638 Ways to Kill Castro
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638 Ways to Kill Castro. Interesting title for a documentary. I figured it was tongue in cheek just emphasizing that their have been a lot of assassination attempts on his life. No, they literally have a record of the number of times he’s been targeted for assassination and that number is really 638. That’s 638 really incompetent people by my calculations.

Anywho, for those who aren’t aware, Fidel Castro is the dictator of Cuba. He started out life as a freedom fighter with the legendary Che Guevara. Both men fought together on the same side, with very different agenda’s. Whereas Che was a humanitarian who cared about freedom, Fidel cared about socialism. Once Fidel took power, he quickly turned Cuba into a communist state.

The reason he rubbed America the wrong way, besides being a commie, is how he handled his takeover of power. There were all kinds of American businesses in Cuba. Everything from Banks, to restaurants, to oil refineries. And he just flat out stole the businesses. He kicked out all of the employees and declared the business’s owned by the state. Certain American’s lost millions. What really is sad is that this happened over 50 years ago, and most young people don’t even realize why were enemies. People today see pictures of Fidel with Jack Nicholson and Julia Roberts and think he must be an okay guy. He’s not. Just ask the 200+ refugees who attempt fleeing to Miami every day how great he is.

This documentary was informative, but it didn’t really blow me away. Most of the evidence was circumstantial at best. They claimed to know the number of assassination attempts per President. This was highlighted by Regan’s monstrous 197 attempts. They even credited Clinton with 21 attempts.

A lot of these attempts I would not even classify as attempts. A lot of stories involved people who were going to do it, then got cold feet at the last minute and never even tried. Those aren’t attempts, those are just thoughts. Out of the so called 638 attempts, less then 100 were actual attempts. But nevertheless, even at 100 that’s a large number for anyone. How did he possibly survive all of those?

Well his security detail is one of the single best units in the world. His head of security was made out to be like a Navy Seal on steroids. His security is so legendary they once made a 1970’S television drama series about them. The attempts that were not stopped by security, were stopped by just flat out luck. In all reality, this guy probably should have bit it during the Eisenhower administration.

I can’t say I cared for the narration of the documentary. It was rather bland. But the info they put together was really nice. It was almost all ancient news reel footage. I love seeing that scratched up print, poor quality clips. Also, this had a surprising amount of gore in it. For apparently no reason, they showed Che Guevara’s dead lifeless body in several close up shots. They also showed actual footage of Castro executing people. It was a lot more graphic then I ever anticipated.

All in all it’s not a bad film by any means. It was really informative. But it just didn’t have the polish of say a History Channel documentary. I did not like that they used so much circumstantial evidence, but I guess they did have to try to fill an hour and half. I wouldn’t exactly say this is a good movie to go grab all your friends to go see, but it would make an excellent point of reference for a school political project. The directors did a great job of not taking a side one way or another, and just presenting the evidence as they uncovered it.

Added:  Wednesday, May 09, 2007
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