When a US-trained former paratrooper, Raul Cruz Leon, arrived in Cuba last August the Salvadoran citizen's baggage allegedly contained deadly C-4 explosives and a list of Cuban tourist resorts.
On September 4th, four bombs went off in a single day, killing an Italian-born tourist and damaging Cuba's most vital source of foreign currency. The trail led directly to Cruz Leon, who has since confessed his part in planting the bombs, claiming he received $4,500 per bomb from a group of US-based Cuban exiles.
In the same month, 74 signatories of the Biological Weapons Convention began an investigation into Cuban allegations that a US government plane sprayed a substance over western Cuba in October 1996. Within two months crop-eating insects had appeared, severely damaging local crops.
"There was a flight on the date alleged," said Ian Soutar, British delegate to the investigation. "There was also, regrettably, a considerable infestation in the territory of Cuba." The tribunal will deliver its results on December 31st and any sanctions will be decided by the UN Security Council. The Clinton administration has rejected the allegations as "outrageous".
Ever since Fidel Castro's rebel army marched triumphantly into Havana on January 1st, 1959, successive US governments have rejected Cuban overtures towards peaceful coexistence and supported radical and often illegal measures to strangle the revolution.
Just 33 days after the revolution began, a US citizen was arrested after flying a small plane into Cuba to assassinate Castro. Back then 75 per cent of the island's arable land was in foreign hands. Castro signed an agrarian reform law limiting land ownership and the US government began planning in earnest to end the revolution.
In October 1959 an air raid launched on Havana killed two people and injured 45. The next day a passenger train was machine-gunned from the air, followed by incendiary bombs which burned 10 tons of sugar cane. Castro organised a citizens' militia while the US planned a full-scale invasion. The UN General Assembly rejected Cuban demands to debate the invasion.
James Wadsworth, US ambassador to the UN, dismissed Cuban charges as "monstrous distortions and downright falsehoods".
The CIA launched Operation Mongoose in 1961, financing schemes to eliminate Castro. One plan was to send the Cuban leader a gift of a diving suit with a fungus to cause chronic skin disease and a bacillus in the breathing apparatus to cause tuberculosis. In 1975 the US Senate Select Committee on Assassinations took testimony from participants in the programme
On April 17th, 1961, the US invasion began, but Castro's militia defeated the attackers within 72 hours with over 1,000 prisoners taken. Between them they had previously owned 90,000 acres of land, 9,666 houses, 70 factories, five mines, two banks and 10 sugar mills.
In October 1962 the Cuban missile crisis began. President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island until Soviet missile sites were dismantled. The Soviets agreed to dismantle the missiles in return for US guarantees that no further invasion would be attempted. Cuba then released 1,113 Bay of Pigs invaders in return for $53 million.
The US imposed a trade embargo on Cuba in 1964, "to make it plain to the people of Cuba that Castro's regime cannot serve their interests". The US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was upset when Britain sold 450 buses to Cuba which "would almost double the public transport of Havana".
Unable to get a foothold within Cuba, where increased public transport, free housing, health and education ensured substantial support for Castro's regime, his opponents looked for softer targets abroad.
The offshore campaign included a bazooka attack on the UN General Assembly building in New York to protest at Che Guevara's presence, car bombs in Miami and the blowing up of a commercial Cuban passenger jet in 1976, killing all 73 people aboard.
The US isolated Cuba, swapping votes against Cuba in international forums for political and economic support to repressive regimes, including Haiti's Papa Doc.
Since the 1980s the US government has focused on electronic invasion, spending millions of dollars on Radio Marti and TV Marti, powerful satellite stations which beam 24-hour anti-Castro news programmes into the island.
Every year the UN General Assembly votes for an end to the US-imposed trade embargo, which lately has left Cuban hospitals without life-saving equipment and medicines. Last year's vote saw 137 countries vote to end the embargo with just three votes against, from the US, Israel and Uzbekistan.
The Clinton administration has tightened the trade embargo by approving the Helms-Burton Law, an extra-territorial measure which punishes non-US companies for trading with Cuba, a measure which violates international law.
The island has survived this remarkable assault but the cost is increasing, as tourism, foreign investment and other currency earners struggle to maintain the equal distribution of scarcity which has kept living standards above average in the region.