UPDATE NOVEMBER 29 2016 FIDEL CASTRO has DIED
NY TIMES= SHE NEARLY ASSASSINATED HIM - MOURNS DICTATORS DEATH
UPDATE JANUARY 2016 ! ACTRESS JENNIFER LAWRENCE WILL STAR AS MARITA LORENZ in a new biopic film! DAILY MAIL UK - JENNIFER LAWRENCE AS FIDEL CASTRO's TEENAGE LOVER ASSASSIN UPCOMING BIOPIC
Excerpt:
According to THR.com, the film titled Marita will tell the story of how the German met Castro in 1959 and began a relationship with him when she was 19 years old.
She became pregnant with his child and later left Cuba for the U.S.
She was then recruited by the CIA and returned to Cuba in 1960 in a mission to assassinate Castro, but, legend has it, love won out.
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The German Edition of Marita's memoir.
DEAR FIDEL link here
book is by Marita Lorenz and Ted Schwarz
MARITA LORENZ
( born August 18, 1939 in Bremen Germany ) |
As the United States attempts to thaw trade relations with Cuba, as Raul Castro, younger brother of Fidel, rules the small island country only 90 miles from the tip of Florida, my thoughts turned to MARITA LORENZ, who was Fidel Castro's Mistress very shortly after the Cuban Revolution that he lead in 1959 when he was 33.
MARITA LORENZ's book, published in 1993, is a love story and spy story as well. For some reason, there have been a lot of notorious mistress-spies, but how many of them have been witness to key events in the President John Fitzgerald Kennedy assassination plan and spoken out about it?
This month as you read the book excerpts I've selected and watch a video, you may, like me, think "but this woman isn't all that beautiful or all that charming really." But then there are so many mythologies and stereotypes about mistresses to bust.
Reading her words and hearing her words and how she got involved in world events and characters from the CIA and the Mafia, I'm struck that Marita comes across as hard, less Mati Hari, and more Virginia Hill. (You can read more about these women who have been Mistress of the Month here using the Google search feature embedded in the sidebar of this blog or by going through my archives.)
So here is the short short story.
Marita was not Cuban or even Hispanic. She was raised in Nazi Germany by an American mother with her much older German father, the captain of a pleasure cruise boat he owned, an absentee father. During World War II Marita was raped by a child predator who went to prison for 39 years for it. Though not Jewish, she and her mother suffered in Germany during that era. Thoughout a turbulent adult life, it was her mother who advocated for her and tried to save her.
In her teenage and young adult years she traveled on the boat with her father. At the time she met Fidel she was living in New York City between cruises and aimed at secretarial school.
Not long after the Cuban Revolution, on February 27, 1959, her father docked his boat as was usual at the Havana harbor. It may have been the first boat to do so after what came down. Fidel Castro and some of his revolutionary companions boarded and stayed for a beer. Marita, a competent hostess and boatwoman at that point, reminded them that on the boat they were not on Cuban soil, served up the beers, and had an instant mutual attraction with Fidel. A picture of her and Fidel at that meeting that circulates in the media has her father, who was sitting next to her, cut out of it though; he was there.
Back in New York, she got the call to come to Cuba at Fidel's expense while her father was out of town again. She went, a virgin but for her childhood rape, found herself to be a hidden, almost locked away mistress to Fidel at the Havana Hilton, crazy in love but always waiting for a visit or a summons, not quite a sex slave but there for sex and whatever relationship they could develop during his visits. The married Fidel professed to love her and she him, they had a mock wedding ceremony, but when she discovered pregnancy had resulted from their amorous trysts, it was a huge problem. Before she could give birth naturally, she found herself drugged and taken to an unknown location where she was prematurely delivered of a baby, told it had died or had been aborted, and was soon removed back to New York, an emotional wreck.
Of these events Fidel later denied any knowledge.
Understandably bitter and confused emotionally, Marita found herself recruited by persons associated with the CIA who wanted her to go back to Havana and Castro, to seduce him and poison him and kill him. She made the trip but could not go through with the plot, which Castro suspected. She couldn't go through with it. She loved Fidel and she wanted to know what had happened to her baby. Her trainers were livid with her for not killing him.
At this point, through all of this experience that was horrible and shocking, Marita must have found herself unable to think straight. Another woman would have, at such a young age yet, found some way to redirect her life to more truly loving companions. But chaos and turmoil continued to be attractive to Marita, and before it was all said and done, she would find herself doing clandestine work for others. Training to be a killer and spy at Camp Perry, Virginia, at age twenty, she had learned to fearlessly parachute from planes and did target practice with Fidel's picture the bulls eye.
She went on to become the mistress of another Hispanic dictator, Marcos Peres Jimenez, who was deposed from Venezuela, while he was living in Miami, and had a daughter by him also, a daughter who lives in the United States. At the time he was considered to be an enemy of Fidel Castro. Unlike the experience with Fidel, who was committed to the poverty of Communism, she and Marcos lived the life of wealthy exiles - for a while. She was recognized as his official mistress by his friends. He refused to let her work. After he was returned to Venezuela, she chased after him and found herself to be an inconvenient woman again. Sometimes penniless and on the run, she even found herself with a young daughter living in the jungle with a native tribe.
During a return to Cuba many years later, in 1981, Marita Lorenz learned that the son she gave birth to is alive, a doctor, and was raised by a professor and his wife; Castro has known where he was. Fidel's invitation, that she could live in Cuba, was repeated.
Perhaps most interesting is Marita's testimony in this book about the JFK assassination and the fact that it was a conspiracy, one she was to take part in.
Cliffhanger!
I hope you will find the book excerpts I've selected this month illuminating!
Missy
C 2015 All Rights Reserved Mistressmanifesto.blogspot.com Missy Rapport