Marita Lorenz: Fidel Castro’s Lover and an Accidental Assassin

A woman recruited to kill the man she once passionately loved. This was the impossible role Ilona Marita Lorenz was asked to play, and the man was Fidel Castro.Marita Lorenz was born on 18 August 1939

in Bremen, Germany. Her mother, Alice Lofland, was an actress who performed under the stage name June Paget. Her father, Heinrich Friedrich Lorenz, was a German ship’s captain. During the Second World War, he later became a commander of a fleet of U-boats, while Alice, an American citizen, was unable to return to the United States.Alice Lofland rescued two Allied soldiers during the war, a British pilot and a French soldier, and was eventually recruited into the French Resistance. In 1944, when Marita was only five years old, she and her mother were captured by the Nazis and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, the family relocated to Manhattan in 1950, where Alice later worked with the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA and US Army intelligence.Marita was 19 when she first met Fidel Castro. In 1959, she was travelling with her father after leaving school in the ninth grade to work aboard his ships. When their vessel docked in Havana, Castro noticed her. According to an account cited by Lauren Dillon in Historic Mysteries, Marita later claimed that she saw a boat approaching with around thirty armed men while her father was taking an afternoon nap in his quarters. One of the men asked to come aboard. When she asked who he was, he replied that he was Fidel Castro.

According to Vanity Fair, Lorenz said in an interview that she gave Castro and his men, including Che Guevara, a tour of the ship. Reports state that the two became intimate when Castro later visited her in her room. Marita returned to New York, but neither of them forgot the other. Castro eventually called her to say that he was sending a plane to bring her back to Cuba.In Havana, Lorenz joined the inner circle of Castro’s personal life and became one of his lovers. She later claimed that she became pregnant with his child. Accounts of what followed vary. As Sam Roberts wrote in The New York Times, “Ms. Lorenz claimed that she had become pregnant during her affair with Castro, but that the fetus, at almost full term, was removed from her in Cuba while she was drugged. The child was raised there, according to Ms. Lorenz.” These claims have been disputed, but they remained central to her own account of the relationship.After months living with Castro, Lorenz left Cuba and moved to Florida. She became involved with anti-Castro networks and began a career in espionage, following in her mother’s footsteps. It was there that she was introduced to CIA agent and future Watergate figure Frank Fiorini Sturgis. The two developed a complicated partnership: while they were not romantically involved, they spent significant time together working on CIA operations targeting Castro. Lorenz later described this period as intoxicating and disorienting, caught between the thrill of covert work and the emotional residue of her past with Castro.In 1960, she was recruited by the CIA to return to Cuba and assassinate Castro. She was given two botulinum toxin pills, described as “white gelatin capsules”, and instructed to place them in his food.She did not go through with it. Lorenz later said she hid the pills in a jar of cold cream, but they dissolved. “They were all gunked up. I fished them out and flushed them down the bidet,” she recalled.In Castro’s hotel room, he allegedly asked her if she had come to kill him. In an interview with Ann Louise Bardach for Vanity Fair in 1993, Lorenz described the moment in detail. “I said, ‘Yes. I wanted to see you.’ And he said, ‘That’s good. That’s good.’” When he asked if she was working for the CIA, she replied, “Not really. I work for myself.”According to Lorenz, Castro then removed his .45 pistol and handed it to her. “He said, ‘You can’t kill me. Nobody can kill me,’” she recalled, describing how he smiled and chewed on his cigar. She said they made love, after which he dressed and left without asking her to stay. “That was the hardest part,” she said. “I wanted him to beg me to stay.”She left him a note, telling him she would return. She never did.