Marita Lorenz: Fidel Castro’s mistress turned assassin
Sky HISTORY’s Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants exposes Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro’s dangerous womanising. How did his mistress Marita Lorenz plot to kill him?
Image: Marita Lorenz | CC BY-SA 4.0
Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro was one of modern history’s most controversial leaders. After taking autocratic power in Cuba in the 1950s, Castro remained a thorn in the side of the United States for decades.
The White House perceived Castro as especially dangerous during the Cold War, when he made Cuba a Soviet ally on the Americans’ own doorstep. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) even went as far as authorising assassination attempts against Castro.
One of those is thought to have involved Marita Lorenz, a German femme fatale who became Castro’s mistress in 1959. As Sky HISTORY’s Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants reveals, the Cuban dictator was notorious for his womanising. So, how close was it to bringing down his communist regime?
Castro’s would-be killer grows up in inauspicious circumstances
Marita Lorenz was born in the northern German city of Bremen to naval captain Heinrich Lorenz and his American wife Alice. Marita’s birthdate was 18th August 1939 – just two weeks before Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland.
During World War II, Heinrich commanded U-boats, but was captured and made a prisoner of war by the British. Alice spied for the British, but Nazi authorities uncovered the family’s treachery. Alice and Marita were both sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp but later liberated by the Allies.
By the 1950s, the Lorenz family had relocated to the United States, with Alice now working for American intelligence and Heinrich captaining ocean liners. Marita often joined her father on his ships. One of them took her to Havana harbour in February 1959, where she first met Castro, the newly minted prime minister of Cuba.
Marita’s blossoming love affair with Castro
In a 1993 interview with Vanity Fair, Marita recalled what happened on that fateful day as she peered out from her father’s ship, MS Berlin. ‘I was standing on the bridge, and in the distance I could see this launch coming toward us. It was filled with about 27 men, all with the same beard.’
One of the men introduced himself as Castro and expressed his wish to come aboard. As Marita’s father was napping at the time, she agreed to give Castro a tour of the ship. Marita felt a romantic spark between them. ‘He stands in front of me, and he takes both my hands, and he is kissing me. He was the sweetest, tenderest.’
The romance takes a tragic turn
Though Marita soon returned to New York, Castro was phoning her within days, inviting her to reconnect with him in Cuba. He even arranged for his private plane to take her there. She eventually found herself at the Habana Hilton hotel in Havana, where she would live with Castro for the next seven months.
Marita even fell pregnant. She was in Cuba when, in the autumn of 1959, she felt unwell and passed out. A drug had apparently been slipped into her milk, but Marita herself has told conflicting stories about what happened next. It seems that either an abortion was forced upon her or she gave birth but the baby was taken from her.
An assassination attempt is foiled
Blaming Castro for her misfortune, Marita reportedly agreed to join the CIA in an assassination plot against him. The plan was for Marita to run back into Castro’s arms but drop lethal poison pills into his drink. She did make the journey to Cuba in January 1960, but later claimed she was too in love with Castro to kill him.
Besides, Marita had made the mistake of secreting the capsules in a container of cold cream. After realising that the pills were now unusable as a result, she attempted to flush them down a toilet at the hotel. Castro walked in on her and boasted: ‘You can’t kill me. Nobody can kill me.’
Startling claims about JFK’s assassination
In 1977, Marita claimed in a newspaper that CIA agent Frank Sturgis had been friendly with Lee Harvey Oswald. According to her account, she joined the two men on a road trip to Dallas in November 1963. Marita reportedly left the group and flew to Miami soon afterwards.
Marita’s claims were sensational for implying that Sturgis was involved in John F Kennedy’s assassination. However, Sturgis himself denied the story, and no solid evidence has been found to support it. The House Select Committee on Assassinations heard from Marita but considered her testimony to be unreliable.
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