The Castro sister who spied for the CIA and defected to the U.S.

Juanita Castro 1933–2023

Juanita Castro always insisted that she hadn’t betrayed her brother. The younger sister of Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, she initially supported his 1959 uprising against dictator Fulgencio Batista. But when he became a hard-line communist and launched a violent crackdown against critics, she sided with the dissidents. For three years, she collaborated with the CIA, helping defectors leave Cuba. In 1963, she, too, fled, to Mexico then Miami, where she lived for the rest of her life. But she maintained it was her brother who let her down, by becoming a dictator. “The betrayal wasn’t mine,” she said. “It was Fidel’s.”

Castro was the fifth of seven children in a middle-class family that included Fidel and Raúl, who eventually succeeded Fidel as president of Cuba. After her brothers took to the mountains for revolution, she traveled to the U.S. to raise funds for them. But she soon “grew disillusioned with Fidel’s move to rule Cuba as a one-party Communist state,” said The New York Times. When the Brazilian ambassador’s wife approached her about collaborating with the CIA, she agreed—stipulating that her help not involve any violence against her brothers. Her handlers communicated by playing certain tunes over shortwave radio, her signal to pick up a message buried under a highway sign.

Once her mother died, though, she left the country, said NPR, and “never saw her brothers again.” For decades, she lived a quiet life in Miami, opening a pharmacy in 1973. Then in 2009, she published a memoir, Fidel and Raúl, My Brothers: The Secret History, in which she argued she had no choice but to work against communism. “I start to get disenchanted when I see so much injustice,” she said in 2014, “and I say, this is not possible, they are wrong here, someone here is doing things wrong.”