Marita
The Spy Who Loved Castro
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The dramatic, glamorous story of lover-turned-spy Marita Lorenz and her affair with Fidel Castro.
Few people can say they’ve seen some of the most significant moments of the twentieth century unravel before their eyes. Marita Lorenz is one of them.
Born in Germany at the outbreak of WWII, Marita was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp as a child. In 1959, she travelled to Cuba where she met and fell in love with Fidel Castro. Yet upon fleeing to America, she was recruited by the CIA to assassinate the Fidel. Torn by love and loyalty, she couldn’t bring herself to slip him the lethal pills.
Her life would take many more twists and turns—including having a child with ex-dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Pérez Jiménez; testifying about the John F. Kennedy assassination; and becoming a party girl with close ties the New York mafia (and then a police informant).
Caught up in Cold War intrigue, espionage, and conspiracy, this is Marita’s incredible autobiography of a young woman who became a spy for the CIA.
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.
