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Skeptoid

Skeptoid #659: Killing Castro

Skeptoid

Brian Dunning

Skeptic, Social Sciences, Skepticism, Paranormal, Conspiracy Theories, Urban Legends, Science, History

4.63K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2019

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's proven the CIA tried to assassinate Castro, but the number of claimed attempts differs wildly.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Stories of what the CIA used to do during the Cold War would fill several entertaining

0:08.7

historical novels to the point that some of it almost seems like mythology.

0:13.5

One such example is the many times the spy agency is said to have tried to kill Fidel Castro.

0:20.5

Some of them seem not just out of James Bond, but out of some caricaturized comic book

0:25.5

version of James Bond.

0:28.0

Today we separate the fact from the fiction, and we're doing that up next right here on

0:33.8

Skeptoid.

0:40.4

You're listening to Skeptoid.

0:41.8

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

0:45.6

Killing Castro.

0:49.0

The Cold War was not only a time of deep mistrust between the East and the West, but also between

0:54.9

the old and the new, conservatives and liberals, capitalists and socialists.

1:00.2

The event most emblematic of this conflict was the Cuban Missile Crisis when the two

1:04.3

sides reached the very brink of nuclear war.

1:07.9

And desperate to minimize communist influence in the Western Hemisphere, the American CIA,

1:13.5

by all accounts, made multiple efforts to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

1:19.8

Today we're going to look at how real these attempts were, as various histories record

1:25.7

radically different characterizations of what happened.

1:31.6

Depending on what source you trust, the CIA made as few as eight attempts on Castro's

1:36.5

life, or as many as 638.

1:40.8

This latest highest number was best popularized by a 2006 BBC documentary called 638 Ways

1:48.3

to Kill Castro, based on a book of the same name.

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