Castro’s sister says she worked with CIA

Published 4:24 pm Tuesday, October 26, 2010

MIAMI — One of Fidel Castro’s sisters says in a memoir released Monday 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, she writes in “My Brothers Fidel and Raul. The Secret Story.”

Castro said in the book that she traveled to Mexico City in 1961 under the pretense of visiting her younger sister Enma. She secretly met a CIA officer who identified himself as “Enrique” at the Camino Real hotel.

A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment on Castro’s account.

Castro said that during the hotel 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 but refused to accept money for her efforts and said she wanted no part in any violence.

“Enrique,” whom Castro says she later learned was a CIA officer in Cuba named Tony Sforza, then asked her to smuggle messages, documents and money back into the country hidden in canned goods.

He told Castro she would receive information through shortwave radio communications. Castro chose a waltz and a song from the opera Madame Butterfly as the signals her handlers would use to let her know if they had information for her.

Castro said she remained on the island while her mother was alive, believing she was protected from the full wrath of Fidel. Her mother died in 1963 and she fled Cuba the following year, eventually settling into a quiet life in Miami, where she ran a pharmacy until 2007 and is generally well regarded by other Cuban exiles.

Fidel, she wrote, was not initially a hard-line communist like their brother Raul and fellow revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, but that Fidel turned to communism to maintain power. Juanita Castro said she tried to help many people who initially supported the revolution only to be ousted in the new regime’s initial purges.

“My brothers could ignore what I did — or appear to ignore it — so as not to hurt my mom, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have problems … everything was becoming more dangerously complicated” after her mother’s death, Castro writes.

Juanita Castro had to get help from Raul — to whom she was much closer than Fidel — in getting a visa to leave Cuba. They have not seen each other since June 18, 1964, the day before she left the country.

When she first arrived in the U.S., many exiles considered Castro a communist spy. She later helped found a CIA-backed nonprofit organization that worked against Cuba’s government.

Under President Richard Nixon, CIA officers told her they were no longer going to support the underground fight against Castro because it negatively affected U.S.-Soviet relations. Castro said the CIA wanted her to start making statements that communism in Latin America was no longer a threat.

At that point she broke off with the agency.