Marita: One Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Love and Espionage from Castro to Kennedy - Hardcover

Lorenz, Marita; Schwarz, Ted

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560250550 ISBN 13: 9781560250555

Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr, 1993

Synopsis

No true life story can possibly compare to the fantastic adventures of Marita Lorenz. From Fidel Castro's lover at age 19, to CIA spy, to human rights activist, Marita tells her own incredible story with all of the passion and force that it took to live it.
In the spring of 1959, aboard her father's ship in Havana harbor, Marita fell under the spell of Fidel Castro and soon fled home and family in New York City to return to Cuba to be with him. Installed in a suite of the Havana Hilton, she became Castro's lover, trusted advisor, and a lieutenant in his 26th of July movement. Within months, she was pregnant with his child. Despite or perhaps because of her close relationship with Fidel, she was betrayed by those nearest to him - kidnapped, drugged, and forcibly aborted of her child. Still heavily sedated and close to death, she was taken back to the United States where she was immediately embraced by National Security officials eager to use her in their growing anti-Castro propaganda campaign. Soon this escalated into something far more sinister as government agents tried to program Marita into an assassin to kill Castro.
Marita's adventures continue as a disillusioned young woman is turned into an accomplished but unwilling operative in the CIA by the likes of Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt. The only woman in a man's world, she developed the skills and courage that made her an invaluable agent and gained her the nickname "Alemana Fria" - the "Cold German." Among her many assignments, perhaps the most harrowing is a mysterious gunrunning mission from Miami to Dallas with a strange character named "Ozzie" (Lee Harvey Oswald) just days before the JFK assassination.
Never far from the center of controversy, Marita becomes involved with former Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. Impulsively following him to Venezuela when he is deported from the U.S., she spends a year abandoned with her baby daughter in the dense jungle with a tribe of Yanomano Indians. Once again, Marita's indomitable spirit empowers her with the will to survive and prevail.
Overcoming every obstacle, Marita at heart has always maintained her love for Cuba. Ultimately, driven by her concern for the Marielitos, the Cuban boat people, she is able to return to Havana to meet with Castro and see, for the first time, the son she thought was dead.
Marita's story is one of high adventure, high romance, and high drama, made more vivid and poignant by the fact that it is all true.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Move over, Mata Hari: Here are the wild--if nearly incredible- -adventures of a new Jane Bond, told with the help of Schwarz (Walking with the Damned, 1991, etc.). ``He held my face in his hands and kissed me--my first kiss....`Be with me,' he whispered.'' The amorous ``he'' is none other than Fidel Castro, flush from conquering Cuba seven weeks earlier but not too busy to notice the pretty 19-year-old visiting Havana with her father. Days later, Lorenz beds the Cuban leader (``We were in bliss for five hours''), beginning the affair that was to alter her life--a life, she tells us, that began badly in Germany as her American-born mom was arrested for spying and sent to Belsen; after V-E Day, Lorenz herself, ten, was raped by an American soldier. Fourteen years later, she's betrayed by Castro as her unborn son is ripped from her womb; moving to the States, she's contacted by sinister intelligence agents, including future Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, and is trained as an assassin. Target: Castro. Lorenz's escapades come fast and furious here: stealing boats; robbing armories; returning to Cuba to kill Castro but ending up ``naked and making love'' with him; driving on November 20, 1963, with Sturgis and a cache of guns to Dallas, where she meets Oswald and E. Howard Hunt; taking up with a former Venezuelan strongman; being exiled to the Amazon, where she's adopted by Yanomano Indians; returning to New York and joining the NYPD; flying one last time, in 1981, to Cuba, where Fidel's charisma again stays her assassin's hand and where she gives him a Polaroid camera. Cynics may snicker as Lorenz cavorts on the jungle floor with her ``pure man'' of a Yanomano, ``blow gun, spear, and poison arrows'' at his side--but, as the saying goes, life can be as thrilling as (and even stranger than) fiction...and sometimes, maybe, even the same thing. (Photographs--not seen) (Film rights sold to Oliver Stone) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

This tale relates how a failure of nerve at the last minute foiled CIA operative Lorenz's assignment to poison Fidel Castro--her lover and the father of her son. Writing with Schwartz ( DeLorean ), she describes her affair with the deposed Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, whose daughter she bore, and a year she spent in a Venezuelan jungle with a lusty Yanomano Indian. She was also, she tells us, trained at a secret camp in the Everglades, along with CIA contract workers, mercenaries and counterrevolutionaries planning the overthrow of Castro. Almost casually, she relates how in mid-November of 1963 she drove from Miami to Dallas in a gun-laden two-car caravan whose occupants included Lee Harvey Oswald. But she left that band before she learned what their mission was. Although she was willing to try to murder Castro and lived among his enemies, Lorenz presents him as the only sympathetic--even noble--character in this chilling tale. She believes he was forced into his alliance with Russia by CIA-promoted U.S. hostility and false intelligence. And she contends that the losses incurred by the Mafia and CIA operatives when he shut down the gambling houses, and a Mafia vendetta against Joseph Kennedy, among other factors, may have motivated the JFK assassination. Lorenz testified before congressional committees investigating the Kennedy assassination, and tabloids of the time featured Mata Hari stories about her, but the tale in its entirety remained untold until now. Like other sensational conspiracy stories, this one presses the limits of credibility, but its very outrageousness gives it weight.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1560250550
• ISBN 13: 9781560250555
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1