After Isabel left, he stopped washing. His clothes were no longer kept clean and neat. He did not go out. All he did all day was to aim his favourite rifle at the TV antenna across the way.
Castro wrote to Mirta, asking her to let him see sevenyear-old Fidelito. He promised to return him to her custody within two weeks, but he had no intention of doing that. In a letter to the Mexican newspapers he said that he could not return Fidelito “into the hands of my most ferocious enemies and detractors, who… outraged my home and sacrificed it to the bloody tyranny which they serve”. When Castro and his men set off on their antiquated wooden yacht, the Granma, on their historic mission to liberate Cuba, Mirta came to Mexico and snatched Fidelito back.
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.