Juanita Castro Speaks at the IRTS Luncheon

The NYPR Archive Collections | Jan 1, 2000

Juana Castro - sister of Fidel Castro - speaks at an International Radio and Television Society (IRTS) Luncheon on November 20th, 1964. Disaffected with her brother's revolution, Castro left Cuba in 1964, emigrating to the United States, where she began collaborating with the US Government.

This is largely a speech about how Fidel's government has stripped Cuba of a free and independent press. Newspaper and television reporters are being jailed, and all Cuban media outlets are either nationalizing or have already been shut down. Juana describes the "stolen press," which is constantly printing communism propaganda, inundating all the Americas with communist ideology. Juana makes an impassioned, emotional speech about the horrors of Fidel's repressive regime. She compares Cuba's imprisonment of the media to Hitler's concentration camps. She describes Cuba's 'death alley,' where Russian PT boats kill Cubans attempting to leave the island as well as Fidel's "mobile death carts," which travel the country acting as judge and executioner for anyone expressing anti-communist sentiment. Juana also disparages Robert F. Williams, the civil rights leader and activist, who fled to Cuba and started Radio Free Dixie, a radio station which, according to Juana, encourages "all Negros born in the US to rebel against the laws of the land."

Finally, Juana Castro gives an impassioned plea to the audience of reporters to go to Cuba and report on what is actually happening, rather than regurgitate Fidel's "theatrical farce" of publicity and communist propaganda. She implores reporters to ask good questions: ask workers if there are ways of life is better after communism; ask them if they eat better, are more productive, and have higher salaries; and finally, ask about the children, who have been ripped from their mother's arms and sent to Russia to be poisoned with communism.

The speech ends with applause.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection

WNYC archives id: 150946
Municipal archives id: RT284

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