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A few days after leaving Cuba in 1964 with her entire life packed in 21 suitcases, Juanita Castro stood before television news cameras in Mexico City. She looked nervous. She was about to condemn her older brother Fidel as a tyrant.
“Cuba is an immense prison surrounded by water,” she told reporters, her voice trembling. “The Cuban people are pinned to a cross of martyrdom imposed by international communism.”
In denouncing Cuba’s communist transformation following her brother’s revolution toppling U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, Ms. Castro caused an international stir amid the Cold War. Fidel was enraged.
A few days later, in a fiery statement, he equated the fracture in his familia to the divide among families during the U.S. Civil War. “While some of their members fought for the freedom of the slaves, others fought for slavery,” he said, adding that he was “personally very bitter” over the ordeal.
Ms. Castro, who died Dec. 4 at 90, wasn’t just an aggrieved sister.
Decades later, after settling in Miami where she owned a pharmacy in Little Havana, Ms. Castro revealed in her autobiography that before defecting she had been a CIA asset with the code name Donna, providing the U.S. government with information about the inner-workings of the family.
It was a dangerous act of subterfuge for which others had been executed.
“Juanita was a remarkable, incredibly brave person,” said Ann Louise Bardach, an author of several books on Cuba who interviewed Ms. Castro at length. “First of all, to leave your country forever is a big deal. To leave a family, the Castro family, and then buck Fidel — there’s not many people who have that kind of courage.”
Juana de la Caridad Castro was born May 6, 1933, in Birán, a village on the east side of Cuba. Her father ran the family’s sprawling farm, and her mother ran the household.
Ms. Castro, one of seven children, studied business and secretarial education at Catholic school in Havana. She was an enthusiastic participant in the early days of the revolution over Batista, whose corrupt government fell to her brother’s guerrilla movement in late December of 1958.
“My brother Fidel filled the Cuban people with hopes, promising to permanently eliminate injustice, terror, and military domination,” Ms. Castro said during her Mexico City television appearance. “I helped in any way I could, first in Cuba and later abroad … collecting funds to buy arms, foodstuffs and medicines for the Cuban patriots who were fighting from the mountains of my country.”
But soon, Ms. Castro watched in shock as her brothers, Fidel and Raúl, embraced radical communist principles. They announced plans to take over family farms, including the sprawling Castro property that their father had worked so hard to grow and maintain.
“Before the Revolution, Fidel was normal,” Ms. Castro told Bardach, according to a transcript she provided to The Washington Post. After the revolution, Fidel declared that family ties were based solely on animal instinct. He also called himself the son of an exploiter.
“This is something that very troubled me,” Ms. Castro said.
Her home in Cuba became a safe haven for Cuban dissidents, which Fidel and Raúl grudgingly tolerated. (Raúl was a military commander during the revolution and later succeeded his brother as president.)
They apparently didn’t know that Ms. Castro, with help from the wife of Brazil’s ambassador to Cuba, was recruited by the CIA in 1961. Clandestine officers communicated with her by shortwave radio, arranging for the song “Fascination Waltz” to be played on the radio at 7 p.m. if they needed to reach her.
Ms. Castro agreed to do anything short of causing harm to her brothers. Among other duties, Ms. Castro smuggled messages and cash into the country from Mexico inside a can. She refused to take payment for her services.
“What I am doing for my country is priceless,” she told her CIA handler, according to her autobiography. “In addition to being my duty as a Cuban, I don’t put a price on my services for you, because it doesn’t have one.”
After her mother died in 1963, she feared Fidel would no longer tolerate her opposition.
“The odds against me were growing longer and longer,” she wrote in Life magazine. “My phone was tapped. Most of us, at least those who were closely identified with me, had burned out our days in Cuba.”
Without opposition from her brothers, she left Cuba safely on a visa to Mexico.
“Now I am away from Cuba, and I am dedicated to Fidel’s — my own brother’s — overthrow and, God forgive me, to his destruction,” she wrote in Life. “Cuba, my country, must be freed of his tyranny.”
In Miami, Cubans viewed Ms. Castro warily. She was, after all, the sister of a man many Cubans there despised.
“It has been hard,” she told Bardach. “At times, somebody would come into the pharmacy and tell me ‘I know that you are his sister’ and complain.”
Ms. Castro remained in touch with several siblings and their extended families, but she never spoke to Fidel again.
“I think her life was lonely,” Bardach said. “There was a sadness about leaving it all behind.”
Ms. Castro never married. Her death, in Miami, was announced on social media by Maria Antonieta Collins, the co-author of her memoir. Other details and a list of survivors were not available.
After Fidel died in 2016, reporters showed up at her home asking how she felt.
”I live with pain in my heart, but I accept my destiny,” she told the New York Times. ”I forgive everybody, including my brother.”