The Spy Who Had Love Affair With Fidel Castro.
An adventurous story of Marita Lorenz
A survivor of the Nazi concentration campa as a teenager; A lover of two prominent figures; A spy appointed by the CIA to assassinate the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro; An informer to F.B.I and C.I.A; A Gunrunner; A mother.
Her life was nothing short of a spy-thriller and can put the best fictional stories to shame. She has come across many notable figures of history, playing a crucial role in how things have panned out. Her name: Marita Lorenz.
The hypothetical child
Born in Bremen, Germany, to an American mother (who was an actress turned spy recruited by Britain and France) and a German father (who was a commercial ship captain).
Her family was incarcerated in the Bergen-Belson concentration camp by Nazis for their anti-nazi stand when she was a 5-year-old child. After the war they were released by the British and the family moved to America in 1950.
After getting released, Lorenzo would travel with her father on his ships. In one such ship travel to Havana, Cuba in 1959, 19-year-old Lorenzo met a bearded group of men who wanted to come aboard.
According to Lorenzo, when she asked the tallest of the group who he was, his response was “Yo soy Cuba” (translation: I am Cuba)
It was only a few days since Castro had sworn as Cuba’s new leader. Both had an instant liking for each other. She showed him the ship and she gave Castro her brother’s phone number.
After a few days, Castro contacted her and asked her to come to Cuba in a private plane that was sent by him. Lorenzo, in her later interviews, claimed that she was pregnant later that year. When she was seven months pregnant, while Castro was away, she was drugged by someone and her baby was taken away.
There is still no evidence if it was true that Lorenzo was impregnated by Castro but she claimed to have met her son Andre once in 1981 when she visited Cuba after a long period.
History could have been something else
After that event, Lorenzo left Cuba. As she was furious with Castro about the missing baby, she joined the Anti-Castro movement for a brief period.
During that time, C.I.A came in contact through a C.I.A Contract agent Frank Sturgis and recruited her to assassinate Castro. They flew her to Cuba and supplied her with poison pills to execute the operation. This was in 1960.
On reuniting, Lorenzo could not do it as she was so much in love with Castro and revealed him about the operation. Historians speculate that among many other things, Bay of Pigs invasion, a C.I.A financed attempt to overthrow the Communist regime in Cuba would have never happened if she had poisoned him that night. Instead, she made love with him and fled back to the United States.
She changed her stand again back home and joined a C.I.A sponsored anti-Castro movement code-named Operation-40 consisting of Cuban exiles. She worked as a gunrunner for the bay of pigs invasion. As it failed miserably, many Cuban exiles were killed, the anti-Castro group developed a hatred for the then-president John.F.Kennedy, who had failed them to provide timely assistance during the operation.
After the bay of pigs fiasco in march 1961, Lorenz was assigned to collect donations for the anti-communist cause from the former Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who was living in exile in Florida. She was his mistress for the next two years and had a daughter (Monica) with him, although he had a family of his own.
She came in contact with one of the Operation-40 members Lee Harvey Oswald, who was secretly recruiting a small number of people which Lorenzo would later refer in interviews as “Assassin Squad.” According to Lorenzo, Oswald, along with Sturgis, Cuban exile leaders Orlando Bosch and Pedro Diaz Lanz, and two others, planned for a secret road trip from Havana to Dallas.
Lorenz was part of that road trip. Once knowing about their hideous plan to assassinate the then U.S.President John F. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) she abandoned them and left for Cuba. Two days later, Oswald assassinated J.F.K.
But, in a later interview, Sturgis, though accepted that he was part of the operation-40, denied the JFK assassination accusations against him.
I’m not saying that everything Marita says is a lie, but she’ll do anything for money.
-Frank Sturgis in an interview to Vanity Fair in1993
Survived Amazon Forests
Things didn’t quite work out well between Lorenzo and Marcos and he was extradited to Venezuela.
With a daughter, Lorenzo struggled financially. In an attempt to find Marcos, she flew to Venezuela where she was arrested by the intelligence officers. They flew her to some secluded part of the Amazon rainforest, dropped her off with her daughter, and flew.
“I still cry when I think of the plane flying away” — Marita Lorenzo.
Both of them were found by the local tribes there. They adopted to live to those circumstances for the next eight to nine months until Lorenzo’s mother found and sent them a plane to bring them home.
After returning home, her life was relatively much better thereafter. She found another gang and worked with them for several years. She partied. She married another man and had a son with him.
She divorced. She raised her children. She worked for the F.B.I and life moved on.
“I will never forget the first time I beheld that penetrating stare, that beautiful face, that wicked and seductive smile”
