Polita Grau, the former first lady of Cuba who later served 14 years in Cuban prisons for conspiring with the CIA to topple Fidel Castro, died Wednesday at the Villa Maria Nursing Center in Miami. She was 84.

For many in Miami, she was revered as the godmother of Pedro Pan -- the Catholic Church-sponsored movement that encouraged Cuban parents to send their children to U.S. families and spare them communist re-education.

With her brother, Ramon, the Graus secretly distributed U.S. letterhead invitations from their Havana home that allowed 14,000 children to come here in the early 1960s. Among them were her own daughter and son, whom she sent to friends in Miami while she stayed behind to care for elderly relatives.

But Polita Grau's Pedro Pan activities were just a small slice of a lifetime of activism and advocacy that spanned both sides of the Florida Straits -- with four separate periods of exile in Miami.

``It is the end of an era. Polita Grau was a piece of Cuban history,'' said DePaul University political scientist Maria de los Angeles Torres, who interviewed Grau many times in Miami.

Her passing, Torres said, was ``particularly significant in terms of women's involvement in Cuban politics.''

As a college student, she was involved in radical campus movements to undermine the Gen. Gerardo Machado regime. Later, she was a supporter of Cuba's 1959 revolution -- but turned against it soon after Castro started nationalizing industries.

Born in Havana on Nov. 19, 1915, Grau was probably destined for political and human rights activism. Her uncle was Ramon Grau San Martin, Cuba's president from 1933 to 1934 and from 1944 to 1948 -- and conferred upon his niece the ceremonial title of first lady during his first term.

``She has been much involved in democratic movements and later on became involved in supporting the revolution and then in the opposition of the revolution,'' Torres said.

So active was her disenchantment with the revolution that she plotted to topple the communist leader.

In 1965, she and her brother Ramon were arrested and charged with being CIA agents and allegedly forming an international espionage ring in Cuba.

She spent 14 years in jail, until Castro authorized a major release of political prisoners in 1978 -- as part of a later abandoned dialogue with Miami exiles encouraged by Jimmy Carter.

Her brother, who died in 1998, was freed eight years later.

``She was a brave woman. She wasn't afraid of anything. She felt very Cuban,'' said Miami businessman Bernardo Benes, who took part in the 1978 dialogue between exiles and Castro that resulted in her early release from a 30-year sentence.

Grau, who had suffered from congestive heart disease, had failing health in recent years, said her daughter Hilda ``Chury'' Aguero.

She described four periods of exile in Miami -- starting with her senior year in high school, when she graduated from St. Patrick's Academy on Miami Beach.

Although Grau was known widely as Polita, that name never appeared on any official identification document. She was born Maria Leopoldina Grau. In her post-prison arrival in the United States, her documents bore the name Maria Aguero, taken from her second husband.

When she became a U.S. citizen, she adopted yet another name: Pola Grau, the name on her naturalization certificate.

In addition to her daughter, survivors include six grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Visitation will be held until noon today at the Rivero Funeral Home, 8200 Bird Road. Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh will officiate at a 1 p.m. Mass today at St. Dominic's Catholic Church, 5909 NW Seventh St.