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Here at Half as Interesting, we try not to stir up controversy, because we much prefer
the comment sections to look like this, instead of this.
Today, though, we’re talking about Fidel Castro, which is hard to do without getting
controversial, but let’s try anyways: Fidel Castro is the former leader of Cuba—a job
that he was very bad at, or maybe very good at, or maybe very medium at, or possibly somewhere
in between.
Fidel Castro had a beard, except for one time when he had a mustache.
Sometimes he wore a hat; but other times, he did not wear a hat.
He had two eyes, one nose, several teeth, and alright this is taking too long.
Back in the 1950s, Cuba was led by this guy, a US-backed military dictator named Fulgencio
Batista.
Now, if you judge leadership based on who has the biggest hat, Batista was a very good
leader, but if you judge leadership based on stuff like helping the poor or not being
corrupt, Batista was a very bad leader, which is probably why his government was overthrown
by an armed rebellion known as the 26th of July Movement, which was led by, you guessed
it, Liam Neeson.
No wait, Fidel Castro—sorry, I always get those guys mixed up, for some reason.
Castro became Prime Minister in 1959, and before long became the only thing the US hated
more than a healthy diet.
It was a classic boy meets military superpower story.
Boy meets military superpower, military superpower is locked in a Cold War with the Soviets,
boy wants Cuban refineries to process Soviet oil, military superpower pressures the refineries
into refusing, boy nationalizes the refineries to make them do it, military superpower cancels
imports of Cuban sugar, boy nationalizes military superpower’s Cuban assets, military superpower
blows up a freighter full of boy’s favorite weapons, boy forms an alliance with the USSR,
military superpower decides to assassinate boy.
Now, according to Castro’s former head of intelligence, Fabian Escalante, from 1960
to 2000, the CIA made 638 attempts on Castro’s life, and went a total of 0 for 638; a record
almost as bad as the Cleveland Browns.
While I’d love to tell you about all 638, here at Half as Interesting, we try to stick
to two things: poorly-written jokes, and the facts, and the thing is, nobody can confirm
a lot of Escalante’s claims, but, we do have ironclad documentation of seven attempts,
in the form of a 1975 report by the US Senate’s Church Committee, which investigated whether
the CIA had ever abused its power—which is kind of like investigating whether Snoop
Dogg has ever smoked weed.
Included in the abuses of power was a list of assassination attempts on Fidel Castro,
and I’ll be honest, it’s probably the most insane list in the world apart from this
very real Buzzfeed list of, “13 potatoes that look like Channing Tatum.”
The CIA’s first attempt came in 1960, but it was frankly a total snooze: the CIA offered
a Cuban who was about to meet with Castro $10,000 to kill him—they didn’t specify
how, and the guy never got the chance anyways.
Their next try, in 1961, was a bit more inventive as they used poison cigars—but not like
how normal cigars are poison.
They put extra poison in them, specifically botulinum toxin, which is so deadly that if
Castro just put a cigar in his mouth, he’d be done for.
The Church report says that the cigars were handed off to an, “unidentified person,”
but sadly for us, the record stops there.
After the cigars failed, the CIA seemingly went into panic mode and started churning
out insane death plots like they were an NBC crime procedural that’s running out of ideas.
In the early 1960s the CIA decided to recruit members of the mafia to assassinate Castro
for them.
I want to be clear—this really happened; CIA officers met with, among others, the mafiosos
Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante—both of whom were on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted
List—and hired them to kill Fidel Castro.
In their closest attempt, the mafia managed to get an assassin to pose as a waiter who
was to deliver a chocolate milkshake that Castro had ordered, but when the waiter-assassin
went to get the poison pill from the freezer, he discovered it had gotten stuck, and in
pulling it loose, he ripped it open and spilled the poison.
Just to emphasize again: this is a real thing that CIA-backed mafia members did in 1963,
and not the plot of a movie called The Three Stooges Assassinate a Dictator.
After the mafia failed, the CIA apparently decided the solution was to go even further
off the deep end.
Their next idea was to rig a seashell with explosives and then place it somewhere that
Castro was known to go swimming, but according to CIA documents, the plan was eventually
abandoned, possibly because it sound like the type of thing that would happen in a direct-to-video
Little Mermaid knock-off, but they stuck with their charming under-the-sea theme on the
next attempt, wherein the CIA infected a scuba diving suit with tuberculosis and tried to
get Castro to wear it—but according to the report, the suit never left the lab.
In their next attempt, they recruited a high-ranking Cuban leader and presented him with a ballpoint
pen that had a hidden hypodermic needle, which would inject Castro with poison upon clicking
the pen.
In the end, though, the Cuban official was so afraid that he would accidentally stab
himself that he threw it away.
Eventually, the CIA pivoted back to more run-of-the-mill, good old fashioned murder, just the way grandma
used to make it.
The final attempt in the Church report was giving a gun with a custom silencer to that
same Cuban official who had refused the poison pen; but ultimately the official eventually
cut contact with the CIA for reasons unknown.
In the end, Castro died of natural causes at the age of 90, which just goes to show,
the secret to a long life to have the CIA spend 40 years trying to kill you.
If you have to go into hiding because the CIA is coming after you, I would suggest learning
to make yourself a good snack: perhaps even the best snack, a grilled cheese sandwich,
and if you want to become the master of grilled cheese sandwiches, you should check out Elena
Karp’s class on how to make the perfect grilled cheese, which is available on Skillshare.
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