There's little I can add to the big news about the secret kept for decades by Juanita Castro: Her valiant collaboration with the CIA to save from imprisonment and execution the democrats of the domestic opposition whom her brothers Fidel and Raúl crushed with such virulence. Her memoirs and statements testify to her private crusade.

But I confess that what attracts me most about this discreet woman is a long episode in her life that is mentioned only in passing in María Antonieta Collins' book. It deals with the years when this sister, sentenced to exile, ran the popular Juanita Cinema in Birán, her hometown.

It's a pity that it occupies only a few pages in the book, because I'm not talking about a brief entrepreneurial fling but about the effort and determination with which a girl barely 15 years old was able to convince her father to help her open the first movie house in town.

Without thinking it over, Don Angel gave financial help to his daughter Juanita, and she traveled to Havana to buy the necessary equipment. That's how her movie house was born, and the girl, with the remarkable entrepreneurial spirit that characterized her from an early age, decided to name the hall after herself.

Well, we know that the first film shown at Cinema Juanita was Together, but not mixed, a Mexican film starring leading man Jorge Negrete. We also learned that the premiere was not exempt from controversy because a black peasant read the title as a racist slur. There was an attempted walkout, which Juanita prevented by explaining that the movie was pure entertainment, not a Leni Riefenstahl stirrer with segregationist overtones.

Once the misunderstanding was cleared, she started the projector and, from that day on, the residents of Birán were able to dream through the magic of celluloid.

I never heard any more about this business that Juanita successfully operated for 15 years. Think about it. In an era dominated by men and in a society that was machista to the core, a teenager from the provinces breaks all the rules by inaugurating a cinema that bears the name not of a Hollywood idol but her own, the name of Lina's and Angel's daughter.

Fidel and Raúl's little sister. A true pioneer in her time, looking far ahead into the future, which at the time contained the spell of the greatest artistic manifestation of the 20th Century: the cinema and its mysteries in movement. One didn't have to leave Birán to see the world and live other lives.

Fifteen years. That's how long that adventure lasted in Juanita Castro's life. A long love affair with the film cans that occasionally moved the public to tears with some overly sentimental plot. On other occasions, all Birán waited for the current big comedy. Bittersweet tales, star-crossed lovers, hysterical comedies, impossible mysteries, romances with happy endings.

What Juanita never could anticipate is that one day she would have to close her beloved movie house, confiscated by her brothers when they seized her parents' farm.

Was there ever a more familiar drama with Shakespearean dilemmas shown in Cinema Juanita? The Montagues and the Capulets under the same roof. Sibling blood about to be shed. The imminent farewell.

Before Fidel and Raúl perpetrated their treason against all Cubans, including their own sister, she gave to her friends everything that brought that hall to life: seats, projectors, lights, mirrors, wall paneling. Not a stone remained. The lights on the marquee went out forever.

Today, Juanita Castro looks back with the glazed-eyed nostalgia of the retired movie director in Giuseppe Tornatore's masterpiece, Cinema Paradiso, who remembers his childhood and youth in a remote Italian town. It was the arrival of a modest movie hall that sparked the imagination of the boy who would grow up to be a filmmaker.

In her way, delicate and on tiptoes, this woman presented her neighbors with the wonder of the Seventh Art. Later, the paradise collapsed.

(C)2009 Firmas Press

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