Juana de la Caridad Castro Ruz

Cuban businesswoman and activist naturalized as a United States citizen, sister of Fidel and Raúl Castro.

Daughter of the marriage of Ángel Castro Argiz and Lina Ruz González, and fifth of seven siblings: Angelita (1923-2012), Ramón (1924-2016), Fidel (1926-2016), Raúl (1931-), Juana (1933-2023), Enma (1936-) and Agustina (1938-2017). With her brother Raúl, Juanita always had great affinity and affectionately called him Muso. She currently resides in Miami, United States, and is also one of the most visible faces of Cuban dissidence abroad.

Like all the siblings in the Castro Ruz family, Juanita studied at the best schools in Cuba and, like her sisters, graduated from the Catholic school of the Ursulines in Havana. But the Castro Ruz family came to prominence when in 1953 her brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro led the assault on Moncada Barracks. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, Juanita, the activist who in 1958 had been raising funds for her brothers' struggle, dedicated herself to building clinics, schools, and hospitals in the countryside.

The governmental policies of Fidel and Raúl came into conflict with family interests when they insisted on including the family plantation in their agrarian reform program to limit private land ownership. Her older brother Ramón Castro Ruz, who held the property, and Juanita felt betrayed and began to oppose their brothers' government. The magazine "Time" reported that "after their mother Lina Ruz died in 1963, there was a violent episode when Fidel decided to expropriate the family lands once and for all.

In 1964, Juanita left Cuba for Mexico and lived with her sister Enma, who had married a Mexican in Cuba and emigrated there. Upon her arrival, she called a press conference and announced that she had defected from Cuba. "I can no longer remain indifferent to what is happening in my country," she declared.

Juanita moved to Miami a few months later. In 1973 she opened a pharmacy called Mini Price. She became a naturalized United States citizen in 1984. In December 2006 she sold her pharmacy to CVS Pharmacy.

In 1998, Juanita sued her niece Alina Fernández, the illegitimate daughter of her brother Fidel Castro, because of some supposedly defamatory passages in Fernández's autobiography, The Daughter of Castro. Memoirs of Exile from Cuba. She claimed the book defamed her family: "People who ate from Fidel's plate yesterday [in an obvious indirect allusion to Alina], come here [to the United States] wanting money and power, so they say anything, even if it is not true." A Spanish court ordered Fernández and her publisher, Plaza & Janés, to pay $45,000 in compensation to Juanita Castro. In 2009 she published her memoirs: Fidel and Raúl My Brothers, the Secret History.