Nikolay Bakharev's Photos in New Museum's Ostalgia' Show

30.4.
2018 Nikolay Bakharev's Photos in New Museum’s ‘Ostalgia’ Show
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ERTAINMENT WORLD NEWS HALF FULL ARTS AND CULTURE U.S. NEWS TECH HUNT FOR THE CURE SCIENCE SC
NIKOLAY BAKHAREV
Nikolay Bakharev's Photos in New Museum’s ‘Ostalgia’

Show
The New Museum’s ‘Ostalgia’ show gives you Russians in swimsuits.
07.29.11 4:53 PM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nikolay-bakharevs-photos-in-new-museums-ostalgia-show 1/22
30.4.2018 Nikolay Bakharev's Photos in New Museum’s ‘Ostalgia’ Show
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NIKOLAY BAKHAREV
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COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW
No. 63, From the Relationship series, 1991-'93 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in. x 11 3/8 in. (29 x 29 cm.)
Was there anything that wasn’t forbidden in the Soviet Union? In the 1970s, when Nikolay Bakharev started
taking his gorgeous, moving portraits of Russians relaxing in swimsuits, it was against the rules to circulate
any images with bare flesh in them. And, of course, it was illegal to take and sell them for money, as Bakharev
did, since that was private enterprise. Even stripping down at all was tightly controlled: “The beach was the
only place where people were allowed to bare their bodies without provoking a negative reaction from the
Soviet society at the time,” said Bakharev.
His swimsuit shots are on display in Ostalgia, an exhibition of art made behind the old Iron Curtain, and in
the countries that came out from behind it after 1989. It is now filling all five stories of the New Museum in
New York. Like lots of the art in Ostalgia, Bakharev’s pictures gain a special poignancy and power because
they weren’t even supposed to exist. To see other works from Ostalgia, visit Blake Gopnik's The Daily Pic.
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No. 16, From the Relationship series, 1981 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in. x 11 3/8 in. (29 x 29 cm.)
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No. 66, From the Type series, 1980-2000 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in. x 11 3/8 in. (29 x 29 cm.)
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No. 116, from the Relationship series, 2004 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in (29 x 29 cm) Courtesy the
artist and Gallery.Photographer.ru, Moscow
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No. 85, from the Relationship series, 1994–97 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in (29 x 29 cm)
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No. 66, From the Relationship series, 1993 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in (29 x 29 cm)
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No. 82, From the Relationship series, 1994-97 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in (29 x 29 cm)
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No. 72, From the Relationship series, 1995 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in (29 x 29 cm)
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No. 7, from the Relationship series, 1985 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in (29 x 29 cm)
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No. 115, from the Type series, 1980–2000 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in (29 x 29 cm)
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No. 22, From the Relationship series, 1984-86 Gelatin silver print 11 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in (29 x 29 cm
CUBA
The Search for Fidel Castro’s Love Child

The story of Marita Lorenz and her purported child with Fidel (and
her subsequent assassination attempt) has captivated writers and
directors. Now her American son wants the truth.
JUSTIN ROHRLICH 04.28.18 10:54 PM ET
On the evening of Feb. 27, 1959, less than eight weeks after Cuban dictator Fulgencio
Batista was forced from power, the German passenger liner MS Berlin docked in Havana
Harbor. Marita Lorenz, the 19-year-old daughter of the ship’s captain, was aboard, having
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joined her father on the cruise.
The next day, while many of the passengers were sightseeing on shore, two launches filled
with armed, bearded men in military uniform pulled alongside the Berlin. Marita was
instantly drawn to the tallest member of the group, who wore what Marita described as a
“wicked and seductive smile.” It was Fidel Castro.
Marita gave a tour of the ship to Castro, who had been sworn in as Cuba’s new leader 11
days earlier. She took him to the boiler room first, then the kitchen, then up through
steerage to her stateroom in first class. Castro pushed Marita inside and gave Marita her
first “real” kiss.
After dinner, the Berlin set sail for New York. Marita disembarked in Manhattan, where
she would be living with her brother Joachim, a student at Columbia University. A few
days after she arrived, Castro called Marita—she had given him Joachim’s home number
on a matchbox before parting ways—and said he was sending a plane to fly her back to
Cuba. A jeep picked Marita up at the other end and drove her to the Havana Hilton, which
Castro had repurposed as his base of operations.
“I used to see her all the time, she lived up on the 24th floor,” Don Soldini, a Staten Island,
New York, native who fought for Castro during the Cuban Revolution, told The Daily
Beast. “I remember when she first came in, she was nuts about Fidel. She was the apple of
his eye for a while; Fidel was smitten by her. But he was smitten by a lot of broads, he had
so many broads. Jesus, did he have broads.”
When Marita discovered she was pregnant, there was little doubt who the father was. In
October 1959, at seven months along, Marita says she was given a glass of drugged milk
and blacked out. When she woke up in a local doctor’s office, the baby was nowhere to be
found. Various stories have been floated over the years about what happened next, but
none have been definitively confirmed: Either the fetus was aborted, Marita suffered a
miscarriage, or she gave birth to a healthy baby boy named Andre.
But Marita, now 78 and living in a nursing home in Queens, New York, believes Andre
could be alive. “Two CIA agents in Guatemala told me that they knew of Andre,” she told
The Daily Beast. “They were adamant that he was my son and that he had lived.
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President Activist
“They said he’s tall, he has Fidel’s features, and he’s a doctor,” said Marita. “The last place
I know he was was at the Karl Marx Hospital in Nicaragua [since renamed Hospital
Alemán Nicaragüense]; he flew in from Cuba periodically to help with the children. I went
there in the late-1980s to track him down, but I missed him. That’s the last I heard of
him.”
It’s a Cold War-era mystery that is still very current for Mark Lorenz, born 10 years later
to Marita and Manhattan building manager and undercover FBI operative Louis Yurasits.
“I’m searching for my brother, whose father would have been Fidel Castro,” Mark told The
Daily Beast. “Nobody has attempted to seriously investigate this specific question to
definitively answer, once and for all, the question of Andre’s existence. Do I have a brother
in Cuba? What if I’m an uncle? I’ve been waiting my whole life to get a shot at answering
this. Come hell or high water, I will find out.”
Mark, who is 48 and verifiably alive, lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with Marita’s dog and
three adopted kittens. He is extremely close with his mother, visiting her nearly every day,
and has power of attorney over all of Marita’s affairs not because she isn’t capable, but
because she “just doesn’t want to deal with any of it anymore,” he said.
Marita and Louis divorced in 1976, and Mark says he and his father were largely estranged
after that. Mark’s grandmother Alice, Marita’s mother, died the following year. Mark says
she left behind a photograph of Fidel Castro with a child, along with a note for Marita
saying that the child was Andre. She hadn’t told her before because she didn’t want to
distract her from living her life, it said. It’s the only tangible evidence the family has,
“aside from one hell of a lot of speculation,” says Mark, who majored in history at Queens
College (with a focus on WWII and the Cold War) and views his search for Andre as a sort
of extension of his studies.
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In 1981, Marita went to visit Castro in Havana after being laid off from her translator job
at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where thousands of Cuban refugees from the Mariel boatlift
were detained. She was picked up by a soldier at the Havana airport, as she was in 1959,
only this time the jeep had been replaced by a Czechoslovakian-built limousine which
delivered her to one of Castro’s many villas around town.
Castro wasn’t particularly happy to see her that day. However, he introduced her to a
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young medical student who was a spitting image of Fidel and was named Andre.
“I couldn't stop looking at the young man, at his hands, his face, that nose that was exactly
like Fidel’s,” Marita wrote in her 2017 autobiography. “Without any doubt he was his son;
he was like a young Fidel. He was our son, I believe that with all certainty, and his image
has been forever stamped on my memory since that day.”
Marita now says Castro confirmed her suspicions at the time, telling her that Andre had
been raised by an elderly Cuban couple who tutored Marita in Spanish back in 1959.
If you live in the New York area and you’ve been to a fancy bar mitzvah or children’s party
in the past decade-and-a-half, there’s a decent chance you’ve met Mark Lorenz, who
provides airbrush artists for high-end events. During the week, he runs his own aquarium
maintenance business, making house calls to clients in and around the city.
Mark says he became aware of Marita’s past in 1977 or ’78, when he was about 8 or 9 years
old.
“It was basically a question of, ‘You did what with who? When?? What?!?’” he recalls.
“When I was little I was just waiting to grow up enough so I could go to college and get a
history degree to be able to figure out what the hell happened in my family.”
Back in 1959, when Alice Lorenz found out about her daughter’s affair with Castro, she
was furious. Together with Alex Rorke, a virulently anti-Castro journalist who reportedly
worked for the CIA, Alice, who had worked for army intelligence and the OSS, published a
story in the May 1960 issue of Confidential magazine under the headline, “Fidel Castro
Raped My Teen-Age Daughter.” Convinced by her mother and Rorke, along with a battery
of other government-types, that Castro was a menace to global security, Marita began
collaborating with the anti-Castro movement in the United States (PDF).
She managed to infiltrate the pro-Castro movement’s New York chapter, and compiled
dossiers on its members for the FBI and was soon providing the FBI with reports on its
members. In December 1960, Marita says the CIA sent her to Cuba to kill Castro.
Marita claims she was given $6,000 and two capsules filled with botulinum toxin to slip
into Castro’s food. But she lost her nerve after she got to his room and flushed the pills
down a toilet at the Havana Hilton. Marita says she left the money behind in Castro’s suite
when she left that evening, along with a note she wrote for Andre.
When she got back to the States after her failed assassination attempt, Marita continued
her anti-Castro activities. In March of 1962, she gave birth to a daughter named Monica.
“Her father is General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the former dictator of Venezuela,” explains
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Mark. “My mom was in Miami working with the anti-Castro people and collecting money
from various anti-Castro-types. Marcos happened to be down there after leaving
Venezuela, they sent my mom to see him and pick up a check for $200,000. And then my
sister came about.”
Marita spent the next chunk of her life back in New York, where she had an apartment on
the Upper East Side and worked as an informant for the FBI and NYPD. There were a
number of Russian and Bulgarian diplomats living in her building, and Marita says she
would regularly rifle through their trash for sensitive documents that she then delivered to
the feds.
In 1988, Marita visited Cuba for the last time, where she told Vanity Fair’s Ann Louise
Bardach that Castro treated her to one “last mercy hump.” However, in Marita’s
autobiography, published nearly a quarter-century later, she said she didn’t get to see
Fidel at all during the 10-day trip.
If Marita Lorenz’s life sounds like a movie to you—she has also been linked to Lee Harvey
Oswald and assorted other players in various JFK conspiracy theories—you’re not the first
to have that thought.
In the early 1990s, Oliver Stone optioned the rights to Marita’s story for $200,000, which
she went through fairly quickly. The film was never made. The 1999 TV movie My Little
Assassin, starring Gabrielle Anwar and Joe Mantegna, was based on her life. And in 2016,
Jennifer Lawrence was tapped by Sony to star in Marita, a project currently in
development.
“The family freaked out,” Mark says. “First they celebrated, and I said, ‘Not yet, it’s not
money in the bank.’ Then after a while, they started saying, ‘So, where’s the movie?’ And
now we’re in the ‘You fucked up, didn’t you?’ mode. It’s been like a flamethrower through
the family. It’s ruined everything, actually.”
Some say the Castro kids are all well-known and there’s no way a son of Fidel’s, especially
one who supposedly looked just like the so-called Maximum Leader, would have been able
to live undetected for all these years.
Georgie Anne Geyer, author of 1991 Castro biography Guerrilla Prince, has cast doubt on
certain aspects of Marita’s story, and writer Ann Louise Bardach, who interviewed Marita
for Vanity Fair in 1993, said she wouldn’t let her see the photograph of Andre and Fidel
her mother had reportedly left her. (Mark says Oliver Stone took the photo when he
optioned Marita’s story and they haven’t seen it since.) A retired FBI agent who
interviewed Marita in 1959 told Bardach she “never said anything about having a kid.”
Others speculate the father might actually have been the late Jesús Yánez Pelletier, a
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Castro bodyguard who later switched sides and was jailed for his anti-Castro views.
“Bullshit,” responds Don Soldini. “I was very good friends with Yánez from the time he
came out of prison until the time he died and it never came up in conversation other than
the fact that she had the abortion. I’ll be honest with you: Was there a kid, is he still alive?
I find it very hard to believe.”
Nevertheless, any doubt or uncertainty that exists seems to motivate Mark, who says he’s
simply looking for an answer.
“One day I’m going to go to Cuba, and I’ll be sitting having a wonderful cup of coffee
across the table from a Cuban in a uniform or a suit, and I’ll say, ‘I’m trying to track down
family here in Cuba. You may have heard of his father,’” he said. “Either they’ll roll their
eyes, or they’ll be like, ‘Hold on a moment.” And they’ll go to one, two, three doors and
someone will come out and say they’re my brother and I’ll pull out a little DNA kit and
say, ‘Nothing personal, but this is for history.’”
Obtaining DNA from a member of the Castro family living in Cuba is likely going to be a
non-starter. Mark says he’s prepared to reach out to other relatives who have left the
island; Castro daughter Alina Fernández, for one, has lived in Miami since 1993. Yet Mark
knows there will probably be resistance from the exile community, though their
participation will be required if he is going to make any real headway in his search.
“My mom is a bit of a bugaboo to them,” says Mark. “OK, she didn’t kill Fidel, get the fuck
over it. I have no malice, I don’t want to fight any dead people’s wars. It’s just one person
looking for family.”
Marita believes Andre is currently “packed away in some remote area in Nicaragua or
Guatemala or somewhere, working as a doctor, dealing in prosthetics” and has purposely
kept a low profile because he “doesn’t want to be known.”
Mark describes the nursing home Marita is now in as “a cross between a rooming house
and Animal House,” and he’d like her to leave as soon as possible. She’d like to live out the
rest of her days in Germany and Mark hopes to join her there.
“Things will be nicer there,” says Mark. “But we’re broke, so we’re just biding our time.”
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30.4.

2018 Nikolay Bakharev's Photos in New Museum’s ‘Ostalgia’ Show

Nikolay Bakharev's Photos in New Museum’s ‘Ostalgia’

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

COURTESY OF NIKOLAY BAKHAREV AND GALLERY.PHOTOGRAPHER.RU, MOSCOW

The Search for Fidel Castro’s Love Child

JUSTIN ROHRLICH 04.28.18 10:54 PM ET

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