Fidel Castro Slept with 35,000 Women and Smoked His First Cigar Aged 14
Fidel Castro smoked his first cigar aged 14
“It was my own father who gave me my first cigar, back in Birán. I must have been 14 or 15… I smoked that first puro, and I didn’t know how it was done. Fortunately, I didn’t inhale the smoke. Although you always absorb a little bit of the nicotine, even if you don’t inhale at all.”
…but he gave up cigars decades ago
“I’ve smoked too much in my life. Until one day, over 20 years ago, I decided to stop. Nobody made me. I just decided to make myself stop smoking… Listening to people [talk] so much about the necessity of a collective fight against obesity, the sedentary lifestyle, smoking, I became convinced that the sacrifice I should make on behalf of public health in Cuba was to quit smoking. Teach by example. I gave up tobacco, and I’ve never missed it.”
Fidel Castro was a baseball fan
Photography by AP/Press Association Images
Castro played baseball as a boy in the early Fifties and was an avid fan. After the revolution he banned all professional sports in Cuba, closing the leagues he had played in as a child.
Fidel Castro claimed there were 600 assassination attempts on his life
Fidel Castro claimed that there were up to 600 attempts to kill him, all funded by the United States, and that some came very close to succeeding. Most of the plots, in his own words, were fantastic (and improbable). One of the attempts included a cyanide pill which was about to be put into a chocolate milkshake at coffee place he often frequented, a plan to pump a TV studio full of hallucinogenic drugs when he went to make a speech, and a gun hidden in a camera at an event in Chile.
…and carried a pistol at all times
Castro carried a 15-shot Browning pistol most of his life. Even after he broke his arm and knee in an accident in 2004.
Fidel Castro slept with 35,000 women
Photography by AP/Press Association Images