Fidel Castro's sister: "I worked with CIA in Cuba"

Fidel Castro's sister: "I worked with CIA in Cuba"
Mon Oct 26, 2009 7:46am EDT
By Pascal Fletcher

MIAMI (Reuters) - The younger sister of Fidel and Raul Castro, Juanita
Castro, collaborated with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 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 either of her brothers for
more than four decades, made the revelation to the Spanish-language TV
channel Univision-Noticias 23 on the eve of the publication of 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, is
being published on Monday.

After initially supporting Fidel Castro's 1959 Revolution that toppled
dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, 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 Univision-Noticias 23.

Juanita Castro said that from her house in Havana, she had worked to
shelter and help those who were being persecuted by Fidel Castro's
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 U.S. 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 added, without giving more
details.

Juanita Castro, who worked quietly in Miami for more than three decades
running a community pharmacy before retiring in late 2006, last spoke to
her brother Fidel at her home in Havana in 1963 when their mother, Lina
Ruz Gonzalez, died of a heart attack. She last spoke to her other
brother Raul in 1964, just days before she left Cuba to go into exile,
she said.

Former leader Fidel Castro, 83, who established a one-party communist
system in Cuba after the 1959 revolution and ruled the island for nearly
half a century, last year handed over the presidency to his younger
brother Raul Castro, 78.

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.

(Reporting by Pascal Fletcher, editing by Jackie Frank)

Fidel Castro's sister: I worked with CIA in Cuba | Reuters (26 October 2009)
http://www.reuters.com/article/globalNews/idUSTRE59P0NK20091026?sp=true