Castro says US-Mafia assassin had little chance

HAVANA, July 8 (Reuters) Convalescing Cuban President Fidel Castro said today the man the United States and Mafia contracted to poison him in the early 1960s would not have been able to get close enough to him to be successful.

Castro, in his latest and longest essay since taking up the pen in March as he recovers from intestinal surgery a year ago, charged the assassination plan was just one of many.

The CIA declassified last month hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detailed some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping.

The agency's so-called ''Family Jewels'' describe the initial efforts to get rid of Castro by using the Mafia, angered at the loss of their casinos after Castro seized power in a 1959 revolution that turned Cuba into a communist state.

According to the documents, six poison pills were provided in 1961 to Juan Orta by the Mafia, identified as a Cuban official who had been receiving kickback payments from gambling interests and who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind. Orta did not carry out the plan.

Castro wrote in his essay published today that Orta was a link with US-based exiles and immigrants before the revolution, and after for a time had frequent access to him.

''The traitor Orta ... received money from organized crime supposedly to help them reopen Casinos. He had nothing to do with the matter,'' Castro wrote.

''By the time they gave him the poison, unlike the earlier moments, there was little chance Orta would see me as by then I was completely occupied with other matters,'' Castro says, referring to preparations to thwart the failed US Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.

Castro indicated the assasination plot was hatched before President John F. Kennedy was elected in November 1960, citing what he says was a key Mafia meeting to put his assassination in motion on September. 14, 1960.

Castro has not been seen in public or delivered a speech since undergoing surgery in July last year, when he handed over power temporarily to his younger brother, Raul.

But the 80-year-old revolutionary has returned to public life by writing ever longer articles, called ''Reflections of the Commander in Chief,'' fueling speculation that his health is improving.

REUTERS SBC PM2235