Jennifer Lawrence has signed on to play the complex character Marita Lorenz in a “true story” that is sure to have a tough time wrestling with the truth(s). Lorenz lived an extraordinary life, topped perhaps only by some of her extraordinary claims.
The former lover of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, she also survived imprisonment in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Nazi Germany as a child. She was reportedly asked by the US government to assassinate Castro and testified before Congress about the plot to kill JFK, which she claimed intimate knowledge of. She was called a “curvy, black-haired American Mata Hari,” by the NY Daily News. And she wrote her own book, telling her story: Marita: One Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Love and Espionage from Castro to Kennedy
- On Fidel Castro: “He held my face in his hands and kissed me–my first kiss. ‘Be with me,’ he whispered.”
- Castro told her: “I’ll make you a queen of Cuba.”
- “When Fidel talks to you, he talks to you very close. He looks right in your eye. We had drinks and sloppy joes. He immediately made me feel nervous.”
- He didn’t let me completely undress. He was the sweetest, tenderest. I guess nobody ever forgets their first lover.”
- What she did with the pills she was supposed to kill Castro with: “I fished them out [of a jar of cold cream] and flushed them down the bidet.”
- Later: “I started running guns again from Miami, New Orleans, and the Keys to Guatamela.”
- And still later, on seeing Castro again: “Fidel. Be glad it was me and not somebody else, because you would have been dead.”
