Juanita Castro

Juana de la Caridad "Juanita" Castro Ruz (6 May 1933 – 4 December 2023) was a Cuban-American activist and writer, as well as the sister of Fidel and Raúl, both former presidents of Cuba, and Ramón, a key figure of the Cuban Revolution. Ideologically opposed to her brothers, she collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba from 1961 to 1964, after which she lived in exile in the United States until her death.

Early life Juana de la Caridad Castro Ruz was born in Birán, near Mayarí, in what was then Oriente Province (now Holguín) on 6 May 1933. She was the fourth child of Ángel Castro y Argiz and Lina Ruz González and had three brothersRamón, Fidel, and Raúland three sistersAngelita, Emma, and Agustina.

Politics Juanita Castro was active in the Cuban revolution, buying weapons for the 26th of July movement during their campaign against Fulgencio Batista. After the revolution, Juanita felt betrayed by the growing influence of Cuban communists in the Cuban government as well as Fidel's violent suppression of political opponents.

Fidel and Raúl's government policies clashed with family business interests. When the two revolutionaries insisted on including the family plantation in their agrarian reform program to limit private land ownership, their older brother Ramón, who had been maintaining the property, angrily exploded, "Raúl is a dirty little Communist. Some day I am going to kill him." For three years she helped political opponents escape detention and flee the island.

Emigration In September 1964, Castro left Cuba for Mexico, staying with her sister Emma, who had married a Mexican man in Cuba and emigrated there. Here she received a trophy presented to her by their president Alton Ochsner. She began to be featured on INCA's radio broadcasts of what it called "truth tapes", with Ochsner crediting them as having helped defeat the socialist Salvador Allende in the 1964 Chilean presidential election.

In 1998, she filed a lawsuit in Spain against her niece Alina Fernández, the illegitimate daughter of her brother Fidel Castro, claiming that she had been libeled in some passages in Fernández's autobiography, Castro's Daughter: An Exile's Memoir of Cuba (1998).

On 25 October 2009, Juanita Castro told Univision's WLTV-23 that she had initially supported her brother's 1959 overthrow of the Batista dictatorship but quickly became disillusioned.

Castro published her autobiography in Spanish in 2009 as ("Fidel and Raúl, My Brothers: The Secret History").