Fidel Castro Ex and former CIA who aborted their love child mourns the death of her 'first love' despite once attempting to assassinate him but backing out and having sex with him instead

While some Cubans are mourning the death of their country's former president, for one German American woman, the passing of Fidel Castro was much more personal. 

Marita Lorenz, who met Castro in 1959 when she was just 19, says she and the communist dictator had a torrid love affair, which led to the birth of his love child before she tried to carry out an assassination plot against him.

Fidel, who was a notorious womanizer, once told journalist Ann Louise Bardach that he had 'almost a tribe' of children. 

But Lorenz, who is now in her 70s and lives in Queens, New York, was still shocked by the news that her first love had died, her son Mark Lorenz said.

'She's in a bit of shock, just taking it all in,' Mark told the New York Daily News.  

Her incredible story began in February 1959, when her father's cruise ship, the MS Berlin dropped anchor in Havana harbor.

A launch boat crammed with uniformed men hurtled towards them, and Castro, being the tallest among them, caught Lorenz's eye.  

'He was 33, with sparkling eyes,' she remembers, speaking in an interview recorded for History Channel documentary, CIA Declassified. 'And that was it. I was lost in love.'

On her return to New York a few days later, she found herself bombarded with calls and invitations to return to Cuba from the dictator.

She obliged and, within days, was installed in Castro's penthouse apartment on the 74th floor of the Havana Hilton.

Two months later, she discovered - to her delight - that she was pregnant. But her happiness wasn't to last.