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Fidel Castro attempts a bloody, disastrous take-over of the Moncado Barracks in Cuba while the OSS, about to be restructured as the CIA, must construct a clandestine “invasion” of Cuba with a band of mercenaries and assassinate Castro.
Anna Teresa lifted the rifle to her shoulder with the same fluid motion and grace with which she often, at the Larchmont Public Library, lifted a book from the cart and placed it carefully on the proper shelf in the proper Dewey Decimal sequence. Framed perfectly in the notch of the squared sight less than fifteen feet away was a target she would miss only if she suffered second thoughts before she could pull the trigger: there it was, the base of Fidel Castro’s head riding atop his neck. To her surprise, she was more relieved than nervous; her hands remained steady, and the weapon’s 8.9-pound weight seemed negligible. The bullet, a .30 caliber longnose, rifling from the barrel of her M-1 Garand would enter the cerebellum of the revolutionary’s brain through a hole measuring 1.5 centimeters. It would instantly explode in mid-cranium, reducing the entire brain matter to a powdery, pasty liquid, destroying all four amygdaloidal nuclei, while exiting from his forehead by ripping the upper half of his skull from the lower, and, in essence, leaving his body momentarily erect—but seemingly headless. Fidel Castro Ruz would be released from his mortal coil and dispatched into eternity with no awareness of the event, not even so much as the initial crack of the shot behind him. He would be, in a millisecond, in his Maker’s Presence with no inkling how he’d gotten there. Anna Theresa’s finger tightened on the flat, curved stem of the trigger’s smooth surface. The muscles in her jaw quivered slightly when it suddenly occurred to her this would be, in all likelihood, if not the first, certainly the most memorable shot fired in the Cuban Revolution.
Excerpt
El poder político proviene del barril de un arma de fuego!
(Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun!)
Fidel Castro, quoting Mao Tse Tung
The University of Havana
18 March 1953
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