![]() ![]() That time, Castro's personal security team carried out their own checks on the scene, and helped to abort the plot. A plot was hatched to put 90kg of high explosives under the podium where he was due to speak. ![]() The most recent serious assassination attempt that we know of came in 2000 when Castro was due to visit Panama. A CIA poison pill had to be abandoned when it failed to disintegrate in water during tests. This former lover is far from the only person to have failed to poison Castro: at one point the CIA prepared bacterial poisons to be placed in Castro's handkerchief or in his tea and coffee, but nothing came of it. According to this woman, Castro had already guessed that she was aiming to kill him and he duly offered her his own pistol. But the pills melted and she decided that, all things considered, putting cold cream in Castro's mouth while he slept was a bad idea. The woman was given poison pills by the CIA, and she hid them in her cold cream jar. On one occasion, a former lover was recruited to kill him, according to Peter Moore, producer of the new film. Two years later, on the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, an agent who had been given a pen-syringe in Paris was sent to kill Castro, but failed. In 1961, when Cuban exiles with the backing of the US government tried to overthrow him in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the aim was to assassinate Fidel and Raul Castro (Fidel's brother, who temporarily took over the presidency this week) and Che Guevara. ONE OF THE reasons there have been so many attempts on his life is that he has been in power for so long.Īttempts to kill Castro began almost immediately after the 1959 revolution that brought him to power. While the idea of an exploding cigar that was intended to blow up in Castro's face is perhaps the best-known of the attempts on his life, others have been equally bizarre. The most spectacular of the plots against Castro will be examined in a TV documentary entitled 638 Ways to Kill Castro, as well as in a companion book of the same name written by the now-retired Escalante - a man who, while in his post as head of the Cuban secret service, played a personal part in heading off a number of the plots. 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 or so years. 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. That may sound like a staggeringly high figure, but then the CIA was pretty keen on killing him. None of the plots, of course, succeeded, but then many of them would probably be rejected as too fanciful even for a James Bond novel.įabian 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. An exploding cigar, a poisoned wetsuit, a former lover armed with lethal pills - Duncan Campbell looks back at the CIA's 638 attempts to kill Fidel Castroįor 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. ![]()
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