Former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who passed away in 2016, was known for his love of cigars and baseball, as well as his extravagant lifestyle.

However, some of the more surprising details of his life have only recently come to light.

Castro was introduced to cigars at a young age by his father, smoking his first cigar at 14 or 15 years old.

He later gave up smoking, saying “I’ve smoked too much in my life”, and that he quit on his own accord over 20 years ago.

Baseball was also a passion of Castro’s, as he played as a child in the early 1950s and was an avid fan.

However, after the revolution he banned all professional sports in Cuba, closing the leagues he had played in as a child.

One of the more shocking revelations about Castro was his claim that there were up to 600 assassination attempts on his life, all funded by the United States.

While many of these plots were “fantastic” and “improbable”, some came dangerously close to succeeding.

These included a plan to put a cyanide pill in a milkshake he often drank, a plot to pump a TV studio with hallucinogenic drugs when he gave a speech, and a gun hidden in a camera at an event in Chile.

Castro was known for carrying a 15-shot Browning pistol most of his life, even after breaking his arm and knee in an accident in 2004.

Another surprising detail about Castro’s life was his sexual exploits.

According to a former Castro insider, the dictator had sex with at least two women a day, often during lunch, dinner, and even breakfast.

His guards would recruit women from the beaches of Havana.

In a Vanity Fair article from 2008, it was reported that he frequently made crude sexual comments during speeches.

When asked how many children he had, he replied, “Well, I don’t have a tribe. Not that much, fewer than a dozen.”

Despite living a life of extravagance, Castro claimed that he had no personal wealth, saying “I don’t have a cent of my own.”

However, he was a constant fixture on the Forbes list of the richest rulers in the world, with an estimated fortune of at least $500 million.

Castro respected US President Kennedy, calling him “an intelligent man, sometimes brilliant, brave”, and believed that if Kennedy had survived, relations between Cuba and the US could have improved.

However, he also thought Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy, questioning how Lee Harvey Oswald could fire so many accurate shots.

One surprising fact about Castro was that he personally wrote all of his speeches.

He said that every time he had someone else write a speech for him, it was “empty” and “ineloquent”, and he had to rewrite it entirely.

He was never able to give a speech that he hadn’t prepared and written himself.

These revelations come from Castro’s memoir, “My Life”, which was published in 2007 and written with Ignacio Ramonet.

In the book, Ramonet had unprecedented access to the Cuban leader and was able to gain insight into his thoughts on a variety of topics, including the CIA’s attempts on his life.