About 10 years ago, the former head of Cuban intelligence, Fabian Escalante, told a British documentary team the CIA had tried to kill Fidel Castro more than 600 times, over a period of about 40 years.
Crazy just how low the CIA will sink to kill someone they don't agree with. Truly the most evil and cowardly organisation on earth.
A series of newspaper reports in the 1970s led to a government investigation of the CIA's abuses of power. President Ford banned political assassinations in 1976, but according to Escalante they continued for two more decades, including in the '90s under President Clinton.
Corruption and lies the whole way down. No wonder the US is crumbling.
According to some accounts, the mafia was able to slip a jar of poison pills to a cafe worker in the capital of Havana.
Some say the worker was meant to slip the poison into an ice cream cone, other say it was a milkshake. But at the crucial moment, the poison could not be dislodged from inside the freezer. It was frozen stuck.
Either way, this was the closest the CIA came to getting the marked man.
If anything could convince me there is a divine force it would be the number of times Castro avoided death through sheer luck. His existence is so statistically improbable that it can only be explained as having something watching over him.
I see it as a bunch of Cubans on the ground lying to the CIA.
"Why yes I'll take your money after you destroyed my country's economy, aww shucks I couldn't get him because [increasingly bad excuses]."
The CIA has no way to call out the lie, the mid-level ghouls don't want to admit they were duped anyway, and the higher-ups ideologically believe there are dissidents all over.
I don't see that as plausible. If it were the case it would just be reported earlier to the Cuban authorities and not get so far along. If a civilian took it into their own hands to foil this and "fail" at the last second they would be risking getting caught by Cuban authorities who would have absolutely no choice but to arrest them and treat them as a CIA asset in an attempted assassination plot against Fidel.
How Castro survived 638 very cunning assassination attempts
If I were to hazard a guess, I think it's because Castro was always accompanied by a chain-smoking marksman with a legendary reputation for misogyny, and a descendant of a renegade samurai known for his immense skills in martial arts and swordsmanship.
The marksman is this guy and the swordsman is this guy. The joke is that Castro is like this guy and the CIA is like this guy, and the number of times Castro successfully evaded assassination attempts is comparable to (or really just over two times) the number of episodes of this anime series. Put another way, I'm saying that evading 638 assassination attempts for 40 years sounds like something straight out of a formulaic weekly cartoon with a hapless bad guy, cf. "I'll get you next time, Gadget! Next time!" or perhaps "Nu, zayats, nu pogodi!"
Now before you call me a weeb, know that the anime I was referencing was mentioned by name in Kanye West's "Touch the Sky" featuring Lupe Fiasco.
Maybe he didn't, maybe they just received the secret of Juche necromancy from the DPRK.
What's more believable, surviving 638 assassination attempts coming from your direct neighbour, who happens to be the most powerful country that ever existed and with unlimited funding? Or the power of socialist comradeship?
My headcanon is that after the first few attempts, the CIA started sabotaging their own colleagues' assassination attempts because they wanted their own personal attempt to be what took him out.