1. As a schoolboy in 1940, Fidel Castro wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt asking for a ten-dollar bill and offering to lead him to Cuban iron mines that could provide ore for use in American shipbuilding.
2. Fidel Castro holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations: 4 hours and 29 minutes, on September 29, 1960. His longest speech on record in Cuba was 7 hours and 10 minutes in 1986 at the III Communist Party Congress in Havana.
3. Fidel Castro was the world's third longest-serving head of state, after Britain's Queen Elizabeth and the King of Thailand. He was not been seen in public since illness forced him to hand over day-to-day control of the country to his brother Raul Castro in July 2006.
4. Despite the CIA plots, a U.S.-backed exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs and four and a half decades of economic sanctions, Castro outlasted nine U.S. presidents, from Eisenhower to Clinton, and faced increased hostility under President George W. Bush, who tightened enforcement of financial sanctions and a travel ban.
5. Fidel Castro claims he survived 634 attempts on his life, mainly masterminded by the Central Intelligence Agency. They allegedly included poison pills, a toxic cigar, exploding mollusks, and a chemically-tainted diving suit as well as powder to make his beard fall out so as to undermine his popularity.
6. Fidel Castro, once a cigar-chomping guerrilla fighter, gave up cigars in 1985. Years later he summed up the harm of smoking tobacco by saying: "The best thing you can do with this box of cigars is to give them to your enemy."
7. One of Castro's pet projects was a cow called Ubre Blanca, or "White Udder", that produced prodigious quantities of milk and became a propaganda tool for Cuba's collectivized agriculture in the 1980s. Ubre Blanca is in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest milk yield by a cow in one day: 110 liters.
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