Opposition To Fidel's Policies
In this climate, Juanita started collaborating with the CIA. In 1964 she left Cuba, staying with her sister Enma, who had left Cuba earlier when she married a Mexican in Cuba before emigrating to the United States. Upon her arrival in Mexico she called a press conference and announced that she had defected from Cuba. "I cannot longer remain indifferent to what is happening in my country," she said. "My brothers Fidel and Raúl have made it an enormous prison surrounded by water. The people are nailed to a cross of torment imposed by international Communism."
Juanita Castro in the immediate post-revolutionary period was credited with helping at least 200 people leave Cuba, as part of her work with the CIA. According to a 1964 article in Time magazine "after the mother Lina Ruz died, there was a violent episode when Fidel decided to expropriate the family land once and for all. Juanita started selling the cattle; Fidel flew into a rage, denounced her as a 'counterrevolutionary worm,' and rushed to the Oriente farm."
In 1998, Juanita filed a lawsuit in Spain against her niece Alina Fernández, her brother Fidel Castro's illegitimate daughter, for libel over some passages in Fernández's autobiography, Castro's Daughter: An Exile's Memoir of Cuba, that was published the same year. The Spanish court ordered Fernández and Plaza & Janes, the Barcelona Random House division that published the book, to pay $45,000 to Juanita. Juanita claimed the book defamed her family stating: "People who were eating off Fidel's plate yesterday come here and want money and power, so they say whatever they want, even if it's not true."
On October 25, 2009, Juanita Castro told Univision's WLTV-23 she initially supported her brother's 1959 overthrow of the Batista dictatorship but quickly became disillusioned. Her home became a sanctuary for anti-Communists before she fled the island in 1964. In the TV interview, Juanita Castro says she was approached by the CIA.
Read more about this topic: Juanita Castro
Famous quotes containing the words opposition to, opposition, fidel and/or policies:
“Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.”
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“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
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“I had to say something
To strike him very weird,
So I yelled out,
“I like Fidel Castro and his beard.””
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