Washington, October 26: Juanita Castro, sister of Cuban leaders Fidel and Raul Castro, worked for the CIA for three years, according to details emerging from her book which is being released Monday.
The details are in her memoirs, Fidel and Raul, My Brothers: The Secret History, which went on sale Monday in the United States, Mexico, Spain and Colombia.
The Miami daily El Nuevo Herald, which had advanced access to the book, reported Monday that Juanita Castro was agent “Donna” for the CIA. She indicated that she was initially recruited for the job by the wife of Vasco Leitao Da Cunha, Brazil’s ambassador in Havana at the time and later Brazil’s foreign minister.
The 76-year-old sister of the Cuban leaders left Cuba in 1964 and has since then been openly critical of the communist regime on the island.
Late Sunday she revealed to a Miami television channel her “greatest secret” – that she cooperated with the CIA from 1961 to 64.
That was the time period when US president John Kennedy tried to depose the communist regime with a failed invasion by CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles. The US also came to the brink of World War III in the standoff over Soviet missiles stationed on the communist Caribbean island just 160 kilometres off the US coast.
Juanita Castro said she chose to risk her own life by cooperating with the US to save the lives of her compatriots. She used coded messages through a short-wave radio to stay in touch with the CIA.
Based on the book – whose launch was shrouded in secrecy to prevent leaks of details – El Nuevo Herald wrote that the CIA decided to take Juanita Castro out of Cuba after current Cuban President Raul Castro visited her to tell her she was being investigated for “counter-revolutionary activities.”
However, Juanita Castro told Miami’s Channel 23 Sunday that her brothers never suspected her of ties with the CIA – a secret she said she kept for many decades.
Starting in 1973, Juanita Castro owned a chemist’s store in Miami, which she sold two years ago.
“Juanita owed us all this portion of history and she has been very brave to decide to tell this secret,” Mexican journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, who wrote the book with Juanita Castro, was quoted as saying.
—IANS