Juanita Castro, one of the younger sisters of the revolutionary Cuban leaders Fidel and Raúl Castro, was initially active in her brothers’ struggle against the US-backed Batista regime. However, she turned against them soon after they came to power in 1959.
According to her 2009 memoir, Fidel and Raúl Mis Hermanos: La Historia Secreta, co-written with María Antonieta Collins, Juanita began to collaborate with the CIA from 1961, as it made attempts to overthrow the Castro regime.
Coming from a traditional Catholic background, without the educational opportunities of her brothers, Juanita, who has died aged 90, had become openly hostile to the ever-radicalising revolution. Prior to the CIA involvement she opened a boarding house in the wealthy Havana suburb of Miramar to protect people who had fallen foul of the regime, as well as to prepare them for the flight into exile. Everyone knew of her counter-revolutionary activities, but she was protected by the presence in the house of her – and her brothers’ – mother, Lina.
After the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles in April 1961, when Juanita was using her influence to secure the release from prison of several acquaintances, she was approached by her friend Virginia Leitão da Cunha, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador in Havana, who suggested that she might find this humanitarian work easier if she were to be supported by the CIA.
Juanita flew to Mexico City that June, where she was interviewed by Tony Sforza, the organiser of Operation Mongoose, a CIA project designed, according to President John F Kennedy’s directive, “to help the people of Cuba overthrow the communist regime in Cuba from within Cuba”.
Juanita was the project’s first recruit. With the codename Donna, she returned to Havana, where a short-wave transmitter was installed in her house. Playing Marchetti’s Fascination Waltz indicated that an important message might be expected, while Puccini’s Madame Butterfly suggested that there was no news.
She continued her work of rescuing people from prison, but she came to the notice of the Cuban intelligence services. When Lina died in 1963, Juanita’s protection also disappeared. Raúl visited her with a large folder containing an account of her misdemeanours, and she felt that this was a warning she could not ignore. She arrived in Mexico in June 1964, creating headlines around the world when she attacked her brother’s government.
Juanita settled into a typical exile life in Miami, feted by some and attacked by others. For five years, she continued to enjoy the support of the CIA. But the inauguration of President Richard Nixon in 1969 led to a change of emphasis in US policy. Anxious to promote detente with the Soviet Union, the Americans agreed to downplay their anti-Cuban propaganda, while the Russians promised to use their best efforts to persuade Fidel to abandon the armed struggle in Latin America.
Juanita was the victim of this change, soon losing the CIA’s financial support. She opened a pharmacy on Miami’s Calle Ocho, a street where Cuban exiles predominated. A formidably opinionated women, with many of the characteristics of her famous brothers, Juanita had a good nose for business and the pharmacy was successful. She would undoubtedly have prospered more had her embryonic commercial enterprises in Cuba not been nationalised in the first years of the revolution.
Born on the Castro family estate at Birán, in Holguín province, Juanita was the fifth of seven children of Angel Castro, a prosperous immigrant from Galicia in northern Spain, and Lina Ruz, the child of a labouring family from Pinar del Río. Aged 15, with an entrepreneurial spirit inherited from her father, Juanita persuaded him to finance and construct a cinema on the estate. Later she went on to run a successful pig farm, and then a radio station in Havana.
Angel died in 1956, while Fidel and Raúl were in Mexico preparing to sail to Cuba in their ship Granma to start their struggle against Batista. Juanita managed to secure a power of attorney from her brothers to allow her to deal with the affairs of the farm. Fond of fast cars, she acquired a new green Chevrolet Impala.
Granma landed in December that year. In 1957, perceived to be in danger as a result of the activities of her brothers, Juanita was advised to leave Cuba, and, travelling with her Chevrolet, she took the ferry from Havana to Miami, involving herself in the fundraising activities of Fidel’s 26 July Movement in Florida.
After travelling to Mexico to meet her mother and sisters over Christmas, she found that her US visa had been revoked, and she was obliged to return to Miami across the land border. Now an illegal immigrant, she returned to Cuba and laid low on the farm. Recognised by the police while on a visit to Havana, she took refuge in the Brazilian embassy in September 1958, courtesy of her friend Virginia, and remained there until the morning of the revolution in January 1959. Juanita left just as Batista’s minister of information arrived to request asylum.
Never wholly at ease with her brothers’ revolution, but sympathetic to its social ambitions, she threw herself into the task of constructing a hospital close to the family estate. When Fidel suggested that Che Guevara might come to open it, Juanita was enraged. She loathed Guevara, believing that he was responsible for the revolution’s turn towards communism, and was hostile to his promotion of the armed struggle. Fidel sent Juan Almeida Bosque instead, and he was forced to listen at the opening ceremony while Juanita proclaimed “Democracia sí, comunismo no” (Democracy – yes, communism – no), to the plaudits of the crowd.
After opening her pharmacy in Miami, she continued to support Cuban exiles and to campaign against communism. She became a US citizen in 1984, and retired from running her business in 2007.
When Fidel died in 2016, Juanita did not return for his funeral, but also did not take joy in his passing, like so many of the Cuban community in Miami. She said: “In the same way that people are demonstrating and celebrating, I’m showing sadness … It’s my family.”
Raúl stepped down as party leader in 2021. He and her sister Enma survive her.
• Juana de la Caridad Castro Ruz, entrepreneur and political activist, born 6 May 1933; died 4 December 2023
