CUBA:Fidel Castro is retiring after surviving numerous plots to end his rule more abruptly.
As America's number one enemy in the 1960s, it is an open secret that he was targeted by the CIA. In 1999, Cuba claimed the US had tried to assassinate Castro no fewer than 637 times in the preceding 40 years, either through official attempts by Washington or by agents of Miami's large exiled Cuban-American population.
"If surviving assassination were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal," Castro once said.
Perhaps the most well-known scheme was the exploding cigar the CIA is said to have designed to detonate as the tobacco-loving leader began to puff on it. That was just one of an array of plans hatched after 1961's failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
The Americans also dreamed up schemes which exploited Castro's passion for scuba diving. They thought about sending him a fungus-infected diving suit as a gift or placing booby-trapped seashells in his favourite underwater spots.
In 1993, a declassified CIA report spelled out details of schemes such as daubing Castro's cigars with deadly chemicals and giving him a ball-point pen containing a hidden poison-packed hypodermic syringe.
The 133-page report also listed two attempts to supply toxic pills to underworld gambling kingpins who thought they could slip them to the Cuban leader. Aside from elaborate plots to kill him, there were also strategies devised with the aim of undermining Castro and inciting his people to rise against him.
One idea was to put hair removal powder in his shoes which would make his legendary beard fall out, causing him to be ridiculed.
Then there was the flamboyant plan dubbed "elimination by illumination". This was to involve spreading the word among Cubans that the "second coming" was at hand, then trying to panic the population into revolution by convincing them of Christ's arrival with a pyrotechnical display in the sky launched from a submarine.
There were proposals to disorientate Castro by contaminating the air of the radio studio from which he broadcast his speeches with a spray the effects of which were similar to LSD.
Yet another scheme was to give him a chemically treated cigar shortly before a major speech, prompting him to "make a public spectacle of himself".
Castro, who has repeatedly accused Cuban exiles of being involved in assassination attempts against him in more recent years, took threats to his life seriously.
One former personal assistant, Delphin Fernandez, once claimed Castro had all his underwear burned after wearing it, so the items could not be laundered with deadly chemicals. -