HAVANA -- Poisoned cigars, poisoned pills and a poisoned pen were just a few of the killing gadgets that figured in the CIA's unsuccessful schemes to do away with Fidel Castro and his communist government.
Those sinister devices and many more are described in Havana's Interior Ministry Museum, a tribute to four decades of spying and plotting against Castro's rule -- and to the Cuban fascination with Cold War espionage.Inside the yellow mansion on a broad residential avenue of Havana, glass cases are filled with confiscated spy paraphernalia: tiny radios and decoders, hidden microphones and miniature cameras, Thompson machine guns and C-4 plastic explosives.
While many Americans might consider the espionage museum a fascinating Cold War artifact, most Cubans see it as testimony to practices that still persist.
In September, there was little surprise on this side of the Florida Straits when U.S. authorities in Miami accused 10 people of spying for Cuba.
Castro, in an interview with CNN, said the most surprising thing about the case was "that the most spying country in the world is accusing the most spied-upon country in the world of espionage."
He admitted Cuba has sent a few of its own to spy in what it considers enemy territory, "to infiltrate counterrevolutionary organizations to inform us about activities that are of great interest to us."
Some such agents are honored at the Interior Ministry Museum. One glass case contains a bloodstained shirt displayed like a religious relic. "Manuel Lopez de la Portilla, 1940-1960," the sign reads. "Killed July 16, 1960, when his identity was discovered by a counterrevolutionary group."
The museum recognizes as a martyr Rogelio "Pao" Iglesias Patino, who died in 1983 at age 47 when his boat sank as he traveled to the United States "to fulfill a mission within the columns of the enemy."
The walls of the museum are lined with painted portraits of him and scores of other men and women who died protecting Cuba's communist state.
They include two young diplomats who were kidnapped from the Cuban Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and killed, two security agents who died when a bomb exploded at the Cuban Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal, and an agent who was killed in a dynamite blast at the Cuban commercial office in Montreal.
Below the photographs are the displays: tiny cameras disguised as disposable plastic lighters, a tin of Hershey's Cocoa stuffed with detonator capsules, black metal decoders for deciphering messages printed in a series of tiny baffling numbers legible only with a magnifying glass.
"Despite the dozens of known acts against the revolutionary leaders of Cuba by the CIA and its innumerable bands that were in its service, not one leader of the Revolution has been assassinated," a large blue sign declares proudly.
It wasn't for lack of trying.
The museum describes dozens of unsuccessful schemes dreamed up to assassinate Castro.