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ENAGE LOVER, A CIA SPY AND A WOULD-BE ASSASSIN
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The CIA was set on killing Castro – and in 1961 they persuaded Marita to do the deed.
She said. “We would use poison pills, a method they said would be ‘suitable for a woman’. I only had to put the contents of the pills in Fidel’s food or drink and leave.
“I was worried that I would be searched on my arrival in Cuba and the pills be found, so I put them into a jar of face cream. There was no search but the pills had almost disintegrated in the face cream.”
When she met Castro he knew she was there to assassinate him. Bizarrely he gave her another chance. She recalled: “He took his gun out of its holster and gave it to me. I picked it up, looked at it then looked at him. He closed his eyes and said, ‘No one can kill me. No one. Ever.’ He was right. I wasn’t going to do it. I dropped the gun.”
She said: “I loved Fidel and longed to stay – but I had to go.”
Before Marita left, Castro admitted her baby had been taken away in 1959. He never told her why but he confirmed she had a son called Andrés. She said: “I wanted to see him, to cuddle him but Fidel cut me short with the words, ‘He’s in good hands.’” Marita added: “Fidel said Andrés was ‘a son of Cuba now’.
She was allowed brief meeting in Cuba in 1981, when Andrés was studying to be a medic.
She recalled: “He embraced me and I broke down.” That was the last time Marita saw her son. She never discovered what became of him. She had two more children, including one with Venezuela’s 1950s dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. She also had several marriages and even became involved with the New York mafia. Castro died last year aged 90. Marita, now 76, said: “I regret the faith placed in the wrong men. But I’m proud that I survived.”
Extracted from The Spy Who Loved Castro by Marita Lorenz – out now and published by Ebury Press at £7.99.