Marita Lorenz was born on August 18, 1939 in Germany at the onset of WW2 to an American mother and German sea captain (making her a perfect candidate for the birthday bingo square). As a child Marita and her mother were imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after her mother, already on watch lists for being American, was accused of helping the incarcerated Jews. After her release from the camp and a sexual assault by a neighbor Marita became a withdrawn, troubled child who stopped going to school and began stowing away on her father’s ship. Eventually Marita’s parents divorced (on paper) so her mother could take Marita and her siblings to America. Marita continued to be an uninterested student and with his permission began working on her father’s ships. This eventually lead her to Cuba and Fidel.
In February 1959, shortly after the Cuban Revolution, Fidel and several members of his army boarded Captain Lorenz’s boat and there was an immediate connection between him and Marita. They stole a few kisses while he toured the vessel and she slipped him her phone number on a matchbook. Fidel called her in New York shortly after she arrived home offering to send a jet for her; she left without telling anyone where she was going and spent the next year in Cuba as Fidel’s girlfriend. At this point I began taking everything Marita wrote with a grain of salt.
Marita claims that, shortly after arriving in Cuba, she got pregnant and, around 7 months later, she was drugged and either had a forced abortion or gave birth to a son she never got to see. She left the island and got involved with anti-Castro activism groups in Florida and was recruited by CIA agents to go back to Cuba and assassinate Castro. She went back to Cuba in 1960 but claims she had the means and opportunity to kill Fidel but chose not to go through with her mission. Despite billing herself as “the spy who loved Castro” this is the end of her direct involvement with the communist leader until a final, brief, meeting in 1981.
Lorenz began dating deposed Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, the woman likes powerful men, and despite his marriage to another woman they had a daughter together. However, shortly after her birth, the Venezuelan government extradited the General to stand trial for his crimes. Following bad advice from a lawyer Marita tried to file a paternity suit against Marcos to keep him in America for longer but it backfired, nullifying a gag order she signed and resulted in the lost of a trust fund Marcos had set up for Marita and their daughter.
Marita claims she knew Lee Harvey Oswald as well as Jack Ruby and that she was involved with a group of radicals that travelled to Dallas in November of 1963 but sent her home the next day because they didn’t want a woman involved. Someone took her seriously because she testified in 1976 in front of the HSCA.
By this point the grains of salt were really piling up. Throughout her story Marita claims she was frequently targeted by the American government. Anytime she or her children were in an accident or ill she believes they were targeted attacks on her for her failed assassination of Castro and her relationship with Jimenez, etc. She also claims she was a frequent collaborator with the CIA and was denied benefits or a pension for her years of service.
Overall this is an entertaining story, Marita is certainly a colorful writer, but I don’t know how reliable the facts are so I wouldn’t use it to write a history paper. According to the interwebs Jennifer Lawrence has been tapped to play her in a biopic.