The younger sister of Fidel and Raul Castro, Juanita Castro, collaborated with the CIA against her brothers’ rule in Cuba before going into exile in Miami in 1964, she said on Sunday.
Juanita Castro, 76, who has not spoken to her brothers for more than four decades, made the revelation to the Spanish-language TV channel Univision-Noticias 23 on the eve of publishing her memoirs about Fidel and Raul Castro.
The book in Spanish, entitled Fidel and Raul, My Brothers, the Secret History, co-written with Mexican journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, went on sale yesterday.
After initially supporting Fidel Castro’s revolution, which toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1959, Juanita Castro said she became disillusioned by the way her elder brother was executing opponents and moving the island toward communism.
“I began to become disenchanted when I saw so much injustice,” she said in an interview with Collins broadcast by the TV station.
Juanita Castro said that from her house in Havana, she had worked to shelter those who were being persecuted by the government.
“My situation in Cuba became delicate because of my activity against the regime,” she said.
She told Collins that one day a person close to both her and Fidel Castro brought her an invitation from the CIA asking her to collaborate with the US spy agency.
“They 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 anyway I said yes,” Juanita Castro told Collins.
Collins said that “in this way began a long relationship with the arch-enemy of Fidel Castro, the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“During three years, from 1961 to 1964, at the risk of her own life, the work of Juanita Castro was to save the lives of her compatriots long before she left for exile in Miami,” Collins said, without giving more details.
Juanita has been a strong critic of Fidel Castro’s communist rule in Cuba, saying he betrayed the democratic principles he originally claimed to espouse by turning to Marxism and aligning Cuba with the Soviet Union.
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