Dear Fidel: Marita’s Story

Marita Lorenz, the daughter of a German sea captain, recalls how she became the mistress of Fidel Castro in Havana soon after the Cuban revolution in 1959. After being six months pregnant with his baby, she was drugged and given a near fatal abortion. She was then recruited by the CIA and Mafia to assassinate Castro, but she threw away the poison pills just before she met Fidel. She then worked for the CIA in Florida and, in 1962, had a daughter while she was the mistress of an ex-dictator of Venezuela. She later married an FBI agent, by whom she had a son, and they spied on UN diplomats in a New York apartment. She claimed her spying days were over when she testified, in the 1977 Kennedy Assassination Inquiry, about her connection to Frank Sturgis and Lee Harvey Oswald.