Killing Castro is a joystick away!

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The obsession of the United States of America with Cuba's Fidel Castro, now a grand old - but still fairly fiery - man of 84, is nothing new. Ever since the anti-capitalist, charismatic leader made himself heard and seen as the unassailable champion of the people in his country - and even beyond - over half a century ago, Fidel Castro inevitably got under the skin of successive US governments to whom communism has always been the worst kind of anathema.
Everyone knows now, thanks to the availability of 'declassified documents' in the public domain [ a virtue most anti-Americans forget to mention], that the CIA had tried to assassinate him several times over the past decades. One story says that they even tried to de-beard him - for that's where Fidel Castro's charisma lay, according to his tormenters - with a chemical weapon pretending to be talcum powder!
So many others had been taken by the CIA's hitmen - Mossadegh and Allende were among the best known - but Fidel Castro seems to have a charm around him. Every CIA attempt against him has failed so far. Perhaps that is why American governments have been so obsessed with ploys to malign or kill him. The latest move however is on another sphere, the virtual world of video games, where killing the quarry is just a joystick away.
The grandest old preacher of communism, Fidel Castro is now being hunted by video gamesters on 'Call of Duty : Black Ops' which has come to the US market lately (November 2010). Here, America's Special Force is seen trying to kill a handsome young Fidel Castro through various underhand methods. Although the item has been marketed as just a video game, the contents and implicit message have managed to create a furor in Cuba. Its state media does not dismiss the game as innocuous at all. On the contrary, it says, it is simply condoning and legitimising surreptitious assassination methods and outright murder.
The Cuba Debate Website adds aptly, 'The US has been trying to achieve through such games what in reality it had failed to do throughout Castro's fifty-year rule.' According to the news service, The Cubans, the video game shows more than 600 attempts being made to kill Castro, and the weapons used range from poisoned pens to killer cigarettes (more likely 'cigars', given the revolutionary's weakness for 'Havanas'). Players embark on a secret military mission shooting their way along Havana's streets in exciting pursuit of the target, the youthful revolutionary Castro.
The physically fragile octogenerian may have retired from direct administrative power, handing the reins to his trusted brother Raul, but he is very much at the helm, so to say, still holding sway as the chief of the communist party of Cuba. His totalitarian system allows no scope for glamour and glitz and luxuries like 'democratic freedom' - not yet - but on the equitable distribution of resources for all the communist regime has remained steadfast.