14ymedio, Madrid, December 4, 2023 — Juana Castro Ruz, sister of former Cuban leaders Fidel and Raúl Castro, died on Monday in a Miami hospital at the age of 90. Her friend, Maria Antonieta Collins, a journalist with the Univisión television network, reported that Juanita, as she was known, died of natural causes, adding that her family will not be giving interviews or holding a public funeral.
Collins, who collaborated with Castro on her 2011 memoir Fidel and Raúl, My Brothers, described her as “an extraordinary person the likes of whom we will never see again, a woman who sacrificed everything for her ideals.” In 1964 she fled Cuba for Mexico after her brother Fidel aligned his regime with the Soviet Union. She later settled permanently in the United States.
In the book, Castro confessed that she once worked for the CIA but broke with the agency when they asked her to make what she described as a “shocking” statement to minimize the communist threat at a time following the Cuban Missile Crisis when both sides in the Cold War were trying to play down the threat of a nuclear conflagration.
In her book, Juanita Castro confessed that she once worked f
