“Castro was indeed a marvelous interview,” she recalled.
Journalist Georgie Anne Geyer recalled visiting Coppelia with Castro soon after it opened in her book Buying the Night Flight: The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent. They named it Coppelia, after Sánchez’s favorite ballet, and it opened on June 4, 1966. The dictator once ordered his ambassador to Canada “to ship him 28 containers of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, one of each flavor.”Īfter he had tasted them all, Castro declared that the “Cuban revolution must produce a quality ice cream of its own.”Ĭastro put Celia Sánchez - his private secretary and close companion since their days as guerrillas - in charge of opening an ice cream parlor to best Howard Johnson’s. The CIA’s failed assassination attempt did little to curb Castro’s sweet tooth. Inside Havana’s Coppelia ice cream parlor. Quirk concluded that while Castro was “pacified” for the moment, the dictator remained certain that “with intense effort and revolutionary awareness, the Cubans could surpass any country in the world in any field of endeavor.”īut the efforts to outdo the French Camembert quickly faded, and Castro focused his attention on another front - making sure Cuba had more flavors of ice cream than America. My cheese and your cigars have centuries of experience behind them.” “Will you agree that there is a better cigar in the world than this?” Voisin asked. Next, he reached over and pulled a cigar from Castro’s pocket. “It’s like the French,” the diplomat added reluctantly.Ĭastro pushed further, insisting that Voisin acknowledge it was in fact better than French Camembert. Voisin agreed that it was a Camembert “in the French style” and that it was “not bad.” This failed to satisfy Castro, and he pushed Voisin further, comparing the Cuban version to the French. According to Quirk, Castro implored Voisin to try some of the new “Cuban Camembert.” Voisin complied. When French agronomist and diplomat Andre Voisin visited Cuba in 1964, Castro urged him to confess that the new “Cuban Camembert” cheese produced on the island was superior to France’s own.īiographer Robert Quirk summarized the exchange between Castro and Voisin in his book Fidel Castro. The soft, creamy cheese is an iconic French food … and Castro wanted to do better. One of his first pet projects was to produce a superior Camembert cheese.
He oversaw many of them himself, and salvaging Cuba’s troubled milk and cattle industries became top priorities.
#Supercow ice cream series#
When Castro seized power in 1959, he implemented a series of economic, industrial and agricultural reforms. But throughout Fidel’s reign, his interest in leche betrayed both personal and political motives that he often couched in Cold War rhetoric.įor him, Cuban dairy was a symbol of the country’s “ongoing revolution” in opposition to Western and capitalist interests. Milk is a staple of the Cuban diet, and its production is a vital industry and relevant economic indicator.Ĭastro retired from the Cuban presidency in 2008, handing the reigns over to his brother, Pres. There’s few regimes in the world as invested in dairy as communist Cuba. Charles Tasnadi/AP photo Fidel argues cheese with France George McGovern to ice cream in the milk-producing town of Jibacoa on May 8, 1975. The failed assassin abandoned the operation.Ībove - the french cheese Cuba aimed to best. When the waiter tried to remove the pill, it split open and its poisonous contents spilled out. Legend suggests the pill contained arsenic, but the CIA opted for a slower-acting botulinum toxin to allow the would-be assassin enough time to escape, according to CIA documents declassified in 2007.īut the waiter stored the pill in the hotel kitchen’s freezer, and it froze to the freezer’s interior lining. Trafficante and Giancana held grudges against the dictator because he shut down Havana’s casinos, which had been lucrative businesses for them prior to Castro’s ouster of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.Ī waiter at the hotel planned to slip one of the pills into Castro’s milkshake. Richard Bissell, then the CIA deputy director for plans, arranged to offer Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, Jr.- heads of the Chicago and Tampa crime families - $150,000 to help assassinate Castro with a poison pill. But in 1961, the CIA hired Mafia assassins to poison the dictator’s milky meal. When Castro lived in the Havana Libre Hotel in the early ’60s, he would often enjoy a chocolate milkshake from the hotel’s lunch counter.
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