MIAMI - One of Fidel Castro’s sisters says in a memoir released yesterday that she collaborated with the CIA against her brother, starting shortly after the United States’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.
Juanita Castro, 76, initially supported her brother’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista dictatorship but quickly grew disillusioned. In a Spanish-language memoir published by Santillana USA and co-written by journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, she says the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to Cuba persuaded her to meet a CIA officer during a trip to Mexico in 1961.
By then, her house had already become a sanctuary for anticommunists, and Fidel Castro had warned her about getting involved with the “gusanos,’’ or worms, as those who opposed the revolution were called.
Castro says in the book, “My Brothers Fidel and Raul. The Secret Story,’’ that she traveled to Mexico City and secretly met a CIA officer named “Enrique’’ at the Camino Real hotel.
During the meeting, she expressed her concerns that those who supported Batista’s overthrow but were not communists were being pushed out of the new government. Castro writes she agreed to help the CIA gather information.
“Agreeing to collaborate with you does not signify that I will participate in any violent activity against my brother, nor any official in the regime,’’ she told the agent.
Castro fled Cuba in 1964 for Miami, where she ran a pharmacy until 2007.
