Castro could hardly take his eyes off the beautiful young Marita. Before dinner, she showed him around the ship. In the elevator down to the engine room, a wave buffered the ship and she fell against him. He took the opportunity to kiss her.
Over dinner, she was impressed by his stories of derring-do in the Sierra Maestra. At one point, her mother recalled, he spread his arms like a messiah, looked to the heavens and said: “I am Cuba.”
Castro suggested that Marita stay in Havana and work for him, but her father said she had to go to school in New York. Castro made her promise she would come back.
Back in New York, Marita got a phone call from Castro. He said he missed her. Her parents were away for a month and she agreed to go down to Cuba for a week. The next day, three officials from the Cuban embassy turned up and took her to Idlewild — now JFK airport. Once in Havana, she was taken directly to the Hilton Hotel, Suite 2406-8. After an hour, Castro arrived. He put his cigar in the ashtray and grabbed her. He hugged her and kissed her and made her promise that she would stay with him forever.
“Always, always,” the young Marita sighed.
They spent the rest of the day together, making love. She complained that she never saw him completely naked — even when he took all his clothes off, he still wore his beard.
Although Marita was quickly accepted by Celia Sanchez and Castro’s personal guards, she soon grew lonely because she did not speak Spanish very well. He was busy and left her alone for long periods. One night he came in at 4 a.m. with some tropical orchids. She was crying and threatened to leave.
“Don’t go, my love,” he said. “We will get married now.”
Then he knelt on the bed in front of her, made the sign of the cross and said: ” Do you, my Alemanita, Marita Lorenz, want to marry Fidel Castro?”
She said: “I do marry you, Fidel Castro, forever.”
They laughed and hugged, and Castro said that, in Cuba, he was the law, he was God. So they were now married legally and in the eyes of the Lord. He said that he knew she was lonely and that, from now on, as his wife, he would take her with him, everywhere. A week later he bought her a diamond engagement ring engraved: “3/59, de Fidel para Marita, Siempre.”
Marita went to work for him as a secretary and interpreter. She accompanied him on his fifteen-day visit to the United States but soon found that she was left behind in hotel rooms while he took care of business. Marita was already pregnant and her nerves were frayed. She became jealous when she noticed the effect his charisma was having on attractive female journalists and others. He was bombarded with letters, notes and messages from women who wanted to meet him. One of them was from Ava Gardner.
According to Marita, Ava Gardner turned up at their hotel, drunk. She forced her way into the lift with them, called her “the little bitch who’s hiding Fidel” and slapped her. Captain Pupo, one of Castro’s guards, pulled his gun.
Later that night, Castro told her that he had fixed Ava Gardner up with one of his aides, who had orders to satisfy her, compliments of the Republic of Cuba.
Back in Havana, the pregnant Marita became ill. An hallucinogenic drug had been slipped to her by an unknown source. In her delirious state, she remembered her stomach suddenly being flat. The baby had gone and, somewhere in the distance, she heard a baby crying.
Marita had a fever. She was suffering from blood poisoning and the doctors could not stop her bleeding from the womb. Castro gave orders for her to be taken back to America where she would be able to get the best medical attention and her own doctor would be on hand.
Back in New York, Marita was taken into protective custody. She was told that her baby had been born prematurely and died. Castro had killed it, she was told repeatedly.
Confidential magazine broke the story. The front page headline read: “An American Mother’s Terrifying Story — “Fidel Castro Raped My Teenage Daughter”.” A smaller headline ran: “Lured to Cuba by Castro, Marita Lorenz, 18, was kidnapped, raped and then cruelly aborted.”
The story went on to tell the story of the “rape” in melodramatic detail, right down to Castro tearing the crucifix from the naked girl’s neck before he had his evil way with her. Meanwhile, Marita’s mother filed a suit against the Cuban government for $11 million. As Marita overcame her trauma, she realized that this was all black propaganda designed to discredit Castro who, having declared himself a Communist, had become a public enemy in the United States.
She was allowed out of hospital, but the FBI kept her under guard. Back home, she received a telegram from Castro, asking her to call him. She went out to a pay phone. When she got through, Castro told her that the child was alive. At that point her FBI bodyguard grabbed the receiver and hung up.
A few weeks later, she received another telegram. This time she gave her bodyguard the slip — rather too easily she thought in retrospect — and went to use the pay phone again. This time she was shot at. Confidential magazine ran a story that Castro had sentenced her to death.
The CIA went to work on her. They managed to convince her that her life was in danger and eventually persuaded her to take part in a half-baked assassination attempt on Castro. They wanted her to poison him. On her way to Cuba she hid the poison capsules in ajar of Ponds cream, which partially dissolved them. When she arrived in Havana, she went straight to his suite in the Hilton. First, she checked it for stray blonde hairs. She found stacks of fan mail from lonely women who wanted to meet him. Then she checked the poison capsules, found that they were ruined and tried to flush them down the bidet.
When Castro arrived, they hugged. She asked for news of her baby, but he said he was tired. He lay on the bed and asked her if she had come to kill him. She said she had. He handed her his revolver, the one he had carried with him throughout the revolution.
She pointed it at him and pressed the release, removing the clip of .45 calibre bullets. He tensed, thinking she had retracted the hammer, ready to fire, but he made no attempt to get out of the way, or defend himself.
“It’s rusty,” Marita said. “It needs oiling.”
“Nobody can kill me, Marita,” he said. “Nobody.”
And he turned his back and went to sleep.
Next morning, they made love. He drank a Coke, without checking to see if she had put anything in it. In the bathroom, she found the remains of the poison capsules still floating in the bidet. She crushed them up and flushed them away, properly this time.
On her knees, she begged for news of her child. It was a boy, he said. He loved the child and she would only be able to see him if she lived with them on Cuba. This was impossible, Marita knew. If she stayed, the CIA would come after her too.
She left the $6,000 the CIA had given her in Castro’s room. When she flew back to Florida, her bosses were furious. Not only had she blown two chances to kill Castro — once with the poison, once with the gun — she had paid him $6,000. It was government money, too. On the other hand, they had proved he was vulnerable. They now knew they could get a potential assassin right to the target. Marita never returned to Cuba and never discovered the truth about her child.
This was not the end of Marita’s association with dictators. As part of her CIA duties, Marita went on to become the mistress of General Marcos Perez Jimenez, the failed dictator of Venezuela and sworn enemy of Castro. From his comfortable exile in Miami, he would phone Castro and taunt him about Marita. But soon after Marita gave birth to the General’s daughter, Monica, Jimenez was extradited back to Venezuela to stand trial.
Since Marita, Castro’s love life has been a series of one-night stands. His security guards were charged with finding him bed partners. He was not the most considerate of lovers — a dancer from the Tropicana complained that he read while he was making love to her; a French actress, that he smoked the whole time; another woman, that he never took his boots off.
A Cuban actress said: “You can’t imagine what a brute he is, what a selfish monster. He just pulled down his pants, and was quick.”
The most common complaint, though, was that he talked incessantly, on such romantic topics as the future of the revolution or agricultural reform.
Castro’s affairs are widely known about in Cuba. Those who he slept with could expect flowers on their birthdays and valuable gifts — a rare paella or a lobster, all despatched with coldhearted efficiency by Celia Sanchez, who was never very far from the leader.
Only one other women has occupied Castro for any length of time. She was another green-eyed, black-haired aristocrat, Dalia Soto Del Valle Jorge, known as “la mujer de Trinidad” — the woman from the city of” Trinidad. Her father, Enrique, was the owner of a large cigar factory and she worked as a secretary at the sugar workers” union, where Castro met her in 1962 or 1963. She had been primed for the affair by a fortune-teller who told her: “You will have the love of a great man.”
When she took up with him, her family considered her to be Castro’s prisoner and her father told friends that he had “lost a daughter”. But the affair endured and Dalia had five sons by Castro. All of them bear his middle name, Alejandro, and he sent them to be educated in the Soviet Union, along with his other, legitimate son, Fidelito.
9. GOING DOWN SOUTH OF THE BORDER
Latin America has seen its fair share of dictators. One of the most unpleasant was Francisco Solano Lopez of Paraguay. Far from liberating his country, he almost destroyed it by going to war simultaneously with three powerful neighbours — Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
Born in 1827, Francisco Lopez was the son of the Paraguayan dictator, Carlos Antonio Lopez. The United States Minister to Paraguay, Charles Ames Washburn, once described Francisco:
Short and stout, always inclining to corpulence. He dressed grotesquely, but his costumes were always expensive and elaborately finished. His eyes, when he was pleased, had a mild expression; but when he was enraged the pupil seemed to dilate till it did not appear to be that of a human being, but rather a wild beast goaded to madness. He had, however, a gross animal look that was repulsive when his face was in repose. His forehead was narrow and his head small, with the rear organs largely developed. His teeth were very much decayed, and so many of the front ones were gone as to render his articulation somewhat difficult and indistinct. He apparently took no pains to keep them clean, and those which remained were unwholesome in appearance, and nearly as dark as the cigar that he had almost constantly between them. His face was rather flat, and his nose and his hair indicated more of the negro than the Indian. His cheeks had a fullness that extended to the jowl, giving him a sort of bulldog expression.
This repulsive creature was the terror of the first families of Asuncion and their daughters. He had a predilection for aristocratic virgins and any who resisted would find their fathers jailed on Carlos Lopez’s orders.
One woman he particularly liked was Pancha Garmendia, known as “the pride and jewel of Asuncion”. Every young man in Paraguay desired her, but Lopez scared them all off. Nevertheless she rejected him, threatening to commit suicide if he laid a finger on her.
Unfortunately, Francisco could not have Pancha’s father jailed as he was already dead. He had been executed as an enemy of the state by Carlos Lopez’s predecessor, El Supremo, the first Perpetual Dictator for Life of Paraguay. Instead, he had her brothers charged with being enemies of the state and executed. With his father’s permission, Francisco confiscated their property and had Pancha arrested. She spent the rest of her life in chains. Even when Francisco Lopez was forced to withdraw from Asuncion by the Allied armies twenty years later, he dragged Pancha along with him into the jungle where she died soon after.
After dealing with Pancha, Francisco fell for Carmencita Cordal and was determined to make her his concubine. She was about to be married to her cousin, Carlos Decoud, the son of one of Paraguay’s leading families. Decoud had the temerity to pick a fight with Francisco and thrash him humiliatingly. It was a foolish move. Carlos Lopez had Decoud arrested on trumpedup charges of plotting a coup d’etat.
The night before he was to be wed to Carmencita, Decoud was executed and his bloodstained corpse was flung into the street in front of her house — some say it was actually delivered to her living-room. Carmencita spent the rest of her life dressed in black, praying in desert shrines and gathering flowers by moonlight.
The daughters of all the leading families began applying for passports and Francisco’s behaviour became so outrageous that Carlos Lopez thought it best that he leave the country while the situation cooled down. So Francisco headed off to Europe with an unlimited bank account. His mission was to buy a navy -just what a landlocked country like Paraguay needed.
On arriving in Paris, young Lopez left the tedious business of state to his secretary and, as the American ambassador put it, “gave loose rein to his natural licentious propensities, and plunged into the vices of that gay capital”.
A great fan of Napoleon, Francisco was eager to be presented at the court of Napoleon III. He squeezed himself into one of his smallest uniforms — he thought, mistakenly, that tight clothing would disguise his corpulent form.
When he was presented to the Emperor, he kissed the Empress’s hand. She turned away and promptly vomited over an ormolu desk, later excusing herself on the grounds that she was pregnant.
Francisco Lopez made a flying visit to London, but Queen Victoria discovered that she was “quite too busy” to entertain her Paraguayan guest.
Back in Paris, Francisco met a young woman who managed to overlook his repulsive appearance. It was said that, where others saw only rotting teeth, she saw jewels. Her name was Eliza Lynch.
Born in County Cork in 1835, she was said to have too much imagination, too many brains and too much libido. She was married at the age of fifteen, divorced at seventeen, and had taken a string of lovers by eighteen. Her family had fled to France to escape the 1845 famine. Her first husband was Xavier Quatrefages, a career officer in the French Army. He was old enough to be her father, but the marriage was an escape from the poverty her family had sunk into.
Her husband was posted to Algiers where Eliza was raped by his commanding officer. Quatrefages took no action to defend his wife’s honour, but she had met a dashing young Russian cavalry officer who did. He killed the colonel and took Eliza off to Paris where he established her in a house in the fashionable Boulevard Saint Germain. But her dashing young cavalry officer soon abandoned her for the excitement of the Crimean War.
Pictures of her from that time show that she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman and she decided to pursue a career as a courtesan. Argentinian journalist Hector Varela described her:
She was tall with a flexible and delicate figure with beautiful and seductive curves. Her skin was alabaster. Her eyes were of a blue that seems borrowed from the very hues of heaven and had an expression of ineffable sweetness in whose depths the light of Cupid was enthroned. Her beautiful lips were indescribably expressive of the voluptuous, moistened by an ethereal deco that God must have provided to lull the fires within her, a mouth that was like a cup of delight at the banquet table of ardent passion. Her hands were small with long fingers, the nails perfectly formed and delicately polished. She was, evidently, one of those women mho make the care of their appearance a religion.
She had a flair for language and a quick wit, and was soon entertaining numerous gentlemen callers. Her reputation grew and no man of substance would leave Paris without having paid a visit to Chez Lynch.
Eliza was still only nineteen when she entertained a man named Brizuela, who was one of Francisco’s retinue. He boasted of his dalliance to the young Lopez, who decided to see this jewel with his own eyes. Eliza was equally eager to entertain this savage who all Paris knew was spraying money around like buckshot.
Within hours of entering Madame Lynch’s salon, Francisco entered her boudoir. The next day he told her of the riches of his country. The day after that, she gave notice to her landlord.
There is no doubt that Lopez was desperat
ely in love with Eliza. He had met beautiful women before, but Eliza was the first woman to go to bed with him without putting up a struggle first.
Eliza, for her part, must have felt some physical revulsion for the loathsome creature. But, although she had no real idea where Paraguay was, she had a shrewd sense of money and power. She was quick-witted enough to know that, while she was a sought-after beauty at nineteen, all too soon she would loose her power to charm, and here was a man who could keep her in clover for the rest of her life. He told her that, one day, he would become the emperor of South America. Could she not be his empress?
Neglecting the tiresome formalities of marriage, they set off on a honeymoon around Europe. On the way, Eliza picked up trunkloads of gowns and jewels. They dined with the notorious Queen Isabella of Spain, who suggested that Paraguay hold a referendum to see if the people wanted to return to the Spanish fold. Francisco said he would think about it. He didn’t.
In Rome, it was said, Eliza held a “wickedly obscene” dinner party for the pope. Then, after a tour of the Crimean battlefront, the happy couple headed for Paraguay.
Francisco’s brother Benigno, who had been with Francisco in Paris, had already returned to Paraguay and told Carlos Lopez that Francisco was involved with “una ramera irlandesa” — an Irish prostitute. Fearing his father’s wrath, Francisco and Eliza stopped off in Buenos Aires. Doña Juana and Francisco’s two sisters said that they refused to accept “La Irlandesa”, but Carlos realized that he was getting old and needed his son and heir back in the country. Reassured by a message from his father, Francisco and an apprehensive Eliza began the slow thousand-mile voyage up river to Asuncion.
When they arrived, Eliza was heavily pregnant. The women of the Lopez family were good to their word. They refused to accept Eliza. She responded by strutting around Asuncion in the latest Paris fashions, showing off her magnificent figure. This quite outshone anything the Lopez sisters had to offer.
Sex Lives of the Great Dictators Page 14