Have a cigar.

So Fidel Castro is stepping down as El Presidente. I'm not at all surprised.
When you hit your eighties running one of the few remaining communist
dictatorships in the Western world has gotta take it out of you.

He has been one person who has been in a few people's sites off and on over the years. Some would think he is wiley,shrewd and possess just a small measure of luck. I'm sure he is all that and more. Judging from the quality of the attempts on his life, I am not so sure there were not many worries around his dinner table.

Fabian Escalante, former head of the Cuban Secret Service, estimates there were over 600 tries at offing Fidel since he took power. That's more than a hundred a year. Them's some bad assassins.

Castro was known to be an avid scuba diver and one idea had the CIA filling
really large sea shells with explosives. Or . . . still on the diving theme, inoculate his dive suit with toxic fungi. That would make him real itchy I suppose.

Then there are the standard spy stuff with pen darts and poisons. One story
has the CIA recruiting a former lover to poison him. The pills were carried into the boudoir in a face cream jar. They dissolved in the cream. The only way to poison him then would be by shoving cold cream in his mouth while he slept. Again, pissing him off. Other poisonings were tried including specially prepared handkerchiefs and coffee.

Less glamorous attempts had members of the Cuban mafia being paid off by the CIA to
score an old fashioned hit or Cuban exiles in bomb plots.And yes it
seems the CIA did develop exploding and /or poisoned cigars.