The man, whose real name was Fidel Castro, was not chasing the American dream when he jumped into the river near the town of Reynosa and swam to the US side near McCallen, Texas, on 1 September 1956. He was on a secret mission to get money for weapons and for a boat to take his fellow revolutionaries back to liberate their island from its military dictator.

Cuba's official communist party daily, Granma, published a detailed two-page report on Friday to mark the 50th anniversary of the day it said the future Cuban leader swam what Americans call the Rio Grande but is known south of the border as the Rio Bravo.

Castro had been forced into exile the previous year by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista after spending two years in prison for his daring but disastrous assault on Batista's Moncada army barracks in Santiago on 26 July 1953.

Throughout 1956, Castro, his younger brother Raul . . . now running Cuba while the leader recuperates from surgery . . . and their new friend, an Argentinian doctor, dreamer and drifter called Ernesto Che Guevara, huddled in a Mexico City bar to plan the revolution.

By the summer of 1956, the socalled M-26, or Movement-26, had around 80 members in Mexico and plenty of underground support back home. But it had little money.

So with Cardenas's help, Castro set up a meeting with exiled former Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras, the man Batista had overthrown in a 1952 coup.

It was an open secret that Prio had skimmed off a lot of the country's money during its post-World War II glory days when the island was a magnet for Hollywood stars and US mafiosi. Castro believed Prio should use some of the money to get rid of Batista. Prio agreed to meet Castro but only on US soil.

The former president feared abduction by Batista's agents.

On the US side of the river, Castro was met by sympathisers, given dry clothes and taken to a rendezvous with Prio. The former president admired Castro's nationalistic zeal. But in later years he said he would not have stumped up his hard-stolen cash had he known Castro would turn communist.

Whether Castro swam back was not revealed. What is known is that he returned with enough cash for a couple of hundred rifles and ammunition and a battered yacht bought from a retired American resident of Mexico. The boat was named Granma, in honour of the American's grandmother.

On 25 November 1956, he, Raul, Che Guevara and 79 other Cubans set sail from Tuxpan in Mexico. On 2 December, they landed in Cuba, where their leader stepped ashore and declared to a bemused farmer:

"I am Fidel Castro and I have come to liberate our country".

It took a little more than two years before he rode into Havana, smoking a Cohiba, to tumultuous acclaim. He has been back to the US several times since, mainly to attend UN sessions, but has always taken a plane.