Accidental Blogger

Fidel Castro may be dead, ill or recuperating well from his recent intestinal surgery. We don’t know for sure. Reports out of Cuba are sketchy.  What we do know is that nearly a week ago after his operation, for the first time in more than four decades of reign, Castro transferred power to his brother, Raul.

During his long tenure as the dictator of Cuba, the nearly 80 year old Castro has been a thorn in the side of successive US governments. Castro’s communist ideology, macho swagger and popularity in many parts of Latin America have added to the American irritation. The US triumphed over its powerful cold war arch enemy, the Soviet Russia but could not bring about a much desired regime change in the tiny and impoverished country of Cuba which lies so close to the edge of Florida. But it was not for the want of trying. The CIA and angry Cuban exiles have planned and attempted to assassinate Castro on more than one occasion – 638 times if his security chief is to be believed.

"For nearly half a century, the CIA and Cuban exiles have been trying to devise ways to assassinate Fidel Castro, who is currently laid low in Cuba following an operation for intestinal bleeding. None of the plots, of course, succeeded, but, then, many of them would probably be rejected as too fanciful for a James Bond novel.

Fabian Escalante, who, for a time, had the job of keeping El Commandante alive, has calculated that there have been a total of 638 attempts on Castro’s life. That may sound like a staggeringly high figure, but then the CIA were pretty keen on killing him. As Wayne Smith, former head of the US interests section in Havana, pointed out recently, Cuba had the effect on the US that a full moon has on a werewolf. It seems highly likely that if the CIA had had access to a werewolf, it would have tried smuggling it into the Sierra Maestra at some point over the past 40-odd years. …."

Apart from straightforward attempts of shooting by assassins, some of the plans were quite bizarre – stuff of cloak and dagger pulp fiction or B movies. Among other things that the CIA tried or planned in order to bump Castro off, were:

• blow him up with a giant mollusk filled with explosives when Castro went scuba diving
• infect him with debilitating skin disease by coating his diving suit with deadly fungus
• coat his handkerchief or lace his tea with killer bacteria
• poke him with a poison filled syringe
• set up a former lover to feed him poison pills hidden in her jar of cream (the pills melted. Castro got a whiff of the plan and gallantly gave the woman his gun and asked her to shoot him. She couldn’t)
• construct exploding cigars or cigars contaminated with botulinum toxin

But none of these attempts on Castro’s life succeeded. Now it seems that the man who has lived his life as if it was a perpetual revolution, will die a mundane, uneventful death – that of an old man in a sick bed … and the old dictator may have had the last laugh, cocky to the end.

"Meanwhile, jokes about Castro’s apparent indestructibility have become commonplace in Cuba. One, recounted in the New Yorker this week, tells of him being given a present of a Galapagos turtle. Castro declines it after he learns that it is likely to live only 100 years. "That’s the problem with pets," he says. "You get attached to them and then they die on you".