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Pros: A great scenario, a multitude of fascinating modern historical characters, perhaps an important subject.

Cons: Unimaginatively made. Too many contradictions in Marita Lorenz's story. Glaring gaps. Little on Kennedy's Assassination.

The Bottom Line: Marita Lorenz's romantic and spy adventures are worth a look. The subject deserved more care than DEAR FIDEL gave it. See my next review for further facts and documentation.

***** 

When I saw DEAR FIDEL: MARITA'S STORY (Lieber Fidel: Maritas Geschichte, 2000), about a year ago, its bizarre heroine had just died, and as I watched Oliver Stone's COMANDANTE at San Francisco International Film Festival last month, I was reminded of DEAR FIDEL's Spy Opera qualities. During Stone's questioning, and throughout his controversial new HBO (banned) documentary on Fidel Castro (seen by fewer than 3000 people in this country, so far), the Dictator side-stepped inquiries about his relationships with women. Certainly, there was no acknowledgment of Marita Lorenz.

It's all old history anyway, fit to be placed with the multitude of Kennedy Assassination theories. We have "moved on," as they like to say in Washington. If Marita's story, or any of those other theories, is valid, then most of the participants, like Marita, are dead; or very old men, like Fidel Castro.

Which would drive home rather painfully the illegitimacy of American Government over the last 40 years. The benefactors of the conspiracy, or their successors, may be in power, but, realistically, there is not very much you or I can do about it now. [Perhaps the hedonistic, selfish, joyfully ignorant attitudes of the American majority toward their history and ideals, past and present, reflect in some small part today that fact, at a most deeply subconscious level.] If, to the contrary, Marita's story is mostly false, and the Assassination theories fantasy, then all this stuff in DEAR FIDEL has been re-hashed too many times. It is no longer intriguing. 

And research would indicate, perhaps either way, Marita can be an unreliable narrator. 

And yet? And yet . . . the film contains a tale worthy of a Spy Epic! 

Consider a scenario, true or fictional, which involves the following characters and their connections: 

THE FAMILY: a beautiful German ingenue (Marita Lorenz) lured by a handsome 32 year-old dictator (Fidel Castro) into an affair that led to a career as a spy/soldier/informant for the CIA, FBI, Mossad and the Mob; her Father (Captain Heinrich F. Lorenz), respected commander of the renowned pre-World War II Trans-Atlantic ocean liner, "Bremen IV," who may have become a double agent; her Mother (Alice J. Lofland Lorenz), American Actress and possible spy, who survived imprisonment at Bergen-Belsen with little Marita, cousin of Senator, later Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr -- Mom gives documentary evidence, three years before the crime, of dealing with a recently revealed figure in the Kennedy Assassination; a loyal brother (Joachim or Joe Lorenz) who lost a future in American Diplomacy because of Marita's adventures; Marita's bitter daughter (Monica Jimenez Perez) by a Venezuelan dictator, one of her CIA contacts; Marita's loving son (Mark), who enjoyed growing up a young spy. 

THE GANG: a gunrunner, guerilla, mob-soldier, CIA Agent (Frank Sturgis), befriender of Marita, who surfaced in half a dozen conspiracies, most notably Watergate; a soldier of fortune (Gerry Hemming), who incorporated Marita into guerilla forces for the CIA, as part of Operation Mongoose, in the Florida Everglades; an ex-FBI and CIA official (Robert "Bob" Maheu), who became the righthand man of Howard Hughes, and brought the Mob together with the CIA in a plot to kill Castro in which Marita may have figured; Mob figures (Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli) who are alleged to have arranged bringing poison capsules to Marita. 

PERIPHERAL CHARACTERS: a local mobster (Ed Levi) who kept Marita in relative comfort for several years; a Castro bodyguard (Jesus Pelletier), who went to jail for a decade after guarding Marita, a man she wishes to see in Cuba. 

It's material for high drama, or an important expose, possibly several of them! 

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And so, what kind of documentary does German Director Wilfried Huismann make of these yeasty characters, this beckoning, potent scenario? Either way you look at it, not as much as he might have. Huismann, an experienced documentarian, was attracted to the project because of its German angle; because he and Marita both come from Bremen, and he had heard from old German sailors of the Norddeutscher Lloyd Line about the legend of the great Captain Lorenz's beautiful, willful 19 year-old daughter and the World-famous Revolutionary. But when he picked up Marita's 1993 Autobiography, Marita: One Woman's Story of Love and Espionage from Castro to Kennedy (extensively revised since her death, I understand), he became suspicious that this Mata Hari might turn out to be fabulist, a grifter or a nut case. A story of such vast melodramatic proportions, he thought, would not be an easy sell to some hardheaded German production head for television films (Huismann's main interest). 

On the one hand, if it were all true, the facts might be hard to prove, and people still might not

believe it anyway. On the other, if it were a crock of sensational blether from a calculating femme fatale, everyone would be embarrassed with the result, and the only one satisfied would be Marita, for her ego gratification and the few bucks she might share with her family and old connections. 

But, finding himself visiting New York in 1998, Writer/Director Huismann looked Marita up. What he found was not pretty. She lived in a cramped apartment, "crammed full of discarded furniture," at times with her faithful 28 year-old Son, Mark. Then 58, Marita was overweight, inclined to bad temper, hampered by an injured hip, swollen with steroid painkillers which gave little relief -- no money for an operation -- living on donuts from a local deli. And amid the clutter, in a silver frame, Huismann saw a photograph of a striking young woman rapt in the spell of a bearded guerilla chieftain, who, with cigar in mouth, looked to be explaining to her the World he was shaking up at that long ago moment. On the strength of the picture, Huismann sat down, and as they spoke comfortably together in their North German dialect, she told him her whole life story in six hours, non-stop. He was alternately enthralled by her joyful adventures, her first passions, and appalled by the matter-of-fact callousness with which she related crimes, and proposed crimes, in which she said she had taken part. 

In the two years of shooting which ensued, Marita evidently proved as difficult, and occasionally as contradictory, as she had been that first day in her apartment. Huismann's photographer, Reini Gossmann, whenever Marita threatened be too much for them, told his boss: "The film can only turn out well if we love the protagonist." Director Huismann says that they did, but I am not convinced. 

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The 90 minute documentary, in German, Spanish and English, with English subtitles, begins in that New York apartment. Marita, plump and dark haired (with ruddy highlights), is writing a letter to the man with whom she was infatuated, a famous dictator she has not seen personally in over 45 years. She wonders if he remembers her, if he would see her if she returned to Cuba now: "Dear Fidel . . . 

We flash back, and the mix of Marita, the Director and other voices speak over a montage of visuals: A young girl with a ribbon in her hair (Marita); a strong looking bear of a man in a white uniform (Captain Lorenz); Marita in home movies, happy at sea with her Father; the German M.S. Berlin entering Havana Harbor in 1959: Castro coming aboard from a lighter with his entourage of barbudos; the lovely Marita laughing with her tall, fit, bearded 32 year-old hero. In the non-linear development of DEAR FIDEL, Marita limps around her apartment and tells us, rather sketchily, about her childhood, going to Bergen-Belsen with her American mother at age 5, of the childhood rape by an American soldier, who came to their home while her Mother was working for the U.S. Army. 

Joe Lorenz, her brother, a Republican factotum in New York State, is inserted to inform us, in wonderment, a (very) little of his connection to her adventures and travails. He describes how, after his diplomatic career went south and he needed a job, Marita's Mob friend, Ed Levi, employed him as a guard for "a mafia graveyard" in New Jersey. With a shake of his head, he remarks that he is amazed his sister is still alive. 

Marita continues how, several weeks after their meeting in Havana Harbor, Castro sent plane fare to her in New York, and how, without informing her mother, nor her father back in Bremen, she left secretly for Cuba. The two were in love for several glorious months; she returned with him on his triumphal entrance into New York City, and went back to Cuba afterward ("under guard," her mother wrote); but when she became pregnant, she wanted to go home again to Mama. Perhaps, understandably, Castro did not want to let his young mistress out of the country, carrying his possible heir, putting herself in the power of the United States, which was already taking steps to crush his revolution. After several more months of escape attempts, she was forced to abort the child by a team that came to the hotel suite where she was imprisoned. Then, Frank Fiorini Sturgis, multi-tasking intelligence agent, whom she had met in his capacity of overseer for the Cuban gambling spots, rolled to the rescue. [Cue a photo of Frank Sturgis and Castro under an Havana Casino Wheel of Fortune.] Frank and others got her home, aided possibly by Mom's Confidential Magazine story: "Castro Raped My Daughter!" 

[Not much is made of Alice J. Lorenz's 1960 article, just a glance at the front cover of Confidential, precursor of the Inquirer and other supermarket tabloids, but the piece remains quite extraordinary by invoking, as DEAR FIDEL does not, the claim that Marita was related to Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (grandson of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who used Cuba as an excuse for America's acquisition of the Philippines). In 1960, a powerful politician in the Republican Party, the Junior Lodge was President Dwight Eisenhower's Ambassador to the UN (wrestling with the new problem of Castro's Cuba), soon to be Richard Nixon's running mate on the Republican Ticket against John F. Kennedy. Three years later, he would be President Kennedy's Ambassador to Vietnam, standing by as the Diem Brothers were assassinated, a few weeks before Kennedy himself was murdered. More extraordinary yet, Mrs. Lorenz writes of various "Castro agents" she had to deal with in rescuing her daughter. One, June Cobb, was identified, through Freedom of Information Act releases years later, in the 1980's, as a CIA agent, who made reports on Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in Mexico City just before Kennedy's Assassination. Did I not say Marita's story might encompass a spy epic?] 

Frank Sturgis now comes on camera, looking remarkably youthful for a man 74, leaving the impression that some of the clips in DEAR FIDEL were shot for some other production, years ago. A familiar face to many because he was one of the Watergate Plumbers, Sturgis volunteers an endorsement of Marita, but we would like to know -- did he really supply arms to Castro's rebels in the Sierra Maestra? Did he fight shoulder to shoulder with Fidel Castro against Batista's forces? Is that why he was made a Captain by Castro in charge of the "Cuban Air Force Secret Service"? How come he also seemed to have run a couple of Casinos for Organized Crime? Was that why Castro supposedly enlisted him to supervise the nationalization of them all? Our hot-breathed puzzlement is ignored. Sturgis does suggest that he and his colleagues (Maheu, Giancana, and Roselli) were pretty p*ssed-off when Marita failed in her mission to assassinate Castro. 

Marita explains that she carried the poison capsules in a jar of cold cream. She and Castro had an impassioned session. He fell asleep. She went into the bathroom to retrieve the poison pills but they had melted, ironically, into the vanishing cream. Marita looked at him snoring on the bed. "The hell with it," she reflected. "Let history take its course." 

Brigade Leader Gerry Hemming, also lean and ready for a man around 70, is spliced in to substantiate that he escorted Marita to the Hotel Libre for that tryst and waited downstairs for word. "Instead of poisoning, Fidel, she slept with him!" he erupts. He didn't trust her for such assassination missions after that. (But she was quite duty-worthy, in his opinion, to be one of the few women among the 4000 member Operation Mongoose force making terror raids on Cuba.)

Later, in a reference to Mobster Levi(?), he suggests that she had, without knowing it, been recruited by the Israeli secret service, and had been a Mossad source of information in later years. He does not tell us what kind of information, nor does he insist that Marita was very bright, but she obviously became rather savvy. 

None of that prevented Marita, she tells us, sometimes in English, sometimes in German, with a smattering of Spanish thrown in, from flying propaganda leaflets over Havana (but destroying her serious purpose, in Hemming's eyes, I'm sure), writing, "Fidel, I love you," on a few of them. And she was not prevented from engaging in fire fights with rival guerilla groups in the Florida swamps. [Cue the photo of Marita, in toreador pants and cashmere sweater, aiming a Browning automatic pistol in the prescribed sitting position.] Indeed, she mentions being abandoned there, at one point!

[She begins to resemble Susan Orlean in The Orchid Thief, or her movie counterpart, Meryl Streep in ADAPTATION. Streep in a black wig would make a great Marita Lorenz!] Nor, most affectingly, was she nixed from being an attractive incentive to "Iron Man" Marcos Perez Jimenez, former Dictator of Venezuela, in providing funds for terror raids on Cuban railroads and cane fields. 

We see snapshots of a pudgy, balding man smiling and flexing his muscles. A couple of the pictures show Marita sitting with Perez Jimenez, sipping tall cocktails at a cabana table, presumably in Miami. 

Oops! The Iron Man's daughter by her, Monica Mercedes Perez Jimenez, is on the spot. Intense-eyed, thin faced, a sweatband around her dark hair, Monica tells us about Mom while doing kick-boxing practice. Each lightning punctilio seems to explode figuratively in the pit of her Mother's stomach. She would have liked a mother and father who played with her, but she had to content herself with "how to put guns together and make Molotov cocktails" at that listening post near the UN, and later procuring weapons for Mom in their slummy New York apartment. When Stunt Woman Monica adjusts her wrist braces and shadow boxes hand weights in front of a mirror, you see a lot of hurt in this handsome woman's face. 

But after all, if we can believe her, Marita has some memories herself that she really, really, really would rather keep to herself. The most important being that night in Miami, late November 1963, when Eduardo Hamilton (Code Name for E. Howard Hunt of later Watergate infamy) gave an envelope of money to Frank Sturgis, Hemmings, and some bitter Cuban veterans of Brigade 2506 they were hung out with. It was enough for them to pile into two cars, one loaded with high powered sniper rifles, and head for Dallas, Texas. [We see a murky reenactment of their walking out of a cottage in the dark toward some cars.] Marita says that after Eduardo delivered a second, really large sum of money, on November 21, 1963, to their motel room in Dallas, and a slimy character named Jack Ruby turned up, she became disturbed over what they might be getting themselves into down there, and Frank had her flown back to Florida that night. 

[E. Howard Hunt sued a right-wing conspiracy-oriented group, The Liberty Lobby, for $12,000,000, in 1981, when they wrote that he was in Dallas at the time of the Assassination. He collected $650,000, but Lawyer Mark Lane, original guru of all Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theories, managed to have the case re-tried in 1985. For what it's worth, in that civil action, Marita Lorenz testified under oath to essentially the story above. She appears to have been a good witness. Lane not only won the case, but rung from another witness, former CIA Western Hemisphere Chief David Atlee Phillips, that both he and Hunt were in Mexico City when Oswald was there, prior to the Assassination. Hunt filed for bankruptcy in 1995.] 

Marita's son, Mark Yurasits Lorenz, whose father was her FBI partner in surveillance of Russian and Eastern European diplomats and visitors staying at their condos, makes an entrance to Morita's apartment. A good-looking, long haired, bearded young man, Mark takes care of his Mother, who finds it increasingly difficult to get around. She would like to go to Cuba one more time, hence the letter to Fidel. Mark enjoyed his spy work as a boy, he tells us, and jokes that "I was the youngest contracted FBI agent of all time." He is raring to accompany his Mother to Havana. 

Most of the last half of the film is shot in Cuba. Classic 18th and 19th Century Spanish streets, street musicians, and photos punctuate Marita's sentimental journey. [There are a number of documentaries on the market about men and women re-visiting their youth in Cuba.] She shows Mark the old places, the Harbor, La Plaza de la Revolution, and Castro's old headquarters at the Havana Hilton. She walks around the hotel room at the Libre where last she says she saw him, when she was a young beauty on her way to becoming a femme fatale agent-of-all-trades. How does former chief Castro bodyguard, enabler, friend and jailer of Marita, now a Dissident, Jesus Yanez Pelletier greet her? Does Castro turn up to welcome her at the dock? Does he make a furtive entrance to the old love nest in the Hotel Libre? 

You'll have to see Lieber Fidel: Maritas Geschichte, or make an appointment with me [See my next review] to check my super-secret files. 

The problem with any story that touches on the Kennedy Assassination is that there are hundreds of books and tapes, each one claiming to have the truth. They lead to madness. Did Lee Harvey Oswald shoot President Kennedy, all by himself? It is very unlikely. Thirty years ago, none of the researchers named the actual conspirators, never the shooters. Today, quite a few writers and film makers do that. People like the LaFontaines ("Oswald Talked"), for instance. But each such work is immediately torn apart and atomized by an alternate universe of conspiracy theory critics. Does any one investigative piece on the crime encompass the entire truth? Impossible. Aside from the charlatans and those simply mistaken, there are many works which have part of the truth, perhaps a lot of it. However, by now, there are many contrary threads, some of them disinformation by any one of a dozen entities, from Kennedy haters to the Mob to elements of the U.S. Establisment, who grind endlessly their exceedingly partisan axes. 

Do I believe DEAR FIDEL: MARITA'S STORY? 

No, it is likely that Sturgis and Hemming were ready, perhaps ordered to embroider and cash in on the documentary, but there are obviously parts of it which are true. And even in the self-serving details, the hyperbole, the sentimental wish-fulfillment, there are occasional flashes of curious fact that draw an old hand back toward the madness. Like Marita's Momma discussing June Cobb in a publication three years before JFK's Assassination -- in Confidential, of all places. [A publication for which, at one time, I was an employee of sorts]. Momma has June Cobb posing(?) as a Castro agent, but it was another ten years before Ms. Cobb surfaced as a CIA asset, keeping tabs on Oswald in Mexico, in the Fall of 1963. That one connection, which can't be phony, is really ignored by Writer/Director Huismann, but it is there for anyone with a little knowledge of the time, and the energy to research it. 

But, no matter, think of it: Prescott Bush, German Liners, Nazi agents, American counter-agents, Castro lovefests, Latin Dictators, the Mob, the CIA, the FBI, Castro Assassination Attempts, the Kennedy Assassination, The Cold War, Watergate, the Mossad, Howard Hughes, Iran-Contra, perhaps 911, the Cuban Dissidents. It might even lead to George W. Bush, maybe the coming Invasion of Cuba (Operation Havana Spring?) -- Who can say? Plus lots of romance, sex, violence and action! 

In the other view, possibly it's all a crock! 

Hey, the Story of Marita Lorenz might still be the scenario for a GODFATHER Trilogy of Spy Stories! One segment to be released every Halloween. 

A gross of half a billion World-wide. 

[Cue the Blue Screen.] 

Where is that great young screenwriter who would take on such a task? I beseech you.