COMING UP : TWO ACKNOWLEDGED MISTRESSES OF A SPANISH KING

In the English speaking world, and I hate to say this, even with so many Hispanic immigrants to the United States, even with some parts of what is now the United States having had Spanish or Mexican settlements before they were the states we know now, it's as if the Spanish world does not exist. We rarely seem to get news out of Central American or any of South America on main stream media other than the incoming illegal immigrants or a major crisis. I also find the information I need for MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT hard to get. 

One of the Spanish language publications I enjoy paging through when I go to the library is Hola Magazine where royals and aristocrats are the celebrities. In that publication they are often photographed in splendid clothing in their gorgeous houses. It would seem that in the Latin world there is still great interest in people of nobility and how they live. 

In May of 2015, our Mistress of the Month was Marita Lorenz who was the Mistress of Fidel Castro (Cuba) and then General Marcos Peres Jimenes; She was a European born daughter of a ship captain based in New York. She turned into a CIA collaborator after having a very difficult time with Castro in particular and men in general. Other than that I have barely touched on Latin culture or people living in it or coming from it. However, I've long wanted to include modern Spanish Mistresses (or Mistresses in Spain).

I'm aware of what's happened with more recent King Juan Carlos I, who abdicated so that his son Felipe VI could take over. Felipe's role has been extremely public. That story is all over the media. Alphonso XII de Bourbon of Spain was the father of  King Juan Carlos and the grandfather of King Felipe VI. It would seem that there has been a tradition of fathering extramatrimonial children for generations in the family.

Despite that, the Spanish macho culture seems to have higher expectations of women for loyalty and faithfulness than for the men. There has been a tradition of Mistresses in Spain despite the  influence of Catholic culture which emphasizes the family and women as the nurturers whose main job is to raise the children. Wives are expected to be faithful and loyal to their husbands and to be with only one man in a life time or the loss of their reputation could be devastating. I believe there is still an emphasis on virginity until marriage for women in Latin culture. Men - not so much. (What's happening in gangs here in the United States is an aberration but that's another story.) 

There has been a tradition of the Wife with the Big House and the Mistress with the Little House which is more civilized than abandoning a woman who might otherwise be put out. Of course we are talking about men who can afford to support two families. In macho culture women remain in traditional roles, though there have been rapid changes in recent years, that was not the case in the late 19th and early 20th century.  

Check back with me tomorrow when I'll begin with our Mistress of the Month!

Missy

CUBA - A GAMBLE ON CUBA THAT'S WORTH TAKING and CUBAN YOUTH'S SZECRET COMPUTER NETWORK

A gamble on Cuba that’s worth taking from NPR   LISTEN TO THIS STORY FROM THE ALL THINGS CONSIDERED PROGRAM at this link!

EXCERPT:

President Barack Obama’s surprise announcement Wednesday that the U.S. and Cuba would seek to normalize relations after a 55-year chill — and after 18 months of secret negotiations assisted by Canada and encouraged by Pope Francis — is a gamble worth taking.

 

“Isolation has not worked,” the president said. “We will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests.”

DETROIT NEWS - CUBAN YOUTH BUILD SECRET COMPUTER NETWORK

EXCERPT:

Havana — Cut off from the Internet, young Cubans have quietly linked thousands of computers into a hidden network that stretches miles across Havana, letting them chat with friends, play games and download hit movies in a mini-replica of the online world that most can’t access.

Home Internet connections are banned for all but a handful of Cubans, and the government charges nearly a quarter of a month’s salary for an hour online in government-run hotels and Internet centers. As a result, most people on the island live offline, complaining about their lack of access to information and contact with friends and family abroad.
 

 

WHAT'S IT LIKE TO LIVE IN CUBA NOW? JULIA COOKE'S EXPERIENTIAL " THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE" REVEALS THE NEW CUBA

NPR : WHATS LIFE IN THE NEW CUBA REALLY LIKE

Now that Fidel Castro's dictatorship has been taking over for a few years by his brother Raul Castro, and time has gone by, enough to open relationships between Cuba and the United States, one does wonder what it would be like to visit in Cuba... or even LIVE there!

Is it as impoverished as we hear? 

How do people get out of Cuba?  Who has to stay?  Are artists special?  

One thing I learned from this book is that there are tourists from all over the world who visit Cuba today, and that the tourists bring money to spend with them. money that is much needed.  The Communist lifestyle has guaranteed people good educations and medical care, though there are sometimes shortages of certain foods.  Maybe only the tourist areas have gotten a paint job.  Is the Communist Experiment that is Cuba a success or failure?  Would you give up the risks of Capitalism for life in this country?

Some Cubans  leave the country to work but they must come back, and apartments are difficult to get, so if you're not careful, some distant relative may show up for a visit and just never leave.

I enjoyed Julia Cooke's book and if you're in the reading mood around CUBA, as I have been, you'll find this another perspective to consider.

MARITA LORENZ on THE JFK ASSASSINATION CONSPIRACY

SOME EXCERPTS and SOME EXTRAPOLATIONS from Missy

page 128  Jimmy Hoffa wanted to destroy Bobby (Kennedy) but it was decided that killing JFK would solve that problem.... Carlos Marcello (Mafia) hated the Kennedys and felt betrayed by the failure to oust Castro and restore the casinos to his men in Cuba....

page 132 - 133 (With "Frank Sturgis" and some others, Marita went on a car ride to Dallas...  They didn't tell her who they had to kill, they just said "This is the BIG ONE!" They registered at a motel as a hunting party - all those weapons!  They also had a lot of disguises.  She was the only woman.)

page 135) "I had proven I could be a soldier where it mattered and now I was being called a broad by some fat mob guy who had probably ass-kissed other mob guys to become whatever the hell he was..."  (The mob guy turns out to be Jack Ruby.  Marita says she knew Lee Harvey Oswald as "Ozzie.")

BUT MARITA GOT OUT OF THERE.  She went instead to Florida to be with her daughter and her daughter's nanny and then flew on to Newark to visit her faithful and loyal mom, and heard of the assassination that had just occurred when the plane landed.

page 138)  "As I have testified, I believe we were all part of an assassination team, heavily armed, well-trained.  Ozzie was probably part decoy, part throw-away.  Undoubtedly he was a shooter, as has long been assumed.  However, the clandestine illegal activities taking place on home soil would shock even the most sophisticated and cynical American citizens."

DEAR FIDEL : A FILM ABOUT MARITA LORENZ

THE ORIGINAL TITLE OF THIS POST WAS "DEAR FIDEL FILM - MARITA'S STORY"

Marita and Fidel's relationship lasted only 8 months. She has a son with Fidel, one of his many children.

English subtitles... Spanish... German...

Due to her multilingualism Marita applied and was accepted to be an airline stewardess for Pan American but being Kept by General Marcos Perez-Jimenez prevented her from taking the job.

This documentary that came out after her books has some new revelations, including a document on what happened to her when she was abducted and "aborted."  Marita says that when the CIA recruited her they showed her bloody pictures of a dead baby and also told her she was made sterile by the operation.

(As it turns out neither thing was true.) 

MARITA LORENZ - ONE WOMAN'S EXTRAORDINARY TALE OF LOVE AND ESPIONAGE FROM CASTRO TO KENNEDY : LOVE WON!

EXCERPTS

from page 49 upon being returned to New York after 8 months with Fidel.

"The enclosed world in which I was being nursed back to health (after the forced labor and delivery of a baby in Cuba) was designed to suck me into a bad dream where these red blooded, God-fearing, all American heroes had rescued me, a half dead, traumatized girl sent back from Cuba, from the clutches of Fidel Castro, Antichrist and butcher..."

from page 72 when she is in training to be a spy

"I was a woman desired by men, of special importance to my country.  And I was also a drugged girl who, between sleeping pills and stimulants, withdrew to play with a pet turtle, a pet cat, and a baby doll I had saved from my childhood... Not unstable by CIA standards or in the world of Cuban counterrevolutionaries...

from page 81 when she is back in Cuba to assassinate Fidel with poison pills...

"Fidel entered the room as though I had never left.  He paused only briefly, then hugged me, said he was exhausted, that he needed to sleep in order to give his talk that night.

"I want to know about the baby," I told him. "I want to know now."

He asked me if I came for him or to kill him.  I told him both.  But first I wanted to know about the baby.

"I know nothing," he frowned, looked concerned.  "I had no part of that."

I said, "You're going to get killed twice.  My father is going to kill you."  Then, loosing control, I began to cry.  "I want to know what happened, Fidel."

Fidel explained that he had given no order, that the doctor had not acted on his behalf.  He also said that the doctor had been executed for his actions.  Fidel became evasive about what happened to the baby.

"All boys born of Cuban fathers belong to Cuba," he told me.

MARITA LORENZ : MISTRESS OF FIDEL CASTRO (and then GENERAL MARCOS PERES JIMENEZ) TURNED CIA COLLABORATOR - MISTRESS OF THE MONTH

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.



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


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