HAVANA -- The Rev. Jesse Jackson took him to church for the first time in 27 years. Home-run legend Hank Aaron asked him for autographed baseballs. Literary great Gabriel Garcia Marquez gave him a copy of Dracula that kept him up all night reading and smuggled ingredients into the country so he could make baklava.

An international cast of luminaries who traveled to Cuba and met with Fidel Castro, as well as top members of his government and military, talk about their experiences with the man who ruled the island for 49 years in U.S. documentarian Estela Bravo's Anecdotas Sobre Fidel (Fidel Anecdotes).

``You really see Fidel the man, a little more of who he is,'' Bravo said Thursday at a screening of her 46-minute movie, part of Havana's annual film festival.

A longtime island resident married to a Cuban, Bravo made the 91-minute-long, sympathetic documentary Fidel: The Untold Story in 2001.

For that film, she interviewed Hollywood stars, American authors and political leaders who had met Castro, as well as Cuban government and military leaders and those who knew Castro as a child.

Bravo used leftover, unedited material from those interviews between 1996 and 2000 to produce her latest documentary. She said she had long believed footage left on the cutting-room floor was worth releasing and felt compelled to make the film now, since Havana's humid and salty air was destroying her recorded material.

``He said, `I haven't been to church in 27 years,' '' Jackson says, recalling the shocked faces of the Cuban priests when the pair appeared in 1994.

A small group of ordinary Cubans lined up in front of a gracefully decaying 1950s Havana movie house for the screening -- though most of those in attendance were Ministry of Interior officials or other VIPs, including Alberto Granados, an Argentine who accompanied revolutionary Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara on his 1950s tour through South America that inspired the film The Motorcycle Diaries.

Castro told 1960s radical-turned-academic Angela Davis that he got nervous before making his interminable speeches, something she says has helped her overcome stage fright.

``He's a big star,'' says late filmmaker and actor Sydney Pollack. ``Whether he's a villain or not, he's still a star.''

Castro's co-star in the documentary is food: Cubans and visitors alike discuss his passion for cooking and his overbearing presence in the kitchen.