FYI: How did Fidel Castro survive so many years in power? Wasn't the US out to get him?
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) doesn't always get its man - fortunately for Fidel Castro, the Cuban president who recently made it to retirement despite the CIA's best efforts to hasten his demise.
The agency has a long history of attacking foreign leaders considered a threat to US interests - Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, former Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley, Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk and former Costa Rican president Jose Figueres have featured on its hit list. But no head of state has been as consistently targeted as Castro, who became the CIA's No1 bugbear almost immediately after he wrested power from US-backed strongman Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
Despite his professions of love for democracy and a visit in which he did his best to charm the US, Castro soon upset the superpower by implementing policies that proved devastating for the many American corporations operating in Cuba, particularly the United Fruit Company. His earliest reforms barred non-Cubans from owning land and limited the amount any Cuban owner could hold, resulting in the expropriation of the company's vast plantations.
By late 1959, US officials were warning that Castro's nationalisation drive would extend to other industries and banks, and could give some of Cuba's Latin American neighbours funny ideas about how to run their own economies.
The CIA did more than just consider killing Castro in the years that followed - it cooked up a series of assassination plots that ranged from the sinister to the downright ludicrous, some explained in detail in documents recently declassified under the US Freedom of Information Act. Among the more memorable were attempts to dose Castro's beloved cigars with virulent toxins and, when that didn't work, hallucinogens, in the hope that he'd lose his flair for oratory and embarrass himself in public. Another of Castro's indulgences, scuba diving, led the CIA to try to present him with a diving suit laced with a fungus that causes a rare, potentially fatal skin disease known as Madura Foot. An alternative plan was to litter Castro's favourite underwater spots with exploding conch shells. Taking aim at Castro's iconic beard, the CIA mulled putting the president in close contact with thallium salts, a substance that would leave the leader bald, bare-faced and (it was hoped) cowed.
The US establishment enlisted the mafia, disgruntled exiles and even divine powers in its bids to bring Castro down - one general suggested convincing Cuba's devout Christians that the Second Coming was at hand and Castro was none other than the devil himself.
Other attempts were relatively straightforward - the agency once persuaded 20-year-old Marita Lorenz, one of Castro's mistresses, to kill him with poison pills. The leader smelled a rat and thrust a gun into the woman's hands, inviting her to shoot him on the spot - she didn't have the nerve.
All told, Fabian Escalante, the former head of Cuba's intelligence service, who was charged with protecting Castro, has counted more than 600 attempts on the life of a leader who outlasted no fewer than nine US presidents.
