HAVANA, Cuba (AP) – When Fidel Castro was 10, he nearly died of appendicitis. Since then, he has survived military assaults and even poisoned cigars and milkshakes. Now, two weeks shy of his 80th birthday, surgery has sidelined the leader of Cuba’s revolution.

After a life filled with near-death experiences, the intestinal bleeding that forced Castro to hand over power and undergo “a complicated surgical operation” may be one of the closest calls yet for the true survivor.

A statement attributed to Castro on Tuesday said he was in good spirits but made clear his condition was touch and go. “I cannot make up positive news,” he was quoted as saying.

The current crisis follows a lifetime of close shaves.

In April 1948, Castro joined throngs in Bogota, Colombia, to protest the creation of the Organisation of American States. The rioting spun out of control, and the 21-year-old Castro took refuge in the Cuban Embassy as the army began hunting down leftists.

During his university days in gangster-ridden Havana, Castro’s political activities against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista were risky enough that he began carrying a gun.

On July 26, 1953, Castro launched what many would later call a suicidal attack on the Moncada military barracks in Cuba’s eastern city of Santiago.

Though it became the symbolic start of the Cuban revolution, the assault failed miserably. After a series of surprises and miscalculations, Castro called off the mission – and was almost left to fend for himself, according to Santiago historian Manuel Pevida.

“All of a sudden he was all alone, just standing there in the street in front of the barracks,” said Pevida, also a Communist Party official. “Everyone in his group had left, but those in the final car realised he wasn’t with them and turned back and picked him up.”

In all, 61 comrades were killed in the assault or the ensuing crackdown.

Good luck seemed to consistently accompany the young Castro.

A few days after the Moncada assault, a lieutenant named Pedro Sarria, sent to capture the attackers, found Castro asleep on the floor of a peasant hut in the hills above Santiago.

The lieutenant recognised Castro, but kept his identity from patrols that might have killed him. And instead of delivering him to the Moncada barracks, where the army was torturing and killing his comrades, Sarria put Castro in a city jail where the presence of journalists made it tricky for authorities to make the rebel leader “disappear”.

“Sarria saved his life,” said Modesta Coya Garcia, a guide at the farmhouse outside Santiago where Castro gathered his men before the Moncada attack.

Despite early brushes with death, Castro continued to take risks.

After an amnesty freed him from prison, he formed a rebel army in Mexico, then returned to Cuba on a crowded yacht that nearly sank in a storm.

The vessel, named Granma, landed in the wrong spot, and of 82 rebels aboard, only 12 survived the landing and initial skirmishes with Batista’s forces in December 1956. In battles in the eastern mountains of the Sierra Maestra, Castro came close to capture several times.

Castro’s rebel army ousted Batista on January 1, 1959. Once in power, Castro’s luck continued – to the chagrin of US officials furious with Cuba’s move towards communism.

The CIA began training Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion and plotting Castro’s assassination. Castro was on the battlefield, but was unhurt, during the 1961 invasion in which more than 150 Cuban defenders died.

Within 72 hours Cuba defeated the invaders, capturing more than 1,000 of them in what became a colossal embarrassment for the United States.

Later plans to assassinate Castro were dramatic, original – and ultimately unsuccessful. More than 30 plots included poisoning his cigars, recruiting a former young German lover and hiding a gun in a TV camera.

One plot took place in the cafeteria of the Habana Libre hotel, where Castro often went for milkshakes in the mid-1960s, according to the book Fidel: A Critical Portrait.

In the book, Tad Szulc quotes former Cuban Interior Minister Ramiro Valdes as saying the CIA hired a young hotel worker to slip a poison pill into Castro’s milkshake. The young man hid the pill in the refrigerator and waited for Castro to show up.

“The capsule was frozen and it broke, and the man couldn’t slip it into the milkshake. It seems he was very nervous,” Szulc quoted Valdes as saying.

Good luck seems to run in the family: Castro’s younger brother Raul also survived the Moncada assault, the near-sinking of the Granma and guerrilla battles in the Sierra Maestra.

Yet detractors say the 75-year-old Raul lacks the strength and charisma that Fidel has used to hold together a communist Cuba.

And as he takes command of the island, they wonder: Could he possibly be as much of a political survivor as his brother?