Fidel Castro practised shooting with Hemingway's rifles in 1953

Fidel Castro and several people who later took part in his attempts to overthrow Cuban ruler Fulgencio Batista unwittingly practised shooting with rifles belonging to US author Ernest Hemingway, the daily Juventud Rebelde reported Wednesday.

"There is something that no one knows. In 1953, at the CCC (the shooting range El Cerro in Havana) several young men practised shooting without knowing that they did so with rifles belonging to 'Papa'," Fernando Nuez, then custodian of the weapons, said using a nickname for the author of novels such as The Old Man and the Sea.

Nuez, 75, a former judge and former international sports shooting referee, was a teenager at the time.

He claimed he found out "a lot later" who the men led by lawyer Fidel Castro were and what they were trying to do.

"I lent them (the guns) but I did not know at the time that they were preparing the historic assaults on Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo," said Nuez, who also accompanied Hemingway in his shooting practices.

"Fidel would shoot any rifle, but I used to give him Hemingway's favourite, the one he called "the mare" - a .12 calibre with double barrel which was like thunder. But Fidel knew more about weapons than me and than many others who shot there," he said.

Nuez recalled when a high intelligence official asked the young men where they were from and what they were planning to do.

"I cannot forget that Fidel answered: 'We are practising, because we are going on a dove hunt.' He got him off his back with that fine irony," Nuez said. dpa co vs aw