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Cuba - Source: Reuters -
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Using the code name Donna, the younger sister of Fidel and Raul
Castro worked undercover for the CIA in Cuba in the early 1960s,
helping opponents of their communist rule escape execution and
imprisonment, she said in memoirs published in exile.
Revealing what the publishers called a closely guarded secret kept
hidden for four decades; Juanita Castro described in the book how
she was recruited by the US Central Intelligence Agency in Havana
two years after the 1959 Revolution led by her brothers, which she
initially supported.
There was no immediate reaction to her revelation from the US
authorities or the Cuban government, which routinely dismisses
critics as mercenaries in the pay of Washington.
Juanita Castro, 76, broke publicly with the Cuban government led
by her brother Fidel Castro in 1964 after leaving Cuba for
Mexico.
She went into exile in Miami and has remained a firm critic of
communist rule in Cuba.
In the memoirs entitled Fidel and Raul, My Brothers, the Secret
History, told to Mexican journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, she
says she quickly became disenchanted with Fidel Castro's rule over
the Caribbean's largest island because he increasingly persecuted
opponents and turned to communism.
She says Fidel Castro betrayed her and other Cubans by abandoning
the nationalist democratic revolution he had promised and imposing
a one-party Marxist state on Cuba.
Juanita Castro wrote she was recruited to be a clandestine CIA
operative by her friend Virginia Leitao da Cunha, the wife of the
Brazilian ambassador to Cuba, who in 1958 sheltered her and other
revolutionary followers of Castro during the armed struggle to
topple dictator Fulgencio Batista.
She said that at a meeting with an American CIA officer Enrique in
a Mexico City hotel in 1961, she was given the code name Donna and
codebooks to use in Cuba with a short-wave radio to receive
instructions from her CIA handlers.
Former leader Fidel Castro, 83, who last year handed over the
presidency of Cuba to his younger brother Raul, 78, for health
reasons, has long considered the CIA his arch-enemy.
He says the US spy agency was behind most of the 600 or so
assassination plots he claims were made against his life.
In her memoirs, Juanita Castro wrote she agreed to work for the CIA
under the noses of her brothers on the condition that she was not
asked to participate in any violent acts against them or any other
member of their government.
"Did I feel remorse about betraying Fidel by agreeing to meet with
his enemies? No, for one simple reason: I didn't betray him. He
betrayed me," she writes in the 432-page book published in Spanish
by Grupo Santillana.
Unpaid collaboration
"He betrayed the thousands of us who suffered and fought for the
revolution that he had offered, one that was generous and just and
would bring peace and democracy to Cuba, and which, as he himself
had promised, would be as 'Cuban as palm trees,'" she said.
Juanita Castro said in her memoirs and in a TV interview that she
never accepted any money from the CIA for her collaboration.
"I never put any price on my desertion ... on my activities
against the communist dictatorship," she told the Spanish language
TV channel Univision-Noticias 23 on Monday.
She described in her book how, following CIA instructions often
secretly picked up at isolated roadside drop points in Cuba, she
helped people persecuted by Fidel Castro's secret police to escape
capture, imprisonment and possible execution.
Some were sheltered at the house where she lived with her mother,
Lina Ruz Gonzalez, who was also the mother of Fidel and Raul
Castro.
Lina Ruz, who also helped some friends escape persecution, died
in 1963, Juanita Castro said.
She recalled her own shock when Fidel Castro, who had denied
publicly that he was a communist, declared on December 2, 1961,
that he was a Marxist-Leninist and that he would remain one for the
rest of his life.
"Fidel's radical change to communism was not out of political
conviction, but simply out of the need to hold power, which is what
has always been important to him," she wrote.
"I have no other explanation: He turned to the Soviet Union to
perpetuate himself in power."
The collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, Cuba's main ally and
economic benefactor for years, plunged the island into economic
crisis.
But despite the economic problems, both Fidel and Raul Castro
have ruled out any shift to capitalism.
In response to a call for a new beginning in US-Cuban ties made by
US President Barack Obama, the Cuban leadership has started talks
with Washington on issues like migration and postal service ties,
but it demands that Obama completely end the 47-year-old US trade
embargo against Cuba.
Obama says he wants to see Havana free jailed dissidents and
improve human rights.
Juanita Castro says she has not spoken to Fidel or Raul Castro
since she left Cuba in 1964.
