had children. She was by her own admission a very private person, but she continued to fight Castro’s “tyranny”.

She testified before a congressional committee in Washington. She joined a demonstration outside the United Nations headquarters in New York when Castro appeared there. She helped Cuban refugees arriving in Florida. She made radio broadcasts for Latin America, and periodically gave interviews in which she called for Castro’s overthrow. 

“I am dedicated to Fidel’s - my own brother’s - overthrow and, God forgive me, to his destruction. Cuba, my country, must be freed from his tyranny,” she said.

In 1998 she sued her niece, Alina Fernandez, Castro’s daughter, for libel after Fernandez defected from Cuba and published a memoir that defamed her and her parents. She was awarded $45,000 in damages, and never spoke to Fernandez even after she, too, settled in Miami.

“People who were eating off Fidel’s plate yesterday come here and want money and power, so they say whatever they want, even if it’s not true,” she said. “Part of my family were responsible for a lot of suffering in Cuba. You can’t change that. But nobody has the right to offend Fidel’s family. Insult Fidel - there’s plenty to say.” 

She published own memoir, Fidel and Raul, My Brothers, the Secret History, in 2009. She used it not only to denounce Castro and Raul, who had succeeded his brother as Cuba’s president the previous year, but finally to confirm long-standing rumours that she had worked for the CIA.

She expressed no regrets. “I don’t think I need to be forgiven for anything. I’ve fulfilled my duty as a Cuban. I’ve tried to do the best I could in my life to defend the freedom of my country,” she said. “The betrayal wasn’t mine. It was Fidel’s.”

She lived nearly 60 years in exile, and always longed to return to a free Cuba, but never did.

(Juana de la Caridad Castro Ruz, Cuban dissident, was born in Biran, Cuba, on May 6 1933, and died in Miami on December 4 2023 aged 90)