Sex Lives of the Great Dictators (18 page)

In December 1956, Castro landed his eighty-two-man expeditionary force on Cuba. They were annihilated in their first attack. The few survivors scattered and Castro took refuge in the Sierra Maestra. From there he got word to Nati, asking her to join him in the mountains.

She, too, could become the "First Lady of the Cuban Revolution". She refused, saying that she could not leave their baby.

One woman who did join him was Celia Sanchez. She was the daughter of a doctor from Manzanillo who had helped coordinate the underground movement in eastern Cuba. She came to the Sierra Maestra to organize the camp and control the millions of dollars the guerrillas had collected in "revolutionary taxes". She also shared Castro's bed. Their letters are full of affection though none of the passion that he displayed in his correspondence with Nati. Their time in the Sierra Maestra together was the beginning of a relationship that lasted for twenty years. After the revolution, she took the apartment below his in Havana, but Castro would be found, as often as not, sprawled out on her bed. If anyone deserves to be called

"First Lady of the Cuban Revolution", it is Celia Sanchez.

After two years in the mountains and a ceaseless guerrilla campaign, Castro successfully launched a full-scale offensive against Batista's police state. He celebrated by having an affair with Gloria Gaitan, known as "the Dark Rose of Bogota". She was the beautiful daughter of the murdered Bolivian revolutionary leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Castro had first met her in Bogota in 1948. The affair continued for several years, even though she was married to a university professor. One day Castro asked: "What do you do in bed with this Greek philosopher who is your husband?"

"He is a very intelligent man," she replied.

"Obviously, but if Karl Marx were a woman, I would not marry him."

When Castro came to power, Nati's husband left for exile in the United States. Castro would visit Nati and as he now openly admitted - his daughter in their mansion, or stay with them in their beach house in Varadero. He gave Nati a number of government jobs and a veteran's pension. When the relationship cooled, he sent mother and daughter to Paris to work in the Cuban embassy there. They returned two years later.

Castro continued seeing Alina, though they began to fall out. She married four times and he did not approve of her choice of husbands. Alina wanted to leave Cuba and pursue a career elsewhere, but the authorities would not give her an exit visa.

In power, Castro also made things difficult for Mirta, who had married a Spaniard, Emilio Nufiez. One night in Varadero, he came across them eating in a steakhouse. He ordered the owner to throw them out. He, bravely, refused. Soon after, Mirta and her second husband left to live in Madrid. Thirty years later, there are still some in the Castro family who maintain that Mirta was the only woman he ever really loved.

Soon after the revolution, Castro met a young German woman called Marita Lorenz. She was seventeen and had black hair and green eyes. They met when the
M.S. Berlin
, the ship her father captained, pulled into Havana harbour while Castro was on board the Granma which he was renovating. Castro, always on the look-out for chances to win over foreigners, contacted the
Berlin
. Marita's father invited him on board for dinner.

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