Valentina Castro was born in Cuba and raised there. In her homeland, Castro’s family had no money and she was forced to support her sister’s and brother by working long hours as a domestic worker. She had an early love of her own younger brother, which prompted her to pursue an education in mathematics, but the educational opportunities for women at that time were limited. Her marriage to Aleksander Orando resulted in two children, though those did not survive to adulthood. After her marriage, Castro worked as a nurse in Sanity in the Bahamas, but she always remained deeply attached to her beloved younger brother, whom she called “the apple of our eye”.
The marriage ended in divorce when Valentina Castro returned to Cuba where he died of a heart attack on her return home. She was not ready to lose her husband or loved one and in that respect found comfort in her occupation as a writer. She continued to write throughout her life, publishing poems and stories in both English and Spanish, and later on, in French. Castro was not content to leave the literary world, however, and in her mature years, she began to publish works in political and social commentaries, which earned her honors from the American Institute of Foreign Language and the UNESCO.
Castro’s career did not end there, however, and she went on to teach American students in Havana, Florida and became the first female Cuban Ambassador to the United States. While she served in the embassy, she managed to build up a pool of hundreds of doctors that came to the island on their official visit from the United States, allowing the hospitals to greatly overcrowd at the time. Despite the hardships of her political career, Castro’s love for writing kept her firmly ensconced in the minds of many Americans.