It was 3AM in the US, last night, when Reuter broke the news that Fidel Castro has resigned, citing this letter to Granma website: "A mis entrañables compatriotas, que me hicieron el inmenso honor de elegirme en días recientes como miembro del Parlamento, en cuyo seno se deben adoptar acuerdos importantes para el destino de nuestra Revolución, les comunico que no aspiraré ni aceptaré- repito- no aspiraré ni aceptaré, el cargo de Presidente del Consejo de Estado y Comandante en Jefe."
It will be interesting to see, now, if the irrational obsession with him felt by all American Presidents from John Kennedy through George W. Bush will decline. Among international relations scholars, there is a consensus that the ailing Cuban regime has been kept alive by the US embargo, a powerful stabilyzing factor in the island. Unfortunately, American politicians have been kept hostage of the powerful Cuban community in Florida, the State that gave Bush the 25 votes in the Electoral College need to become President in 2000.
There are literally hundreds of book dealing with the CIA and Cuba, most of them of modest interest. One that had new material when published in 1994 was David Corn's Blond Ghost, while a more recent one is Dan Bohning's The Castro's Obsession. Corn write the first biography of Ted Shackley, who ran from Miami the inter-agency program to overthrow Castro in the early Sixties. 
A more scholarly approach, focusing on the larger picture of the different path chosen by Canada, Mexico, and Spain toward Cuba (constructive engagement) is found in the book by Michele Zebich-Knos and Heather Nicol Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: isolation or engagement? The authors have assembled a group of scholars to describe the domestic causes and evaluate the international effects of these different approaches.
