Her name is Ilona Marita Lorenz, born on 18 August 1939, just a few days before Hitler invaded Poland. Her mother was thrown out of hospital immediately after giving birth because they needed space for future wounded soldiers. She could not count on her husband’s help as he had sailed the seas all his life. Marita’s mother’s life was shrouded in mystery and when her daughter later asked her exactly where and when she was born, she always got the same answer: “It doesn’t matter.”
Marita’s mother was the daughter of American farmers, she was educated in New York and learned to dance and perform in various Broadway plays. One day she left America for Paris. On board, she met First Officer Heinrich Lorenz, married him and moved to Bremen in 1932. The couple had two sons, Joachim and Philip, a daughter, Valerie, and in 1939, Marita.
Heinrich Lorenz travelled to America many times as a naval officer, and it is likely that on one of these trips he was persuaded by the FBI to work for them. In 1941, however, a major fire broke out on the Bremen, a ship destined to disembark German troops in England, and shortly afterwards her mother, an American citizen, was interrogated by the Gestapo. There was no evidence against her, so she was released, but the family has been under constant surveillance ever since.
The mother wanted to emigrate back to America with her children and asked the Swiss consulate to intervene, but the Americans told her that she could go back but her children could not because they were German citizens. Because of her contacts with the Swiss consulate, the Gestapo interrogated her again.
During the war, Marita’s father rarely came home, so all the care for the family fell on her mother. The Gestapo interrogated her mother several times and one day arrested her for minor offences, such as not displaying the Nazi flag or attending meetings. She had already had to send her eldest son Joachim to a boarding school in Meissen, Philip to a friend’s family and Valeria to neighbours, as she could not support them herself. After her mother’s arrest, Marita was left alone, and she also contracted typhoid fever and was sent to a children’s hospital. When she recovered, she was simply put on a truck with some other children and taken to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The only thing she remembered later was the terrible smell and the feeling that everyone she saw there was dead, no one was smiling and no one was talking. Marita did not know that her mother was in the same camp, but at the other end. They were both lucky to be alive, but they were thin to the bone, sick and scared, but alive.
On 15 April 1945, British troops liberated the camp and the survivors began to return home. The family was reunited, missing only their father, who had been taken prisoner by the British. A year later, her parents were officially divorced, and four years after that, her mother returned to New York with the children, took a job in an American war office and sent Marita to school. She travelled a lot and the bond with her children was slowly breaking.
Marita could not forget the beautiful days she spent with her father and when her mother travelled to Ethiopia for an extended period of time on orders from the Pentagon, she returned to him in Bremenhaven, Germany. She did not stay long at school, she was drawn to the sea and, as her father was a captain of large cruise ships, she travelled with him many times, mostly in the Caribbean. She loved Havana because the people were friendly, the nightlife was unique, the music was great and so was the food. She had no interest in the social unrest on the island, but her father told her: “All the people of the Caribbean have in common are revolutions. Presidents don’t live long here. It is their way of life. They kill each other to take over the country.”
In early 1959, the revolution reached Cuba. Five and a half years after his unsuccessful attempt to oust President Batista by storming the Moncada barracks, and after several years of exile abroad, Castro landed in Cuba in 1956 with a few followers, took refuge in the Sierra Maestra mountains and began his struggle for power. His revolution was victorious and on 1 January 1959 the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba.
Although CIA Director Allen Dulles had already informed President Eisenhower in 1958 that “the Cuban revolution may not be in the interests of America, American industry and American business”, America nevertheless immediately recognised the Castro regime, albeit with a great deal of trepidation about what would happen in the future.
Marita Alemanita
Cuba was the last stop on the Berlin’s island cruise. She docked in Havana on Friday 27 February 1959. There was no nervousness among the passengers and the programme went as planned, including a visit to Havana’s nightlife. The following day, many of the passengers left for excursions, leaving only the crew on board to continue preparations for the departure from Havana scheduled for the following day.
Marita stayed on board and soon noticed that two motorboats full of bearded and armed people were approaching the ship. Her father, Captain Lorenz, was asleep in his cabin, so she decided to ask the bearded men what they wanted. “We want to see the boat,” replied a big bearded man, introducing himself, “I am Dr Fidel Castro.” The few passengers who remained on the boat were frightened at the sight of the gunmen, and Marita offered to take them on a tour.
“Ilona Marita Lorenz,” she introduced herself and Castro replied laughing, “Marita Alemanita (Marita, a little German girl ).” At her request, the gunmen put down their weapons and laid them on the floor of the deck. Marita, with her meagre knowledge of Spanish, led them from the fire and engine rooms to the galley, where the staff in immaculate white dresses looked in amazement at the bearded men in crumpled olive drab military uniforms. They toured the tourist and first class cabins and ended their visit in the ship’s bar, where passengers danced nightly to live music. Beards were served wine, caviar and champagne and the atmosphere became convivial.
When they reached the bridge, they were greeted by Captain Lorenz, who had woken up, and an interesting conversation ensued. Then they all went to the ship’s first-class restaurant for lunch. The curious tourists in the restaurant wanted Castro’s autograph, and he gladly obliged. After that, the bearded men said their goodbyes and the ship sailed for America later that night. As Castro said goodbye to Marita, laughing, “We’ll see each other again, won’t we?”
After returning to New York, Marita lived peacefully with her brother Joachim and attended an accounting course, while their mother was again away on business in Heidelberg. One day the phone rang in the apartment and the operator told her that an international call was coming from Cuba. It was Fidel, asking her if she wanted to come to Cuba. She answered yes immediately and without thinking. She knew that her brother would try to persuade her not to go on such adventures, so in his absence she took her suitcase, filled it with the essentials and circled Havana in red pencil on the map of Latin America that hung on the wall. My brother would understand immediately where she was going.
She left the apartment on 4 March 1959, accompanied by three Cubans who had come to look for her. A Cuban airline plane was waiting for them at the airport and they were the only passengers on the flight to Havana. After landing, she was taken by jeep to the former Havana Hilton Hotel, now renamed the Havana Libre Hotel, and then by elevator to the 24th floor. The corridor was full of ‘barbudos’ – bearded men sitting on the floor smoking cigars.
Fidel had an apartment at number 2408, connected to the adjacent apartments where his closest associates Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos lived. There was no one in Fidel’s apartment, but she was told that he would be coming soon. The apartment was in complete disarray, with a bazooka under the bed, many weapons, cigar boxes, empty beer bottles, plastic bags of dirty laundry and the smell of cigars everywhere.
“Alemanita,” she finally heard Fidel’s voice, “it’s good to be together again.” Fidel was a big man, at least 190 centimetres tall and weighing about 100 kilograms. “Ah, I’ll only stay for a few days,” she replied. He told her that she would stay with him, that he would already talk to her father and that she did not need to go anywhere, because the hotel had everything she needed; a shop, a restaurant, a cleaners. He will come and go as he pleases. And indeed he rarely stayed all night with her, sometimes he would come for a few hours and then rush off.
Eventually, the idleness got too much for her, so Fidel allowed her to go out on errands, accompanied by his security guard Yenez Pelletier. During these outings, she wore the uniform of Castro’s 26 July military movement, as it would have been unusual for her to go around dressed as a tourist. Pelletier sometimes took her to visit the elderly couple Fernandez, who had an old friendship with Fidel. She was also taken to Varadero beach, and sometimes she was allowed to work with Fidel’s secretary Celia, sorting out the mail and taking phone calls.
Fidel liked to tell her about his political plans; nationalisation and agrarian reform. It was agrarian reform and nationalisation that were the biggest stumbling blocks in Cuba’s relations with America in the beginning. That is why, in April 1959, Fidel made his first foreign visit to America. Marita accompanied him on this 11-day trip, which was also the first opportunity to see his family again, whom he had left a month earlier. She did not know whether her mother would be home, as she had written letters to her without giving her address, and her father was back in Germany.
Castro did not visit America on the basis of an official invitation from the government, but at the request of American publishers, although the US administration was also very interested in his visit. He met with members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as with the US Vice-President, Richard Nixon, who still thought quite highly of him. From Washington, the delegation travelled to New York, where they stayed in the heart of Manhattan. Fidel was always surrounded by admirers. In numerous press conferences, he denied rumours of mass executions and of his avoidance of elections and distanced himself from communism. Marita was increasingly jealous, as a crowd of women always swarmed around him.
Termination of pregnancy
After returning to Cuba, Marita went for walks alone, always dressed in uniform. In May 1959, she became aware that she was often nauseous and vomiting in the morning and soon realised that she was pregnant. Fidel was surprised but soon calmed down and assured her that everything would be fine.
At the end of May 1959, she was suddenly transferred to the Riviera Hotel for a few days without warning, where she met someone who would later turn out to be a major influence on her life. She did not learn his name at their first meeting. He was a dark-haired man, Italian-looking, dressed in the military uniform of the Cuban air force. Without preamble, he said to her: ‘I know you are a friend of Fidel’s. If you need help, I can give it to you. I can take you from here. I am an American.”
She assured him, to his surprise, that she did not need help and that she did not want to leave Cuba. She told Fidel all about this strange encounter and the offer, and he became very angry and told her not to speak to him again and to avoid him in future. She later learned that the stranger’s name was Frank Fiorini, for years she was convinced that this was his real name, and then in June 1972 she saw him on television under the name Frank Sturgis; he was one of the five men arrested in the Watergate affair. But at that time he was only Frank Fiorini to her, and Fidel knew him only by that name.
Fiorini was the intermediary and messenger between Fidel’s guerrillas in the mountains and his operatives in Havana and Santiago. He smuggled arms and ammunition out of America and sold them to the guerrillas. He did not do this for political motives. It was part of a plan to gain Fidel’s trust and information about his intentions with the former President of Cuba, Carlos Pr ío, who had been removed from that post by Fulgencio Batista in a coup d’état. Probably Pr ío hoped to regain power and oust the inexperienced Fidel Castro.
After the victory of the revolution, Fiorini of course gained Fidel’s trust, but at the same time he also contacted the CIA and offered his services, especially information on the influence of communism in Cuba. He also sold his services to the mafia, which by this time was already firmly entrenched on the island. Batista allowed the American mafia to build hotels and open casinos in Cuba and protected them from police surveillance. Last but not least, the owner of the Riviera Hotel was the well-known American gangster Meyer Lansky.
After Marita’s return to the Hilton, Florioni often called her and asked her to intervene with Castro on this or that matter, as he was about to close the casinos. He did so, but the number of American tourists fell drastically as a result, so the casinos were able to continue operating after paying high taxes.
Her pregnancy progressed nicely, and soon she could no longer wear her uniform. Then began the nightmare she would remember for the rest of her life. Fidel was visiting the province of Oriente. Marita ate breakfast as usual and drank a glass of milk, but then she felt nauseous and fainted. She only vaguely remembered the wailing of the siren, then there was nothing more for her. According to some accounts, she miscarried, but not naturally, it was a forced abortion, the work of a doctor who was not a gynaecologist but a heart surgeon.
How much time passed before she woke up, she did not know. She was back at the Hilton, but not in Fidel’s apartment, but in a more modest room. She was bleeding, in terrible pain and felt very unwell. If Castro’s good friend Camilo Cienfuegos had not come to her room and called a doctor, she would certainly have bled to death. He helped her to get dressed and took her to the airport in a jeep, from where she flew to America. She was convinced that she was being stalked for her life, she trusted no one anymore.
On 28 October 1959, Camilo Cienfuegos flew from Havana to Camag üey in a small plane, but never arrived at his destination. Nor has any information ever come to light as to what happened to the plane, except that neither the wreckage nor its body was found.
The first days in New York were terrible. Marita had lost everything, she had no friends, Fidel had not called and she did not know what the future held. She cried a lot and wanted to forget the past. She was alone, her brother Joachim was in Argentina, her other brother Philip was always touring as a concert pianist and her younger sister Valeria was already married and living elsewhere. Her mother had returned from a mission in Heidelberg, but they were constantly arguing.
Life was unbearable. FBI agents were constantly knocking on her apartment door, monitoring her and asking about her time in Cuba. She had the feeling that both the agents and her own mother looked at her with contempt and silently wondered how she could have got involved with “that communist”. Doctors prescribed various pills which caused her to experience mental ups and downs and severe depression. She woke up in the middle of the night all sweaty and wondering about the meaning of her life.
She preferred to be alone, but rarely managed it, as there were almost always two FBI agents in the apartment, who introduced themselves as Frank and Frank. They were trying to “brainwash” her, and they kept telling her about the evils of communism and how important it was to destroy it in order to save the American people. They gave her pills that were supposed to be ordinary vitamins, but she noticed that they made her feel strange.
Her mother was a frequent visitor to the FBI and once introduced her to Jesuit Alex Rourke, a good acquaintance of the Kennedys. He had worked as a military espionage specialist in World War II and was an associate of the CIA and the FBI. It was he who introduced her to the various Cuban groups, some sympathetic to Fidel Castro and others not. At that time, this was still possible, as America did not yet have a very clear position on the Cuban regime. Marita told Rourke about all her meetings, so that the FBI was always up to date on what was happening on the Cuban hot dance floor.
These were not easy times for Marita and she realised that she had to distance herself from some people. In those days nobody trusted anybody and everybody suspected everybody. At the end of 1959 she received a telegram from Cuba asking her to call a number. She was convinced that her telephone in her apartment was being tapped, so she called from a public phone booth in the next street.
When she picked up the receiver, two shots rang out and shattered the glass of the telephone box. She never found out who fired the shots. Was it one of the Cuban groups or a new FBI plot? She was aware that in the whole of America she was the only person who – or so she hoped – still had unrestricted access to some people in Cuba.
At that time, travel to Cuba was not yet banned and airlines were still operating. So Alex Rourke suggested she go there to see if she could still move freely in circles close to Castro. She left first thing in the morning and returned the same day. On this short trip she had neither the strength nor the will to think about what she had to do, although her former key still gave her access to the Hilton – now the Havana Libre – and to room 2408.
Her next trip was hastily organised in December 1959, just before the propaganda campaign against Castro was to begin. At that time, her parents wrote an open letter to Castro, asking him at least to reimburse the costs of their daughter’s hospital and psychological treatment in America. After returning from Cuba, Marita was hospitalised several times for constant bleeding. A copy of the letter has been sent to many media, ambassadors, senators and other politicians.
Marita was outraged by the letter, but it was only the beginning of her campaign against Castro. Alex Rourke was now using her as a puppet, getting the four-month tabloid Confidential to publish sensationalist and fictitious stories about her life in Cuba.
The quarrels and misunderstandings with her mother continued, and she longed to be near her father, so she moved in with him in Bremenhaven. But even here she could not find peace. Instead of helping her to overcome her difficulties, her father refused to discuss them at all. “It’s OK, you made a mistake and I hope you’ve learned from it,” was all he could say to her.
Then translations of articles from Confidentiale were published in Germany, neighbours began to look at her askance and all sorts of remarks were made. Alex Rourke wrote to her asking her to return to America, and she did return to New York in September 1960. She began to take part in activities that were, to put it mildly, illegal. She drove in a convoy of cars from North America to Miami, the trunks full of weapons and ammunition, and during the journey people she did not know joined the convoy. The driving was so exhausting that the drivers had to take stimulants to avoid falling asleep at the wheel.
The mother was initially against the move, but calmed down when she got reassurance from Alex Rourke that everything was fine. After arriving in Miami, they stayed in a cheap motel next to an abandoned factory where the Cubans who were going to throw Castro out of power were living and training. They were dressed in camouflage uniforms and trained by mercenaries.
Whether she wanted to or not, Marita became a participant in the invasion of Cuba, largely funded by the CIA. Here she met again an old acquaintance, Fiorini, and years later he told her how the operation had gone. It involved many CIA operatives and agents of Batista’s former security service, teaching volunteers how to infiltrate the country and find contacts with members of the local resistance movement. There was also a special group called the “Liquidation Group”, tasked with liquidating Cuban politicians and high-ranking officers.
Marita spent most of her time in a motel, sometimes in the company of Irwin Cardin, daughter of the Cobbs Fruit Company manager, on the family estate. Although he was not in a combative mood, he wanted to be involved in the economic reconstruction of Cuba to suit American interests. She also used to visit the swampy area of the South Florida Everglades, full of snakes and alligators, where the Cubans were trained. When she asked what she was supposed to do there, as she could not imagine crawling around in the swamp with a gun and shooting at ‘barbudos’, they smiled mysteriously and said to her: ‘Each of us has a specific task’.
In a world where everyone has a job to do, only she didn’t know what hers was. It was only when she returned to New York that, for the first time, she was told in no uncertain terms that Castro had to be killed, even though, in fact, they used the word neutralise. They discussed this in the FBI building, not in one of the rooms, but, as a precaution, in the corridor.
A little later, the logistics of the operation were revealed to her. The pills used were supposedly more “suitable for a woman”. She should just put them in Castro’s food or drink and leave. She was assured that Fidel would not suffer too much.
After she recovered from her surprise, she asked Alex Rourke: “You want me to kill him?” And she got the answer, “It’s God’s will. Sometimes God does things we don’t understand. You will get absolution. You will do it in his name and for America. Because he ruined your life.”
She found the task completely absurd, pointless and illogical, but Rourke didn’t give up. There was a second, a third and a fourth meeting, during which he let her know that she would have no money worries when she returned. There was some arguing in the apartment, the parks and the cars, and finally she agreed to cooperate. It seemed to her that an almost painless death was better and more beautiful than Fidel being shot or stabbed. For she knew that the CIA would not give up and would find someone else to carry out the task.
Of course, this was not the only plan to get rid of Castro. The CIA was already planning the liquidation early in 1959, and each plan was more fantastic than the other. They were going to poison him with hallucinogenic drugs so that he would lose control of himself and be a pathetic image of the former revolutionary. They wanted to poison the microphone into which he usually bellowed his speeches of several hours, to inject his cigars with a poisonous substance that would paralyse his brain, to pour poisonous thallium salt into his boots so that his chin would fall off.
Marita was told that the poison pills would be made in Chicago and handed over to her by Johnny Rosselli, a former manager of one of Havana’s famous nightclubs. She seemingly knew him, having been introduced to him in Havana. Rosselli handed her a box containing two pills at a hotel in Miami. Frank Fiorini and Alex Rourke also attended this meeting. She summoned all her strength and said, “I don’t know if I can do this.” Fiorini replied, “You will do it for your country.”
That night she slept badly. How could she have got into this situation? Two years ago, she was a carefree girl whose only resistance was to try to evade her parents’ authority. Now her company was secret agents, rebels, mafiosi and mercenaries, for whom she carried weapons and under whose influence she turned into a murderess.
Tablets in face cream
A few days later, Fiorini and Rourke walked her to the airport in Miami and pushed a small suitcase into her hands. Before she boarded the plane, Alex Rourke came up to her and whispered, so Fiorini couldn’t hear him, “Don’t do this.” She was shaken. So someone else had a guilty conscience and moral doubts. With a Jesuit like Rourke, that was quite possible. What the man did not know was that she had already decided on the way to the airport that she would not do it, or that she was incapable of doing it.
She was convinced that her luggage would be scrutinised at Havana airport, so she hid the lethal pills in her face cream. She feared in vain, because they did not even look at her luggage. She went to the Colina Hotel, changed into her olive-green military uniform and walked to the Havana Libre Hotel, distraught.
Her heart was pounding as she walked into the lobby, waved kindly to everyone, headed to the lift, got out on the 24th floor and opened the door of room 2408 with the key. It was empty and full of cigar remnants. She decided to get rid of the pills, opened the cream and saw that the pills had almost completely melted with it and were therefore useless. Nevertheless, she threw the cream down the toilet. She breathed a sigh of relief and returned to the room. Suddenly, she heard a call: ‘Oh, Alemanita! You’re back.” Fidel was standing in front of her. “But where have you been? With those people from Miami, the counter-revolutionaries?”
“I came to ask you what happened to me the day I had the operation and what happened to our island. That’s the main reason I’m here,” she replied. Fidel tried to reassure her, but failed. He suggested that she stay in Cuba, but she knew that was impossible. But what would they say in America when she told them she had failed in her mission?
Doubting her fate, she travelled back to Miami the same evening. When she stepped off the plane, she saw Fiorini and Rourke waiting for her with a group of people in military uniforms. They didn’t believe her when she told them that the plan had gone down the drain. They started shouting and cursing at her, then took her to a safe house on the outskirts of the city.
She did not know what her fate would be. She wanted to get out of the circle of suspicious people, spies and agents and get a job as a waitress. But Fiorini prevented her from doing so, convinced that she could still be useful despite her failure. So she was employed transporting weapons, cleaning and preserving assault rifles and revolvers, and taking part in arms transports to Guatemala and Nicaragua, where the anti-Castro operations were centred. She wondered why all these secret trips and arms shipments when the US Government was supposed to be supporting all the actions against Cuba.
Of course, Fiorini and his associates did not mainly buy weapons on the open market, but stole them from US military warehouses. At that time, her job was to wait in the car while others broke in and stole weapons. She had to watch and report if unknown persons approached the warehouse. On one occasion, she was even in a small plane flying from Miami to Cuba, dropping propaganda leaflets over the settlements. She was astonished when the FBI later questioned her about this flight, as if she had no idea what was going on. Fiorini instructed her that if she was arrested during any action, she should call the telephone number he had given her and everything would be cleared up quickly.
Very often she had to compile reports on tides and currents off Cuba. But working at sea and with the sea made her happy and she knew it was better not to ask too many questions. She was one of the few women in the group and many who knew of her role in the attempted assassination of Castro wondered what else she was doing with them.
One day, while training in the Everglades swamps, someone fired and a bullet grazed her neck. She was bleeding profusely and was taken to the house of Orlando Bosch, a paediatrician by profession, who had enough medical equipment to treat minor injuries. He cleaned and bandaged her wound because they could not even think of taking her to hospital, as she would have to tell them where she had received the gunshot wound. She never found out who had fired the shot, although she was persuaded that it was an accident.
She saw strangers arriving several times, most often someone called Eduardo, who each time handed Fiorini a thick envelope. This was repeated almost thirty times at intervals, and this is how the money changed hands and kept their group running smoothly. It was only years later, when the Watergate scandal broke and Richard Nixon was removed as President of America and Fiorini was arrested, that it was discovered that the mysterious Eduardo E. Howard Hunt, Nixon’s adviser, was in charge of security. His telephone number was found in the notebook of one of the Watergate burglars. So he was the one who financed the preparations for Operation Bay of Pigs in Florida.
Sometimes military advisers also appeared in the swamp, not only to teach the young men, but also to encourage them morally. But by the beginning of 1961, the training was over and everyone was waiting and wondering, “When will it start?” The waiting was killing. If the participants had not taken so much cocaine, perhaps they would have been less nervous and less likely to go around telling people what they were going to do. But as it was, there were even rumours in the newspapers that a group of armed men was preparing to go to Cuba in the swamp.
Marita had strong doubts about the success of this venture. She had been to Cuba and had seen that the majority of the population was firmly behind Castro and could therefore not count on an internal revolt against him. She was also familiar with one of the possible landing points, the Zapata swamp, having been there with Castro, and was convinced that most of the invaders would drown there.
Bay of Pigs
The rebels’ biggest strike force was a brigade called 2506, which soon grew to 300 trained men. To transport them to the Cuban beaches, the CIA chartered five small cargo ships owned by a Cuban exile and anchored in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. The invasion fleet also included two LCI landing craft, four smaller landing craft on which five small tanks, ten trucks and a bulldozer were loaded, and aluminium outboard motor boats.
Disembarkation was scheduled for the coast of the province of Matanzas, near the Bay of Pigs. There was no harbour, but there was an airfield, Gir ó n, the occupation of which was one of the important objectives of the invasion. On 14 April 1961, during the night hours, the invasion fleet slowly slipped out of the port of Puerto Cabezas and headed towards the Bay of Pigs. In the early hours of 15 April, eight B-26 aircraft, crewed by Cuban émigrés, flew towards Cuba and attacked Cuban airfields at 6am. By midday, Castro was without half of his planes.
Meanwhile, the invasion force of 1 500 men approached the Cuban coast with fatal delays and began to disembark the rebels at the three ends of the Bay of Pigs. Problems arose when the bulk of the invasion troops were about to disembark near Girón. Small boats hit the rocks at full speed and sank, drowning several men. The surprise was over. As the landing boats began to approach the shore, Castro’s militiamen were already firing cannon at them, as the local radio station had already sounded the alarm and fresh Castro troops began to arrive on the scene. One landing ship immediately ran aground close to the coast.
The disembarkation of the tanks was also slow, as the first thing to do was to find out where there were no coral reefs. Soon there were many wounded on the beach, but the doctors could not help them as all the medicines were left on the stranded ship. Nevertheless, all the men were landed on the shore and they managed to drive all the militiamen away from the Girón airfield. Theoretically, Brigade 2506 had every chance of using the airfield operationally. On 17 April, five rebel planes dropped heavy equipment and paratroopers, who immediately occupied the two main roads where Castro could bring in reinforcements. Only one road remained open.
Then Castro’s planes flew in and badly damaged the second landing ship, which was carrying 200 barrels of aviation fuel. The ship was blown up by three powerful explosions. It was also carrying a truck with the main communication equipment, which was the only direct link to the invasion squadron. It was the lack of communication that prevented the invasion leaders from assessing what was happening on the various parts of the beach.
Thirty kilometres off the Cuban coast, the US aircraft carrier Essex was anchored, watching helplessly as it was forbidden to intervene. Clearly, the invasion force was running out of steam. The US Navy and Air Force were already at maximum alert in their home bases, just waiting for the command to intervene. But the command came from nowhere.
Meanwhile, the remaining invasion ships have already sailed from Cuban waters, to return the next night with ammunition supplies, which the rebels are already running low on. But they did not return, either because the crews refused to sail near the battlefields or because they demanded the protection of US aircraft.
Meanwhile, Castro’s tanks and 2 100 militiamen, soldiers and police were approaching the Bay of Pigs. In the face of this superiority, the rebel units began to retreat slowly and to gather near Girón airport. The troops gathered around Brigade 2506 somehow survived 18 April, despite the strong attacks. But the next day the bridgehead fell.
Alfredo Duran, a young member of Brigade 2506, later bitterly recalled: ‘On the evening of 17 April, we landed on the coast full of hope. We were sure that we would win or die. We never thought that we would lose and stay alive.”
It took several weeks before the militia and the army managed to half the remnants of the invading troops. The most tragic fate was suffered by 20 soldiers of the brigade who boarded a large boat and tried to make their way to the Mexican Yucatan peninsula. Food and water were scarce and they were drifting towards the centre of the Gulf of Mexico. They began to die of hunger and thirst. In utter desperation, they became cannibals, eating the flesh of their dead comrades. After three weeks of torment, they were rescued by a ship. The survivors agreed not to tell anyone that they had become cannibals. They kept their promise for decades, until one of them told the story to a journalist. He blamed the US government and the CIA for letting them down: “They dumped us on the shore like a bunch of garbage and left us there to die.”
Venezuelan dictator
Fiorini and his group were not directly involved in the invasion, and Marita only knew as much about it as those better informed told her. Her job was still to collect donations from Cuban emigrants. In May 1961, Fiorini sent her to a villa in the suburbs of Miami Beach, where a donor, a “retired general”, was supposed to have handed her a sack of money at a party. He ordered her to leave the party as soon as she received it.
The security guards let her in and she immediately saw that this was the home of wealth. The well-kept palm trees, the soaked green grass and the many Mercedes with leather seats in the car park were proof that the “General” was living well. She was taken to a room and told to wait. Finally, the ‘general’ appeared and introduced himself as Marcos. He was small in stature, already stooped and with thinning hair, but a friendly smile. To her warnings that she was in a hurry, that she had only come to get money and that they were waiting for her outside, he just replied kindly: “Let them wait.”
When she finally got the bag with half a million dollars in cash and handed it to Fiorini, who was waiting for her in the car, she asked him who this general was. He replied, “We live off him. You have just met another dictator.”
But this was not her last meeting with the former President of Venezuela, the self-proclaimed General Marcos Pérez Jiménez. He invited her to lunch on several occasions, gave her gold bracelets and told her about the beautiful Venezuela where he was supposed to be building hospitals, schools and kindergartens for the poor and, in general, making sure that its people loved him. Of course, he forgot to mention that he ruled the country with an iron hand until 1958 and that he was known for his brutality and corruption. He was now in exile in Florida, awaiting a court decision on extradition, as he was awaiting trial in his homeland for four political murders and the embezzlement of millions of dollars.
When Marita told him she was pregnant, he was overjoyed and promised to take care of her and the baby. He rented her an apartment and visited her several times a week. When she told her mother about the pregnancy, she started shouting at her for being a dependent woman. Because of problems with her first pregnancy, she decided to give birth in New York and when she told Marcos after the birth that she had given birth to a daughter, he exclaimed in frustration: “Oh, not again!”. He and his wife already had four daughters.
Despite this, he paid all her hospital bills and called her every day. She decided to return to Miami. The story ended as all stories with dictators usually end. Marcos soon found himself in prison and an American court decided to extradite him to Venezuela. Accompanied by a bunch of detectives and with his hands cuffed, he was put on a plane to Caracas. Marita and her daughter Monica were once again alone, destitute and without a future.
Who should he turn to now? Fiorini was the one who helped her, and she found herself back in the circle of Cuban emigrants. After the Bay of Pigs disaster, they began to hate President Kennedy instead of Castro and to blame him for not wanting to help them at that time. But there was not enough work for Fiorini, so she took a job with a textbook publisher. She did not last long in that job and returned to New York. She was without a regular income, but she managed to support herself.
She loved to have fun and was known as the perfect “party girl”. In 1977, she was deeply saddened by the death of her mother, who, despite all her misunderstandings, had always stood by her. She married a few years later and soon divorced after the birth of her child. It was difficult for her to be alone with two children, without a proper education and without a job, so she thought of asking Fidel Castro for help. She sent letters to the Cuban mission to the United Nations asking for help, but received no reply.
In the summer of 1979, she learned that Castro was coming to New York to address the UN General Assembly. She naively thought that she would be able to meet him there. But a few days before his arrival, two CIA officers knocked on her door and ordered her to leave New York within three hours. The CIA wanted to avoid any possible complications. She protested, claiming that she had no money to go anywhere, and they gave her some, but not much. Seeing that there was no point in protesting, she picked up the child and drove the car to Canada. A car with two CIA officers followed close on her heels.
In Montreal, she went to the Cuban embassy and said she wanted to go to Cuba with her two children. They explained that she had to go to the Czechoslovak embassy in Washington, which represented Cuban interests, and apply for a visa. When she left the amabassade, two CIA agents approached her and started threatening to arrest her if she continued to force her way to Cuba.
She did not give up and finally got her Cuban entry visa. In fact, US President Jimmy Carter had already lifted the ban on travel to Cuba in 1977, so on 1 September 1981 she boarded a plane and flew to Havana. Immediately after landing, two militiamen approached her, pushed her into a car and took her to a hotel. There, they locked her in a room and placed a guard in front of her, who watched over her day and night.
The next day, without a word, they took her back to the airport and put her on a flight to Miami. Her single-entry visa was thus used up. She then lived in Miami for a while, got a job, got married again and, in the end, stayed on her own. She moved to New York and lived with her dog, cat and tortoise in the seedy borough of Queens. She had no regular income, but sometimes she got some money for interviews and, with the help of a journalist, she wrote her biography, which sold like a cheap edition of a pocket book. She fell more and more into depression, but never considered taking her own life. “It is easy to die”, she used to say, “the real challenge is to live”.
