Those of us who have covered Cuba for some time knew this day would come. We just thought it would be different. We thought the dictatorship would end with a bang, not a whimper.

After taking note of numerous efforts to bring down Fidel Castro through violent means, we expected that he would get his head blown off from another exploding cigar.

Word is that the CIA tried that tactic. It failed.

Then Fidel gave up smoking.

There was another story — unsubstantiated, as are most of these plots. According to this one, the CIA tried to put itching powder in his famous beard. The idea was to drive him mad thus rendering him incapacitated and incapable of running the Communist country. He then could be overthrown from within, prison doors would be thrust open, the presses would resume, and democracy would flourish.

Close but no cigar.

That's what you get when you send a bunch of high school pranksters to overthrow a government and kill its unelected leader. I'm surprised our guys didn't try to short-sheet Castro's bed!

Death plots never succeeded because Castro kept his friends close and his enemies closer. For years, loyalists infiltrated groups in Havana and quelled any possible revolt. Loyalists also infiltrated groups in Florida's Cuban exile communities and reported back to Havana.

It was probably good for Castro that he and the Soviet Union remained simpatico even after the end of the Cold War. That's because the KGB, masters of mayhem, know how to get their man, and Vlad, the new Russian impaler, lets his folks get away with murder.

Putin's loyalists poison and irradiate defectors and enemies, even now. If the Russians had wanted Castro dead, he would be. (Have you checked out Kosovo lately?)

Castro lives long, having prospered from his legendary status and Soviet debt forgiveness. Rather than be martyred in death, he has become immortalized in life as the last revolutionary poet. He is the go-to guy for wannabes, such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a legend in his own mind.

Castro is a tyrant, a ruthless dictator and more. He would have launched missiles that the Soviets planted in our hemisphere had not Premier Nikita Khrushchev and President John Kennedy talked things out.

Khrushchev thought better of his plan to use Cuba as a base for an attack on the United States because JFK made clear the consequences of such recklessness.

Cooler heads than Castro's prevailed. The "missiles of October" weren't launched, and we didn't have World War III then and there. Castro still wanted to attack us. Khrushchev made the Cuban hothead stand down.

For years, our spies tried to put this dog down. There was even a sequel to the Bay of Pigs invasion, except by air instead of sea. That didn't work, either, and the plotters had to explain what they were doing in Cuban airspace. Dropping Chiclets, what else?

Some in Miami's Cuban mafia, especially after the Elian Gonzalez deportation under President Clinton, claimed to have a bullet with Castro's name on it. They also claimed there is no Cuban mafia, but that's another story.

Castro never got in their crosshairs. It wasn't a sniper's bullet that ended his 49-year rule at age 81. It was something unexpected. Weariness and old age led him to say, "I will not aspire to nor accept the post of president of the Council of State and commander in chief." Few would have guessed the day would come when a resignation letter stopped the revolution a half-century later. Faced with poor health and old age, Castro grew old and tired, and this month, he took a buyout. Whoa!

That's it? Game over? Decades of turning dissenters into political prisoners, years of scolding Gorbachev as a girlie man over glasnost and perestroika, and the world's longest-serving Commie dictator just gave up and called it quits?

We should have seen this coming. Remember when Cuba offered to help Katrina victims along our Gulf Coast?

So now the Maximum Leader has posted a "gone fishing" sign, given the deed to the dictatorship to his brother, and is riding into the sunset of retirement. Don't be surprised if you see him on the green in Boca.

In his youth, Cuba's guerrilla prince boasted that history would absolve him. As what now? As elder statesman to whom wannabes such as Chavez hold court? As the diseased old toad waiting on Death? Qué?

With all that he has done, this hardly seems fair. This hardly seems just. But what in Castro's Cuba ever was?

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (lokeman@kcstar.com) is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss Lokeman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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