“Fidel Was Not A Very Good Lover,” Says The German Marita Lorenz

Photo of Marita Lorenz and Fidel Castro on the cover of the book "I Was the Spy Loved by the Comandante" published by Peninsula
Photo of Marita Lorenz and Fidel Castro on the cover of the book “I Was the Spy Loved by the Comandante” published by Peninsula

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Madrid, 5 September 2016 — Marita Lorenz’s first kiss (1939) came from Fidel Castro. Daughter of a ship’s captain, she met the leader of the Revolution at age 20, at a dock at the port of Havana. After she showed him around the ship, the leader asked her where her cabin was and, once they were there he pushed her inside and kissed her. But Lorenz didn’t feel intimidated, “I was enthralled. Fidel gave off an enormous seductive power!” she said, in an interview with the French weekly Paris-Match, subsequently translated by YoDona, a magazine belonging to the Spanish daily El Mundo. In the interview, Fidel Castro’s ex-lover offers every kind of detail about the relationship they maintained in 1959, before she joined the anti-Castro ranks.

Almost six decades later, Lorenz says that Fidel Castro was the great love of her life, despite her claim that he wasn’t a good lover. “He was more interested during the caresses than during the sexual act itself. But dictators are all like that,” she says from experience, having also had a relationship with the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez.

“Fidel was a narcissist. He loved to look at himself in the mirror while he stroked his beard. He lacked self-confidence, or rather, he needed adulation and pampering, like a little boy,” she told YoDona, denying that she feels any resentment toward the leader of the Cuban Revolution.

Lorenz lived in Suite 2408 in the Havana Hilton (the hotel where Fidel, Raul and Ernesto Che Guevara were also living) between March and November of 1959, a time when Fidel Castro still had not broken off relations with the United States nor become linked with the USSR.

“Fidel was a narcissist. He loved to look in the mirror as he stroked his beard. He lacked self-confidence, or rather, needed to be flattered and pampered, like a little boy”

Castro’s lover was aware that the relationship would not end in marriage. “I’m married to Cuba,” he told her. However, she was soon pregnant, and although her son was supposedly taken away from her, she met him in 1981: “I saw him when I visited Fidel the last time, after 20 years of separation,” she said. “They told me I’d undergone an abortion, but the gynecologist in New York told me I had given birth. What they said about an abortion was false. My pregnancy was almost full-term and my son was born when I was in a coma in Cuba. He is a boy. He grew up there and is called Andres Vazquez.”

It was during her pregnancy when she came into contact with the CIA indirectly through Frank Sturgis, an American who presented himself as an ally of Fidel, although in reality he was allied with Batista and defending the interests of the mafia in Cuban casinos.

“He said he could help me and, in return, asked me many things. To get rid of him, I ended up giving him documents that Fidel threw in the trash and that, in my opinion, were of no interest. But that seemed to satisfy him,” she recalls.

In October 1959, after a poisoning attempt she gave birth to her son and after a few months hospitalized in the United States she returned to the island at the end of the same year, having already become a spy.

During her convalescence, she joined the anti-Castro side motivated by her conversations with the FBI, which supposedly asked her to assassinate Castro in 1961. “Oh, my little German,” Fidel greeted her, knowing she was going to kill him. “He handed me his gun and I took it. Then, looking into my eyes, he said to me… ‘No one can kill me’ He was right I dropped the gun and I felt liberated.”

Despite not meeting their expectations – “They explained that if he had been killed would not have had to launch the Bay of Pigs operation” – Lorenz remained linked for years to espionage: “I came to know in Miami, at a meeting of those anti-Castro, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was implicated in the Kennedy assassination. But he was not alone, I’m sure there was someone else. In my view there was a plot to kill the president,” she believes.

At 76 years, the former spy lives in Queens (New York) in a semi-basement and wants to return to Germany to reunite with her son Mark, from her relationship with the Venezuelan dictator Perez Jimenez. “He has a job there, because he is going to run a museum devoted to the secret services.”