Juanita Castro, who turned against her brother Fidel, dies at the age of 90

Juanita Castro, a sister of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro who broke with him in the early 1960s over his brutal crackdown on dissent and began working with the Central Intelligence Agency before fleeing the island nation in 1964 and never speaking to her brother again, died Monday in Miami. She was 90.

Maria Antonieta Collins, a journalist who helped Ms. Castro write a memoir published in 2009 that revealed her clandestine activities for the first time, confirmed the death on Instagram.

Ms. Castro wrote that the CIA, which she had to call “the company” to avert suspicions, communicated with her in Havana via shortwave radio, playing the “Fascination Waltz” every day at 7 p.m., followed by a coded message. If there was no news that day, her spy contacts would broadcast the overture to “Madama Butterfly.”

Ms. Castro — who was six years younger than Fidel and two years younger than her brother Raúl, who eventually succeeded the ailing Fidel in power — originally supported the uprising that toppled Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. She raised money before the insurrection in the United States and, after its triumph, helped build hospitals and schools.

But she became disillusioned with Fidel’s attempt to rule Cuba as a one-party communist state. “He betrayed the Cuban revolution, which was democratic and as Cuban as palm trees, as he used to say,” Ms. Castro said in an interview with Reuters in 2009, when her memoir “Fidel and Raúl, My Brothers: The Secret History” was published.

The work she did for the CIA from 1961 to 1964 while operating under the code name “Donna,” she wrote, included helping anti-Castro dissidents and CIA operatives avoid exposure and arrest, including finding safe houses. She said she has helped many people flee the island.

‘The betrayal was not mine. It was Fidel’s,” she said.

According to Ms. Castro, she told her original CIA recruiter that she would cooperate on one condition: that she would not be asked to assist in any violent plot against her brothers. It was shortly after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles, which the CIA had organized. The agency was busy plots are hatched to assassinate Castrosometimes with the help of the mafia.

Ms. Castro was already helping dissidents privately, she wrote, when the wife of Brazil’s ambassador to Havana, Virginia Leitão da Cunha, approached her about working with the CIA. “Don’t be afraid, Juanita, these people are first class.” Mrs. Castro remembered what the ambassador’s wife had said.

In June 1961, a meeting was arranged in Mexico City between Mrs. Castro and a CIA agent she identified as Tony Sforza, which was based in Cuba under the guise of a professional gambler named Frank Stevens. “He spoke perfect Spanish,” she wrote.

In their first conversation, Mrs. Castro lamented the direction Cuba had taken under her brother. Her first mission was to smuggle money, messages and documents, packed in cans of food, back to Havana. She said she refused to take money for herself.

In Cuba, she collected coded messages left by clandestine agents and buried under highway signs. Once, while picking up a message from two female college students, family friends whom she had enlisted as employees, her car broke down. While standing along the road, they happened to be passed by Fidel Castro and his motorcade. He gave them a ride into town and towed their car. “We arrived at our destination, said goodbye to Fidel and thanked him for the service,” she wrote.

Ms. Castro’s older brothers were aware that she was associating with anti-communist Cubans, but not that she was associating with the CIA. Fidel Castro warned her to distance herself from “worms,” ​​as he called dissidents. Her activities include sending medicine and food to political prisoners and rescuing convicted prisoners from the firing squad. she said later.

As long as their mother, Lina Ruz González, remained alive, Juanita Castro believed that Fidel would not harm her. But after their mother died of a heart attack in 1963, Ms. Castro wrote, “things became dangerously more complicated.”

The following year she went into exile, first fleeing to Mexico.

“I can no longer remain indifferent to what is happening in my country,” she said in a statement to the press upon arriving in Mexico. “My brothers Fidel and Raúl turned it into a huge prison, surrounded by water. The people are nailed to a cross of torment imposed by international communism.”

The following year she moved to South Florida, where she opened a pharmacy in Little Havana in 1973 and lived a quiet life for decades. She was never fully embraced by anti-Castro activists in Miami, she once said, because they distrusted her family name. She sold the drugstore to the CVS chain in 2006 and retired.

Juana de la Caridad Cástro Ruz was born on May 6, 1933 in Birán, a village in eastern Cuba. Her father, Ángel Castro y Argiz, was a farmer and businessman. Her mother originally worked as a domestic helper in the home. The couple had seven children together: Angelita, Ramon, Fidel, Raúl, Juanita, Enma and Agustina.

Ms. Castro’s survivors include her brother Raúl and her sister Enma.

When Fidel Castro fell ill in 2006 before handing power to Raúl, and again when he died in 2016, thousands of Cuban exiles and their descendants spontaneously took to the streets of Miami. But Ms. Castro was discouraged. Even though she had not spoken to her brother in more than fifty years, she felt the strain of family ties and said it was disrespectful to rejoice over someone’s illness or death.

“There is no need to do what the Cuban people did here on the streets of Miami,” she said in a 2016 interview with The New York Times. “That’s not Christian. It’s not human.”