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FIDEL Castro Ruz, the President of Cuba, will go down in history as the leader who has survived a record number of plots against his life and personality, something that is in itself not less than a miracle. According to an exhibition put up by Havana Museum, the cigar-loving Cuban leader has so far survived as many as 637 murder bids, all made by the infamous Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These assassination plots often involved mercenaries from the Cuban-American community in Miami.

The Havana exhibition has been put up by the Cuban interior ministry and, in its richness, documents the whole wide range of US hostilities towards Cuba, in one of the theatres of imperialist intrigues.

These plots were spread over as many as 9 US administrations since the victory of the Cuban revolution on the New Year day of 1959. Thus they show how Democrats and Republicans share the same deep-seated hatred for the Cuban leader, now 74. This also shows the depth of the hatred which members of the former ruling circles of Cuba, now living in exile in the US, harbour towards the leader of the 1959 revolution. Many of these self-exiled Cubans simply live off the CIA money.

The last plot hatched by the CIA was in as recently as November 1999, when it tried to blow Castro up at a summit held in Panama.

The plots hatched by the CIA display an extraordinary vividness. For example, one of the plots was to somehow make Castro lay his hands upon an easy-to-explode cigar or seashell. During Castro’s visit to Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1971, an assassin was hired to take a gun, hidden in a TV camera, to a press conference which the two leaders were scheduled to address, and wipe Castro off the planet. The plot was aborted because the hired assassin got too frightened at the last minute to pull the trigger.

In a similarly very close attempt, an assassin was hired to gun down Castro in 1994, during an annual Ibero-American summit held in Colombia. The assassin was to target Castro when he was to pass through Cartagena along with his novelist friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Castro later said: "I would have had the honour of dying with such an illustrious writer."

Some of the earlier plots against Castro have already been admitted in the since then declassified CIA documents. One such plot was to make Castro a butt of public ridicule by pumping laughing gas into a TV studio where he was to speak. Another similar plot was to plant a depilatory powder that would make the hair fall out of his celebrated beard.

According to a US Senate report, dated 1975, following an investigation of CIA activities against Castro dated, "The tools for attempted assassination went from long-range rifles to poisoned pills, to fatal bacteria in dust, and others which require a large stretch of the imagination." The Havana Museum reproduces this report in Spanish.

The CIA also tried to use poisoned diving suit, cigars and pills against Castro in order to realise its nefarious design. On one occasion, it handed over a syringe, hidden in a pen, to a hired assassin in Paris. This happened on the same day US president John Kennedy was shot dead in 1963. The murder plan proved abortive.

One of the lesser-known plots to kill Castro was a conspiracy in 1962 to shoot the former foreign minister Raul Castro, then lie in ambush for Fidel Castro and other senior communist leaders to appear in public, and target them when the funeral cortege went down the Havana streets.

According to another plot, someone from among the spectators at a baseball game in Havana’s Latino Americana stadium was to toss a grenade at Castro when he rose in front of them to applaud the players.

Most of these assassination plots were thwarted by the Cuban security apparatus or aborted because of other reasons. According to the declassified US documents, however, some of these came very close to assassinating the Cuban president.

According to a tag at the simultaneously fascinating and chilling exhibition put up by the Havana Museum, "History cannot recall a similar witch-hunt in the world against a prominent political figure as there has been against the commander-in-chief Fidel Castro."