by DARIEN CAVANAUGH

Former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro loves milk, and especially ice cream. You could say it does a revolution good.

“One Sunday, letting himself go, [Castro] finished off a good-sized lunch with 18 scoops of ice cream,” famed novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez wrote in his essay A Personal Portrait of Fidel.

The writer was a longtime friend and supporter of the dictator. He would occasionally recall the anecdote in interviews. Sometimes Castro ate 26 scoops, and other times it was 28. Which would sound ridiculous, if not for all the other strange stories about Castro’s love of the creamy treat.

Biographies about Castro are full of curious anecdotes, awkward diplomatic confrontations and bizarre schemes involving cows, milk and an array of other dairy products.

The dictator’s dairy crush led him to argue with a French ambassador about cheese, breed a race of super cows and on at least one occasion … it was nearly the death of him.

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. But in 1961, the CIA hired Mafia assassins to poison the dictator’s milky meal.

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.

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.

A waiter at the hotel planned to slip one of the pills into Castro’s milkshake. 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.

But the waiter stored the pill in the hotel kitchen’s freezer, and it froze to the freezer’s interior lining. When the waiter tried to remove the pill, it split open and its poisonous contents spilled out.

The failed assassin abandoned the operation.