Former Cuban President Fidel Castro has died of natural causes at the age of 90. However, very few people know that the revolutionary leader survived not 10 or 20 but more than 600 assassination attempts. For nearly half a century, attempts to kill Cuba’s most iconic leader involved spies, mafia hitmen, James Bond-style death devices and other methods that might sound like something from an Ian Fleming novel.
Now, a new documentary, Mafia Spies, streaming on Paramount+, reveals how the CIA worked with the Mafia to plot the assassination of Castro. It is based on a book of the same name written by Thomas Maier.
The six episodes of Mafia Detectives feature complex plots and a large cast of politicians, gangsters, spies, revolutionaries and entertainers.
Castro was the newly appointed Prime Minister of Cuba and the CIA, then led by Allen Dulles, wanted to oust him.
To assassinate Castro, the CIA recruited organized criminal Sam Giancana and John Roselli of the Chicago Outfit through a middleman named Robert Maheu, a lawyer and businessman.
It is noteworthy that the Mafia had its own motives behind removing Castro, because when Castro took power in 1959, Havana’s casinos were no longer a means of earning money for them.
The series highlights the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
In an attempt to accomplish their objective, the CIA and its Mafia allies used everything from poison pills to a deadly “bottle of honey” to lure a woman into committing murder and seduction.
Maier’s book is based largely on documents related to the Kennedy assassination, which were published by the National Archives in separate batches in 2017 and 2018.
JFK records show that despite their deadly reputation, Mafia duo Giancana and Roselli were unable to assassinate Castro.
A would-be assassin in Havana was supplied with poison pills by the CIA. However, he was frightened off before he could tamper with Castro’s dinner.
The Church Committee, a Senate committee that documented abuses by the intelligence services in the mid-1970s, claimed that the Cigar Plot, perhaps the best-known attempt to assassinate Castro, began in the 1960s.
According to the committee’s investigation, an officer was given a box of Castro’s favorite cigars and ordered to inject him with a lethal poison. The cigars were laced with botulinum toxin, so powerful that ingestion could cause death. It is unclear from the record whether an attempt was made to give Castro the cigars.
Castro loved scuba diving, so it should come as no surprise that the CIA investigated the possibility of creating an explosive seashell to assassinate him during one of his trips.
According to the Church Committee report, in 1963, Desmond Fitzgerald, head of the (anti-Castro CIA) task force, ordered his assistant to find out if it would be possible to place a seashell that could be set to explode at a location where Castro frequently dived.
Other failed Florida-based commando operations were attributed to bad luck or unlucky timing.
CIA-trained fighters found attacking Cuban beaches during nighttime raids were often captured and sometimes executed by firing squad.
The JFK documents also show how Castro’s network of double agents and supporters in Florida thwarted CIA operations and helped protect the Communist leader.
Some conspirators associated with both the gangsters betrayed them for personal gain.
