CASTRO LOVED LECHE

fun factoid

Fidel and Ubre Blanca the Super Cow (AFP Photo/Prensa/Getty)

Fidel Castro loved cow milk. He had a deep love of ice cream as novelist and friend Gabriel Garcia Márquez recorded in the essay A Personal Portrait of Fidel:  “One Sunday, letting himself go, [Castro] finished off a good-sized lunch with 18 scoops of ice cream.” His dairy obsession was once nearly the death of Fidel, when one the 100+ CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel almost succeeded with a poison milkshake.

Ubre Blanca (white udder), Fidel’s prized cow was a genetic experiment to breed super producers. In 1982 she crushed all the dairy records by producing about four times the milk of the average cow. (That’s 29 GALLONS of milk in a day.) And this became a success story for the revolution but sadly Ubre Blanca was an anomaly. Nonetheless, her death was recognized on the front page of the national newspaper, and she was memorialized with poems, postage stamps, and statues. Her eggs and tissue samples were preserved for future genetic engineering and her big-udder body is on display at the National Cattle Health Center near Havana.

On the opposite end of the cow scale, Castro was also a supporter of mini patio-sized cows that could graze in back yards and would produce up to one gallon of milk per day.

You can learn more about La Reina, Zebu, and Holstein hybrid cows in this video. Grab a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and enjoy.

Ubre Blanca, the postage stamp version