By NTD.la Staff
(Editor's note: In light of the turbulent times in Cuba, we've retrieved an article published in 2015 by our colleagues at Ntd.la, recounting a series of incredible stories about Fidel Castro. Furthermore, to add a musical touch to the occasion, we've included a long and beautiful playlist, which we found while browsing Spotify, full of classics from timba, rumba, son, mambo, hip hop, danzón, guaguancó, mozambique, conga, danzonete, changüí, bolero, nengón, and other genres native to the island.).
In August, the most important leader of the 20th century in Latin America would have turned 95. Loved and hated all over the planet, he made Cuba an important place in the world. Those who suffered because of his ideas and actions have tried to assassinate him no less than 638 times. Here we summarize the data that emerges from the testimony of Fabian Escalante, who was head of the Cuban secret service until 2007. According to him, 638 attempts to end the life of Fidel Castro Ruz, the undisputed leader of the Cuban revolution.
In our quest to continue telling the best story of Latin America, we bring you the most astonishing forms that the operations to end the life of the bearded Cuban have taken.
1. The one from Minita… They say that Marita Lorenz, Lorenz, considered one of Fidel's many girlfriends, allegedly accepted an offer from the CIA in which she would administer poisoned capsules to him. Lorenz managed to smuggle the pills into Fidel's bedroom. He asked her if she had come to kill him, and she answered yes. She didn't dare, they say she said: «"No Fidel, I can't.".
2. Drug the bearded man. Imagine this situation for a second. 3 PM, Oval Room of the White House, May 1st, in the middle of the Cold War in 1970. An advisor hands a folder to the president. The folder doesn't say it verbatim, but the idea is as follows: Let's drug Fidel and have him spout nonsense so everyone thinks he's no longer fit to be the leader of the revolution. In this case, the effort was not so much to kill Fidel, but to discredit him. The CIA reportedly considered gassing a radio station where Castro was giving a live broadcast with an aerosol containing a substance similar to LSD. The idea was that when Fidel went crazy while addressing the nation live, The Cubans thought their leader was crazy and stopped trusting him.
3. There's magic in his beard. Long before Dumbledore and Harry Potter, A 1975 report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee in the US believed that part of Castro's power resided in his beard. The CIA made a calculation that worked something like this: We annihilate his beard -> We annihilate his power -> We annihilate his revolution. A rather ludicrous, imaginative, adolescent, and idiotic plan. He considered putting thallium salt (a chemical used in hair removal products) in Fidel Castro's shoes or in one of his cigars. Luckily the plan was never carried out and he continued to adorn the bearded face of that man until the end of his days.
4. The explosive shell. Knowing that Fidel liked to scuba dive, the CIA planned to place a bomb in a snail shell in one of Fidel's favorite places to practice this sport. The Agency prepared a brightly colored conch shell, unusual in appearance enough to attract the revolutionary leader's attention, ensuring he would be close enough when it exploded to kill him. The plan failed because no conch shell was large enough to contain such a bomb.
5. The poisoned suit. Again in 1975, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee stated that there was concrete evidence «"of a plan to present Castro with a wetsuit lined with spores and bacteria that would cause him a serious skin disease (or perhaps something worse).". The situation would be like this: while negotiations were underway to free the prisoners of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, lawyer James Donovan He was supposed to deliver a wetsuit for diving infested with poison. When the time came to do it, James chose to give her a different one without any bacteria or spores.
