For many years stories of CIA efforts to bump off Fidel Castro were the only growth industry in Cuba. The 638 supposed attempts included such unlikely plots as sending the Cuban leader exploding cigars, packing his scuba-diving suit with lethal fungus, spraying a TV studio with LSD while he was broadcasting and filling a large mollusc with high explosive in the hope that Castro would pick it up while swimming underwater and blow himself to pieces.

The tales were varied and colourful. Some may have been true. But they had in common only that Castro survived, and that, in the end, was the point. “If surviving assassination were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal,” Castro boasted. Each failed “attempt” made Castro appear more omnipotent and the CIA seem more incompetent.

In 1993 a declassified CIA report detailed schemes such as giving Castro a pen containing a poison-filled hypodermic, provoking a revolution by launching a fireworks display from a submarine to imitate the Second Coming of Christ and putting a depilatory powder in his shoes to make his beard fall out.

Few schemes got farther than the drawing board. The closest the CIA came to killing Castro, according to the former head of Cuban intelligence, was in 1963 when hired American mobsters allegedly planned to slip a poisoned pill into his milkshake, only to have the capsule stick to the freezer compartment in the Havana Libre Hotel.

If all this sounds a little James Bond, that is no coincidence. In 1961 Ian Fleming had dinner with John F. Kennedy and a number of intelligence chiefs in Washington. The creator of 007 flippantly remarked that one way of getting rid of Castro would be to drop leaflets telling Cubans that their beards were natural repositories for radioactivity, and they should shave them off to avoid impotence — thus leaving their leader to be humiliated as a lone, impotent beard.

Fleming was joking. The CIA was not, and the next day Allen Dulles, then the CIA director, called him to discuss the plan.

This suggests that when it comes to anti-Castro plots, the only people more gullible than the Cubans are officers of the CIA.

Times Recommends

• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power
• Big guns wheeled out for the marginals
• Wanted: new merchants of light