Choosing CIA over family wasn’t easy, says Juanita Castro

MIAMI - Juanita Castro, the younger sister of Cuban leaders Fidel and Raul Castro, has said it was not easy to decide between preserving her family ties and joining the US spy agency.

“It wasn’t easy, but in the face of so much injustice, neither was it very difficult for me. I was aware the family rupture would be strong, violent. I had to choose. I decided on the latter (joining the CIA),” she said in an interview with EFE.

Juanita revealed her collaboration with the CIA (Central Investigation Agency) in her memoir “Fidel y Raul, mis hermanos: La historia secreta” (Fidel and Raul, My Brothers: The Secret History”), published by Santillana USA and co-authored with Mexican journalist Maria Antonieta Collins.

Her activity consisted of hiding people who were being persecuted or sought by the government run by her brothers, sending messages to other CIA collaborators on the Caribbean island and transporting weapons in her vehicle to secret locations.

Before her contacts with the CIA, Juanita worked against the Castro government. She observed that her brothers were betraying what they had been promising: “bread with freedom, bread without terror, a true democracy, social justice”.

“It ended up being exactly the opposite. They decided to take the road of communism, of Marxism. The Cuban people never backed a communist revolution. They fought for democratic changes,” she said.

Juanita Castro, 76, left Cuba in 1964 and currently lives in Miami, where she owned and operated a pharmacy until her retirement in 2007.

She recalled that she fought hard at first for the Cuban revolution, which triumphed Jan 1, 1959, but shortly after the victory she began to feel “disappointed and disheartened” by the implementation of radical measures such as firing squads to eliminate opponents of the regime.

Juanita was a strong supporter of the revolution until gradually she noticed what was happening: “This determined my attitude and position. Already at the beginning of 1960, I was very concerned.”

“The road that they (Fidel and Raul) took, very different than the one they offered, was what determined that our relationship as siblings would be broken,” she told Tuesday.

Consequently, in 1961 she became a CIA agent in Cuba, a step that she said caused her no remorse.

Juanita said she has not spoken with Fidel or Raul since 1963.

–EFE