Castro says US assassin lacked access

HAVANA -- President Fidel Castro of Cuba said yesterday that the man the United States and Mafia contracted to poison him in the early 1960s would not have been able to get close enough to him to be successful.

Castro, in his longest essay since taking up the pen in March as he recovers from intestinal surgery a year ago, charged that the assassination plan was just one of many.

The CIA last month declassified hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detailed some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, and kidnapping.

In the article, Castro also said the Declaration of Independence produced a country dedicated to "world tyranny."

"Based on simple events, my purpose is to carry on demonstrating the immense hypocrisy and the total lack of ethics which characterize the actions, chaotic by nature, of the government of the United States," he wrote.

The declassified CIA documents describe the initial efforts to get rid of Castro by using the Mafia, which was angered at the loss of gambling casinos after Castro seized power in a 1959 revolution that turned Cuba into a communist state.

According to the documents, the Mafia provided six poison pills to Juan Orta in 1961. Orta was identified as a Cuban official who still had access to Castro and who had been receiving kickbacks from gambling interests. Orta did not carry out the poisoning plan.

Castro, 80, wrote in his essay published yesterday that Orta had ties to US-based exiles and immigrants.

"The traitor Orta . . . received money from organized crime supposedly to help them reopen Casinos. He had nothing to do with the matter," Castro wrote.

"By the time they gave him the poison, unlike the earlier moments, there was little chance Orta would see me as by then I was completely occupied with other matters," he said, referring to preparations to thwart the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.

"I have survived numerous assassination plots," Castro said, adding that luck and careful attention to detail allowed him to escape capture by the Cuban Army while he and his fellow revolutionaries plotted their overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959.

Castro said the assassination plot was hatched before President John F. Kennedy was elected, citing what he says was a key Mafia meeting to put his assassination in motion on Sept. 14, 1960.

He also said Cuba expected some kind of attack before the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was carried out by 1,500 Cuban exiles with US support.

"We were aware of an imminent attack, but didn't know when or how it would come," he wrote.

Castro has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency surgery last July .

But the revolutionary leader has returned to public life by writing increasingly longer articles, called "Reflections of the Commander in Chief," fueling speculation that his health is improving.