Juanita Castro, a sister of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro who broke with him over his brutal crackdown on dissent within the early Nineteen Sixties, happening to collaborate with the Central Intelligence Company earlier than fleeing the island nation in 1964, by no means to talk to her brother once more, died on Monday in Miami. She was 90.
Maria Antonieta Collins, a journalist who helped Ms. Castro write a memoir, revealed in 2009, that exposed her clandestine actions for the primary time, confirmed the dying on Instagram.
Ms. Castro wrote that the C.I.A., which she was instructed to name “the corporate” to deflect suspicions, communicated along with her in Havana by shortwave radio, taking part in the “Fascination Waltz” every day at 7 p.m. adopted by a coded message. If there was no message that day, her espionage contacts would broadcast the overture from “Madama Butterfly.”
Ms. Castro — who was six years youthful than Fidel and two years youthful than her brother Raúl, who ultimately succeeded the ailing Fidel in energy — initially supported the rebellion that toppled the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. She raised cash for the insurgency in the USA and, after its triumph, helped construct hospitals and faculties.
However she grew disillusioned with Fidel’s transfer to rule Cuba as a one-party Communist state. “He betrayed the Cuban revolution, which was democratic and as Cuban as palm timber, as he himself used to say,” Ms. Castro mentioned in an interview with Reuters in 2009, when her memoir, “Fidel and Raúl, My Brothers: The Secret Historical past,” was revealed.
The work she did for the C.I.A. from 1961 to 1964 whereas working beneath the code identify “Donna,” she wrote, concerned serving to anti-Castro dissidents and C.I.A. brokers keep away from publicity and seize, together with discovering protected homes. She mentioned she helped many individuals escape the island.
“The betrayal wasn’t mine. It was Fidel’s,” she mentioned.
In response to Ms. Castro, she instructed her unique C.I.A. recruiter that she would collaborate on one situation: that she not be requested to assist with any violent plot in opposition to her brothers. It was shortly after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles, which the C.I.A. had organized. The company was busily hatching plots to assassinate Castro, generally with Mafia assist.
Ms. Castro was already privately aiding dissidents, she wrote, when the spouse of the Brazilian ambassador in Havana, Virginia Leitão da Cunha, approached her about working with the C.I.A. “Don’t be afraid, Juanita, these persons are top notch,” Ms. Castro recalled the ambassador’s spouse saying.
A gathering was arrange in June 1961 in Mexico Metropolis between Ms. Castro and a C.I.A. operative she recognized as Tony Sforza, who was primarily based in Cuba beneath the quilt of being knowledgeable gambler named Frank Stevens. “He spoke Spanish completely,’’ she wrote.
Of their preliminary dialog, Ms. Castro lamented the course Cuba had taken beneath her brother. Her first mission was to smuggle cash, messages and paperwork again to Havana packaged in cans of meals. She mentioned she refused to just accept any cash for herself.
In Cuba, she would acquire coded messages left by clandestine operatives that had been buried on the base of freeway indicators. As soon as, whereas selecting up a message with two feminine college college students, household mates she had introduced in as collaborators, her automotive broke down. Whereas standing by the street, they occurred to be handed by Fidel Castro and his motorcade. He gave them a experience into city and towed their automotive. “We arrived on the vacation spot, we mentioned goodbye to Fidel and thanked him for the service,’’ she wrote.
Ms. Castro’s older brothers had been conscious that she was associating with anti-communist Cubans, although not that she was associating with the C.I.A. Fidel Castro warned her to steer clear of “worms,” as he known as dissidents. Her actions included sending medication and meals to political prisoners and making an attempt to save lots of convicted prisoners from the firing squad, she later mentioned.
So long as their mom, Lina Ruz González, remained alive, Juanita Castro believed Fidel wouldn’t hurt her. However after their mom died of a coronary heart assault in 1963, Ms. Castro wrote, “all the things was turning into extra dangerously difficult.”
She went into exile the following 12 months, fleeing first to Mexico.
“I can’t longer stay detached to what’s occurring in my nation,” she mentioned in a press release to the press on arriving in Mexico. “My brothers Fidel and Raúl have made it an unlimited jail surrounded by water. The persons are nailed to a cross of torment imposed by worldwide Communism.”
The subsequent 12 months she moved to South Florida, the place she opened a pharmacy in Little Havana in 1973 and lived quietly for many years. She was by no means totally embraced by anti-Castro activists in Miami, she as soon as mentioned, as a result of they had been suspicious of her household identify. She offered the pharmacy to the CVS chain in 2006 and retired.
Juana de la Caridad Cástro Ruz was born on Might 6, 1933, in Birán, a village in jap Cuba. Her father, Ángel Castro y Argiz, was a farmer and businessman. Her mom was initially employed as a home within the family. The couple had seven youngsters collectively: Angelita, Ramon, Fidel, Raúl, Juanita, Enma and Agustina.
Ms. Castro’s survivors embrace her brother Raúl and her sister Enma.
When Fidel Castro grew sick in 2006 earlier than handing energy to Raúl, and once more when he died in 2016, hundreds of Cuban exiles and their descendants took to Miami’s streets in spontaneous celebrations. However Ms. Castro was disheartened. Regardless that she had not spoken to her brother in additional than 5 a long time, she felt the tug of household bonds and mentioned it was disrespectful to rejoice at anybody’s illness or dying.
“It’s not essential to do what the Cuban individuals have executed right here within the streets of Miami,” she mentioned in an interview with The New York Instances in 2016. “That’s not Christian. It’s not humane.”