Want to kill Fidel Castro? Think you've got what it takes to gun down the guy who's survived almost 700 assassination attempts, from exploding cigars to fungus-infested wetsuits to handgun wielding psychos?
Now's your chance thanks to the new entry in the Call of Duty: Black Ops video game series, which has seriously pissed off El Jefe Maximo's government with a mission centered on whacking Castro. In other news, this game is going to rocket off the shelves in Little Havana -- do you think they have a Playstation 3 at Alpha 66 headquarters?
Call of Duty puts players into Cold War-era covert missions from the Soviet Union to Laos, and the new edition -- which hit stores on Tuesday -- opens in the lead-up to the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Players blast their way through revolutionary Havana, trying to find and assassinate the young Fidel.
Either Fidel is not a big gamer or he didn't exactly see the fun in trying to hunt down his cigar-puffing, heavily bearded virtual double. The website Cuba Debate, which runs Casto's own "Reflections of Fidel," slammed the game in a piece posted this week.
"What the United States couldn't accomplish in more than 50 years, they are now trying to do virtually," the story says.
Snap! Even worse, the site warns, the game will encourage poor impressionable young Americans to also want to assassinate Fidel.
"On the one hand, it glorifies the illegal assassination attempts the United States government planned against the Cuban leader ... and on the other, it stimulates sociopathic attitudes in North American children and adolescents," the site says, according to AP's translation.
Fair enough, Cuba Debate. But perhaps the Cubans should have tracked down a console and played through the level before going ballistic.
Turns out, once players succeed and shoot Castro, they learn that they've actually only killed a body double and are promptly exiled to Siberia.
See, Fidel? The game just reinforces what a slippery old bastard you are! Yanqui children will come away with the vital life lesson that you are literally impossible to kill. (A lesson we've learned all too well in the Magic City.)