To most outsiders, Cuba is something of an enigma. During the more than half-century-long embargo that has restricted the free exchange of both goods and culture between Cuba and the United States, Americans have built a sort of impressionistic collage of what we think Cuba is like, and what sorts of things we think are common there: vintage cars, cigars, old guys in cool white hats. But what many of us stateside might not realize is that dairy, and ice cream in particular, is as integral to Cuban culture as Cohiba cigars.

As relations soured with the US, CIA plots kept in mind Castro’s famous appetite for ice cream. In 1963, the CIA worked with US-based mafiosi to ply a worker at the Havana Libre Hotel with a pill containing botulinum toxin and instructions to slip it into Castro’s daily milkshake. The plot was abandoned when the worker accidentally broke open the pill while trying to get it unstuck from the interior of the hotel’s kitchen freezer, where it had been stored.

Castro ate ridiculous quantities of frozen dairy. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, a close friend of Castro’s, recalled in a biographical essay that the Cuban leader once finished off a lunch with 18 scoops of ice cream.

It all goes back to Fidel Castro, the communist revolutionary who seized control of the country in 1959 after a violent coup and retained control for longer than any other non-royal leader since Victorian times. Relations between the US and Cuba deteriorated shortly after Castro gained power. In 1962, then-president Kennedy famously bought 1,200 Cuban cigars just hours before expanding the trade embargo to consumer goods, including Cuban cigars. Less known is the fact that Castro, despite his frequent anti-United States diatribes, had his own shipment of forbidden Yankee pleasures. Once the embargo was in full effect, Castro had his ambassador to Canada send him 28 containers of ice cream from Howard Johnson’s, then the largest restaurant chain in the US.

In fact, Cuba is—and seemingly always has been—completely obsessed with dairy. The state of Cuban ice cream has, in fact, over the years, basically tracked the 20th-century political and social changes of the island nation. From the revolution to the modern shift toward a freer market, the story of Cuba’s ice cream is the story of Cuba itself—and it’s changing fast.

Upon taking power, Castro made his dairy obsession state policy. Apparently, after trying each flavor of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, Castro declared that superseding the Yankee ice cream in quality would be one of the aims of his fledgling government. And as the years and decades went on, Castro quite publicly associated the maintenance of a healthy dairy industry with the success of his governance.

Countless historical anecdotes evince the passion with which Castro sought to bolster Cuban dairy. In 1964, he got in a fight with visiting French diplomat André Voisin, after Voisin refused to concede that a Cuban-produced Camembert was better than the French, though he admitted that it was “not bad.”

Castro assured that [Ubre Blanca] was provided special care, including a security detail and an air-conditioned stable where music was played during milking. He brought foreign dignitaries to visit the cow and spoke about her constantly.

Maintaining dairy production necessitated a healthy supply of milk, and prior to the revolution, most of Cuba’s cattle were Creoles and Zebus, neither of which is known for milk production. So Castro’s government purchased thousands of Holstein cows from Canada, and embarked upon a breeding program to hybridize a new breed of Holsteins that could survive the hot and humid Cuban climate. In 1972, Ubre Blanca was born.

Ubre Blanca (“White Udder”), a hybrid Holstein cow, was perhaps Castro’s favorite Cuban citizen due to her prolific milk-producing abilities. In 1982, the Guinness Book of World Records certified her as the world’s highest-producing dairy cow, providing 110 liters in a single day. Castro assured that she was provided special care, including a security detail and an air-conditioned stable where music was played during milking. He brought foreign dignitaries to visit the cow and spoke about her constantly.