Marita Lorenz

Ilona Marita Lorenz (18 August 1939 – 31 August 2019) was a German woman who had an affair with Fidel Castro in 1959 and in January 1960 was involved in an assassination attempt by the CIA on Castro's life.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she testified about the John F. Kennedy assassination, stating that she was involved with a group of anti-Cuban militants, including Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt of CIA and Watergate infamy, shortly before the assassination.

Early life She was born Ilona Marita Lorenz in Bremen, the daughter of Alice June (née Lofland) and Heinrich Lorenz. She had a sister, Valerie, and two brothers, Joachim and Manfred "Philip". Her father, a wealthy German navy captain, became commander of a fleet of U-boats when Germany invaded Poland two weeks after Marita was born and was subsequently taken prisoner after his ship was captured; he was interned in a POW camp in England. Earlier in the war she had been recruited for the French underground by British intelligence after she aided in the rescue of a French soldier and British pilot. Fidel Castro and his men visited the ship and Castro took a liking to Lorenz. After dinner, the Berlin set sail for New York. Lorenz disembarked in Manhattan, where she would be living with her brother Joachim, a student at Columbia University. A few days after she arrived, Castro called Lorenz—she had given him Joachim's home number on a matchbox before parting ways—and said he was sending a plane to fly her back to Cuba. A jeep picked Lorenz up at the other end and drove her to the Havana Hilton, which Castro had repurposed as his base of operations. She claims then to have lived with Castro for several months, engaging in a sexual relationship.

Lorenz claimed in her memoir to have been impregnated by Castro. According to Lorenz in October 1959, when she was six months pregnant, she was given a laced drink in her hotel suite before being taken to an unknown location where an abortion was performed against her wishes. However Castro's long-time assistant Jesús Yáñez Pelletier disputes this and insisted that Lorenz had the abortion against Castro's own wishes.

She left the island and joined anti-Castro activists in Florida. Her later testimony named Francisco Fiorini as the CIA agent who recruited her to assassinate Castro, and that this was an alias for Frank Fiorini Sturgis. She received poison pills that she was to put in Castro's food. Back in Cuba in 1960, she did not deliver the pills but told Castro about the plot, claiming that she still loved him. She left the island and visited Castro one last time in 1981. She spent 10 days in Cuba in 1988.

According to Lorenz, in March 1961 she met deposed Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, introduced to her as "General Diaz", at a residence in Miami Beach, Florida while working as a courier for the International Anti-Communist Brigade. She said she was to collect a $200,000 contribution from Pérez Jiménez for her group. She claimed to have been with Frank Sturgis at a meeting with the CIA head in Miami which also included E. Howard Hunt, which Frank stated was for planning right before the JFK assassination.

JFK conspiracy allegations In 1977, Lorenz told Paul Meskil of the New York Daily News that she met Lee Harvey Oswald in the fall of 1963 at an Operation 40 safe house in the Little Havana section of Miami. According to Lorenz, she met him again before the Kennedy assassination in 1963 in the house of Orlando Bosch, with Frank Sturgis, Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, and two other Cubans present. In an interview with Steve Dunleavy of the New York Post shortly after he posted bail, Sturgis said that he believed communist agents had pressured Lorenz into making the accusations against him. Later that week in Manhattan Criminal Court, charges against Sturgis were dropped after the prosecutor told the judge that his office found no evidence of coercion or harassment.

In February 1985, attorney Mark Lane read a deposition that Lorenz provided in E. Howard Hunt's libel suit against the Liberty Lobby's tabloid, The Spotlight. Lorenz lived in New York City at the time, however, Lane read the deposition in court stating that Lorenz was "afraid to come to Miami". According to one account, this testimony became the "centerpiece" for Lane's 1991 book Plausible Denial. In 1993, Lorenz was interviewed by Vanity Fair writer Ann Louise Bardach who described her as "a patron saint of conspiracy buffs". Kirkus Reviews described the book as "the wild—if nearly incredible—adventures of a new Jane Bond". Publishers Weekly wrote: "Like other sensational conspiracy stories, this one presses the limits of credibility, but its very outrageousness gives it weight." Gabrielle Anwar portrayed Lorenz in the film and her mother Alice was portrayed by Jill Clayburgh.

In 2016, it was reported that she would be played by Jennifer Lawrence in the upcoming biographical film Marita, which is based on Lorenz's memoir, Marita: The Spy Who Loved Castro. As of 2022, the film is still listed as 'in development'.

Personal life Lorenz lived in Baltimore, Maryland.