Blowback - S2 Bonus 4 - "CIAin't Kiddin'"

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Guest Luna Olavarria-Gallegos explains how the US government infiltrated and co-opted the hip-hop scene in Cuba.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This week, the Associated Press revealed that the United States government attempted and failed to co-op the hip-hop scene in Cuba to, quote, spark youth movement against the government. This failure comes on the heels of two others, also reported by the AP, one to create a fake Cuban Twitter, and the other to send young people into Cuba to recruit activists. Here to help us make sense of this story is Trish Wilson of the Associated Press, who joins me now from Washington, D.C. So, Trish, what was this program? How did it work? Well, the intent was to radicalize the Cuban people to challenge their own government. And the way it worked was that the USAID contractors infiltrated the hip-hop scene, and we're trying to generate a fan base that would speak out against the government and challenge it and ultimately lead them to democratic reforms.

Most people in the audience are also going to wonder, what does USAID have to do with any of this? I mean, when we think of USAID, usually we're thinking of bags of foods in countries that are desperate for food. How does this line up with the mission? Well, beyond its humanitarian mission, part of USAID's mission is to promote democracy efforts around the world. So this is one of those pro-democracy efforts. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James, and this is Season 2, Bonus Episode 4.

One of Great Britain's most prolific authors of pro-colonial anti-communist propaganda, Richard Crossman, once said this. Quote, The way to carry out good propaganda is to appear to be never carrying it out at all. slightly more official language, a U.S. National Security Council Directive from 1950 at the dawn of the Cold War stated that, the most effective kind of propaganda is that in which, quote, the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own. This principle to launder or disguise propaganda as spontaneous, voluntary, democratic activity is still faithfully followed by the U.S. State Department, the Defense Department, and of course the Central Intelligence Agency. In this season, we've discussed the various covert programs

and schemes that the U.S. government set up against Cuba in the early 1960s following the country's revolution. Now, on this bonus episode, we'll discuss a more contemporary example, perhaps a more subtle example, but one that conveys the endless forms of sabotage that the American empire can take against countries such as Cuba. The topic, the weaponization of music, specifically hip-hop. To discuss this topic and more, we'll be joined by our guest this week, writer and digital producer Luna Orvaria Gallegos. Luna was also the impact producer for the documentary The War on Cuba, which you can see on YouTube. But before we talk with Luna, by way of preface, let's do a little background on this topic.

On March 29, 1949, the Soviet composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, sat in a bridal suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in mid-Manhattan. Shostakovich was a high-profile delegate at the Soviet-sponsored Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. In the years after World War II and the devastating cost paid by the USSR in defeating Hitler, the Soviet Union had peace as a top priority, as would the soon-to-be People's Republic of China, which, for its part, was emerging not just from World War II, but a devastating civil war with the nationalists. Of course, to those in the West that viewed communism as pure evil, this peace conference was yet another sneaky move by the Reds, to lower the guard of the free world and infiltrate good, decent, liberal society.

Protesters in the streets outside the Waldorf Astoria condemned the conference as an insidious propaganda push by world communism. Some Western intellectuals, such as Mary McCarthy and T.S. Eliot, did the same thing in open letters and journals. And right in front of Shostakovich, in the suite, so did Nicholas Nabokov, composer, white Russian emigre, cousin of novelist Vladimir, and arch critic of the USSR. Nabokov harangued his fellow composer Shastakovich, essentially calling him a stooge of his authoritarian

government, suggesting that Shostakovich had placed his role as propagandist before his role as artist. As it happened, Nabokov himself was an active collaborator with the CIA and the state Department. The composer was a key player in the U.S. government's cultural front of the Cold War, and would a year or so after this confrontation with Shostakovich officially become General Secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom? The Congress for Cultural Freedom, or the CCF, was a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, a network of writers, artists, and musicians united in their public stance against communism and in favor of Western-style liberal democracy. U.S. intelligence up till this point had infiltrated organized labor, media, journalism,

even the Iowa Writers' Workshop. So why not the culture as well? The CIA quite literally ran and funded journals, magazines, books that came out, of course, without telling anybody they were doing it, to present the picture of a country and a system that welcomed. all viewpoints and published all ideas as long as at the end of the day they weren't favorable to communism. On the musical front, this was not simply jazz diplomacy, where artists such as Dizzy Gillespie or Louis Armstrong got to go abroad on tour, you know, make America look good. It went deeper than that.

Artists such as Nabokov, who passionately denounced state control of art in socialist countries, were directly in league with the U.S. government itself. As the historian Patrick Iber puts it, through the CCF, as well as by more direct means, the CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War, the closest thing that the U.S. government had

to a ministry of culture. This left a complex legacy. During the Cold War, it was common to draw the distinction between, quote, totalitarian and, quote, free societies by noting that, Only in the free ones could groups self-organize independently of the state. But many of the groups that made that argument, including magazines on the left, were often

covertly sponsored instruments of state power. Look up who exactly was published in the journals sponsored by the CIA, and you may be surprised and disturbed. Although not all of those published were aware of CCF connections, many were conscious and willing collaborators. One of the CCF's magazines published the likes of James Baldwin and Richard Wright. For this cultural propaganda effort, the important thing was not whether someone was radical or left-wing per se. In fact, critics of America were included in the mix to disprove that America or its state apparatus was monolithic, oppressive, and racist. The important thing

was that the influencers here proved you could have your little radical ideas so long as you opposed the actually existing movement and governments of communism. That was the idea behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom in general. And you can read about it in several places. There's most famously perhaps Who Paid the Piper by Francis Stoner Saunders. There's a couple of things in it that are a little outdated. For example, Shostakovich's memoirs that she cites where he talks about how much he hated the Soviet authorities actually turned out to be a Forgery, written by a Russian emigray, but that's a different story. There is also the Mighty Wurlitzer, how the CIA played America by Hugh Wilford, and Finks, how the CIA tricked

the world's best writers by Joel Whitney. But let's move past that initial 40s and 50s era to the time period of our story with Cuba. Ibeard takes notice of one magazine called Mundo Nuevo. turns out to be a CIA-backed publication that targeted Latin America in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Quote, the Congress for Cultural Freedom's programs were not limited to Europe, and in the mid-60s, it was trying to shift its Latin American operation from one that was ineffectively fighting the relatively unimportant pro-Soviet communist parties of the region to one that would subtly undermine the appeal of Fidel Castro's Cuba. It closed one magazine, Quadernos, in 1965, and launched Mundo Nuevo a year later to try and appeal to more left-wing writers.

The initial director, the Uruguayan Emir-Origuez-Monegal, insisted that he was trying to broker peace in the cultural Cold War and have an honest dialogue about art and politics in Cuba. Mundo Nuevo's goal here was to appear as a mediating space where left-wingers could contribute in, appraisals of Cuban socialism, when in fact it was a CIA front, as Iber writes it was successful. Pablo Neruda, the communist poet who only a few years earlier had been the subject of a CCF campaign to undermine his candidacy for the Nobel Prize, contributed several poems. There are interviews with Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges and fiction that would be foundational to the boom in Latin American letters from Jose Donoso and Guillermo Cabaret Infante. Most surprisingly, it published an early excerpt from the still unpublished 100 years of solitude by

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. And Garcia-Marquez, later famous for his close friendship with Fidel Castro, regretted his contribution when connections to the CIA were soon revealed. So there's some background. In the decades after the revolution, the U.S. carried on this strategy, this cultural operation, if you like. The CCF went away in the 1970s, but its tactics continued, among other places, in the Middle East. A little throwback to season one here. Here's a 2011 article in Al Jazeera. The State Department began using hip-hop as a tool in the mid-2000s, when, in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the resurgence of the Taliban, Karen Hughes, then undersecretary of State for public diplomacy,

launched an initiative called Rhythm Road. The program was modeled on the jazz diplomacy initiative of the Cold War era, except that in the war on terror, hip-hop would play the central role of countering, quote, poor perceptions of the United States. Hillary Clinton's State Department spoke openly about, quote, hip-hop diplomacy, in which hip-hop envoys would be sent to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to improve U.S. relations with the mother. Muslim world. But just as we've heard from the Cold War history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, etc., the U.S. government's use of music goes far beyond simply sending artists overseas to showcase American talent and, quote, start conversations. The United States actually creates

and co-ops domestic culture in these countries to secretly manipulate the people. And that legacy brings us to our current era and our current subject of Cuba, from which we read this headline. Associated Press, December 2014, U.S. co-opted Cuba's hip-hop scene to spark change. Havana. For more than two years, a U.S. agency secretly infiltrated Cuba's underground hip-hop movement, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a youth movement against the government, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press. The idea was to use Cuban musicians to, quote, break the information blockade and build a network

of young people seeking, quote, social change. So, this operation appears to have taken place for several years from around 2009 to maybe 2012. It was agents for USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, that ran a program to organize Cuban hip-hop artists into a domestic front. against the Cuban government. Quote, quoting from the AP report, contractors would recruit scores of Cuban musicians for projects disguised as cultural initiatives,

but really aimed at boosting their visibility and stoking a movement of fans to challenge the government, end quote. This was run, in part, by a Serbian contractor, who was a veteran of similar efforts at regime change from the U.S. war against the government of Slavidomelowicz in Serbia, in the late 90s and early 2000s. Quoting again from AP, Creative Associates,

this was the DC firm acting on behalf of the U.S. government, creative associates used a Panama front company and a bank in Liechtenstein to hide the money trail from Cuba, where thousands of dollars went to fund a TV program starring Los Alianos. This is a rap group we'll talk about later. It would be distributed on DVDs

to circumvent Cuba's censors, end quote. Here's some more. detail on the nature of the broader program of USAID. Quoting from Associated Press, the program is laid out in documents involving creative associates international. A Washington, D.C. contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba's communist government. The thousands of pages include contracts, emails, preserved chats, budgets, expense reports, powerpoints, photographs, and passports. The work included the creation of a, quote, Cuban Twitter. This is a topic we'll discuss some other time.

and the dispatch of inexperienced Latin American youth to recruit activists. Now, of course, USAID denied all of this, at least the terminology of, you know, infiltration and cultural propaganda. Quote, any assertions that our work is secret or covert are simply false, the USAID said in a statement. Its programs were aimed at, quote, strengthening civil society. Now, they say that they briefed Congress on all of this, but, Several members of Congress denounced the initiative after it became public. Now, this all culminated in the USAID, attempting to basically hijack or co-opt a Cuban music festival that was independent from any kind of state control at the time. Quote, in 2010, in August, Los Adianos took the stage at Rottia, one of Cuba's largest independent music festivals.

Before a crowd of about 15,000 people, the group lacerated government officials by name. and taunted the police. Part of the program kept getting detained by the Cuban officials who would go through their computers and their thumb drives and were constantly trying to figure out what was going on. The USAID contractors continued to go through customs with their computers and they were detained so many times that the Cubans ultimately figured it out. This all backfired once the Cuban authorities discovered this giant op

because after that, the independent festival was taken over by Cuban authorities to preserve it from being used by the American government. And the artists that were most heavily promoted by USAID left the country or when they left the country to come back were prevented from reentering and performing. This most prominent group, Los Adianos, were caught up in all of this. And after being used by USAID, we're no longer allowed to perform in Cuba. One of the key things that happened is that there was an independent music concert festival in Cuba at the time called La Rottilla.

And at the concert in 2010, the Los Al Dianos performed before a big crowd, a 15,000, the biggest crowd ever. But afterwards, the Cubans figured out that the concert was actually funded by USAID. So they took it over, and that ended the big independent music festival that existed on the island at the time. So that's the general story, as reported by, you know, not a cookie blog, but in fact, one of America's premier wire services. So here with us to discuss this topic and more is Luna Olavaria Gallegos. Luna is a writer and producer, but she also worked with hip-hop artists in Cuba

for many years. So we're lucky to have her. Luna, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the show. Right off the bat, I can't help but notice that NPR has just run an article. I have in front of me here, whose headline reads, quote, the hip-hop song that's driving Cuba's unprecedented protests. Now, they're referring to the protests over the last week or so, and the song they're referring to is Patria and Vida. The world is witnessing Cubans, both on the island and in exile, clamoring for freedom. Cuba, in FIU, we're now this leads perfectly into our topic for today.

So let's start here. You worked with Cuban hip-hop artists for years. Can you give our audience just an idea of the landscape of Cuban hip-hop? What that scene is like, especially over the past decade or so. Thank you so. having me. And you mentioned Los Al Dianos, and I just want to go back to that and add a little bit of context. So

Los Al Dianos are definitely amongst the most famous hip-hop groups in all of Latin America. The group is made up of two, or was made up of two rappers, Aldo and N.B. And they took the Cuban world by storm when they

came out. This is mid Nauts, 2000s. They had provocative lyrics that were incredibly antagonistic toward the government. towards Fidel Castro. And there was a time where Los Al Dianos was blasting in neighborhoods across Cuba and eventually across Latin America.

And so with their rise and their integration into the music industry and the entertainment market, they were invited to do shows outside of Cuba. And this is also a time when there is not really substantial infrastructure for Cuban urban music. Most of the government's attention was towards non-electronic music. So for this group that began as a self-promoted hip-hop group from an embargoed country to get to this level of fame was really, really big. Right. But then what happened after the USAID stuff came out is eventually they left Cuba and they split up and now they have individual careers.

But what they left in Cuba was a full landscape of artists who still have a memory of this romanticized nostalgia era, everything they are talking about with the Rotilla Festival, with the shows. So you have a lot of hip hop artists today in Cuba that are really driven by this memory of their peers in their generation or the one that directly came directly before who were able through their music to have access to travel, to shows, to money, really cool parties. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, basically. Yes. And so you have that at the back of the hip-hop imaginary

and really I see this as one ghost that drives the scene. Interesting. So let's go for a second. beyond Los Adianos and the USAID story, because you can see this kind of thing at play elsewhere. For example, within the past year, the National Endowment for Democracy, this is another arm of the U.S. government that pumps money and messaging and propaganda into countries that America doesn't like. The NED, for short, the NED gave a Colombian magazine called Cartel Urbano, $110,000 within this past year, the magazine goes on to fund a project called M-E-L-A-H,

which supports hip-hop artists. And they recently put out a compilation album. Now, on this compilation, you can find one of the artists who was on the Pathia I Vida song, so the one connected to the anti-government protests. But they also have an artist who has been on the pro-government response to that kind of thing. So on the same compilation, you have artists who are associated with the anti-government stuff and artists right next to them involved in the pro-government messaging.

How does that happen? How should we understand that? You know, artists don't really pay attention to where the money is coming from or honestly the politics that deeply. But that doesn't mean that the money isn't influencing politics. It's about infrastructural sustenance of whole scenes. This kind of messaging is focused on freedom of. of expression, which is, by the way, a CIA talking point. So in my experience, artists really aren't paying attention to that. Right. And when you say that that's a CIA talking point,

for example, you know, the message is never going to be straightforwardly, hey, everybody, overthrow your government. This has been the CIA or USAID. Thank you. Good night. It's going to be things like freedom of expression, being an individual, expressing yourself, etc. These are, basically for the American ideas about individualism and glorifying to people abroad the American way of running a country, as opposed to, say, for example, Cuba's emphasis on more collective goals and the greater good. It's a subtle message, but it's exactly what you would do if you were a smart operative at the National Endowment for Democracy or USAID or the Central Intelligence agency who's going to say don't be yourself don't be an individual don't express yourself it's kind

of bulletproof as propaganda and also what happens is that uh you're getting rewarded for talking about certain freedoms that the united states says we have freedom of expression freedom of the speech freedom of the press which by the way are controlled by corporations so whether or not we actually have those freedoms is is is not very clear but if you're getting rewarded to say these certain things you're going to keep saying them. No one's telling an artist to say, fuck the embargo. So who's going to say that?

So let's go back to Los Adianos because, as you mentioned before, they seem to be a very important thread here in the politicization of Cuban hip-hop. Why them? Why is that? So Los Al d'Aanos, they were really angry and at a time

right after the special period, which you go over in your podcast, they totally embodied youth culture. in a way that was so refreshing to Cubans. It hadn't been talked about and people were really suffering on the streets. So they were really seen as pioneers in a certain way. They were definitely not the first rappers, but they were delivering a message that hadn't really been spoken.

It touched a nerve. Yeah, in a wide way. And also, their style was very loud, angry, aggressive, great ink. Kind of like shocking to a lot of people for, for the first time. Exactly. But what's unfortunate is that this culture, and we see this time and time again,

it's not being sustained by a community or incubated collectively. Instead, it's just co-opted by the U.S. government and very few representatives are chosen. The idea of the artist as a truth teller or someone who sparks political upheaval is that's pretty common in the United States. It's what artists tell themselves.

Certainly, it seems like for many in Cuba, Los Adianos represented a similar idea that they were tapping into something. What resonated in their music with people that made them feel like they were doing this? Yeah, they were saying things no other person was saying on that level. They couldn't even be ignored by the government. And they started a movement that they could not be ignored. But what's striking to me is how they had sort of an oversized influence. So, you know, in the U.S., we don't have that many conscious artists, but every once in a while we do, but we don't ask them for policy suggestions. The politics usually lead the artists, and, you know, we don't want artists to be vaguely leading the politics.

So even if an artist has good politics, I think history shows that beyond that we need artists to be led by labor leaders, educators, organizers, creating political change. Now, something that's particularly interesting here is that. that in the United States, hip hop was long viewed by politicians, opinion makers, ideologues, as a subversive genre of music, something nasty and destructive even. U.S. conservatives and liberals alike had both attacked, you know, the social commentary in rap music and hip-hop as inflammatory, sometimes un-American, insurrectionist, if you like. and it was often associated with the ideas manufactured about, you know, moments of social upheaval that white America was scared of. Hip-hop was that soundtrack for them, the scary sounds of primarily angry young black men.

That's how it was presented. But you flash forward here to 2011, and Hillary Clinton, who herself once referred to young black men as, quote, super predators, now she's championing hip-hop and rap music. abroad, saying that we're going to send our envoys of hip hop out there into the world because we think it's a beautiful genre and we're proud of it. We're proud to show off this music now. So you see this ease by which the same country or the powers that be of that country that demonize this music, it was seen as countercultural, simply adapt and then begin to use it to send into other countries that we have agendas against to try and subvert them and create problems actively. engineer problems through this type of countercultural music for those countries.

Yeah, so you're right. Like hip hop once signaled political counterculture in the belly of the beast, the United States. But in order to understand really why it was so easily used by the CIA, I think it's important to think deeply about the history of it. So the heyday of political hip hop was, as we know, in the late 80s and the early 90s. and this came on the heels of a lot of really tumultuous times in the U.S. So there was a war on drugs, 12 years of Republican presidents, two Reagan eras, one Bush. There was a lot of this type of this music that was in many ways reporting on the way the Reagan years had completely hollowed out the infrastructure in New York

and how the prison industrial complex was a type of genocide, specifically towards black and Latinx men. and then we had KRS 1, public enemy, Queen Latifah. They were really raising the alarm from a very close point of view. And, you know, they were also glorifying and partying in a way that allowed people to cope with this type of trauma. But then later, what this turned into is essentially a type of self-referential version of itself. So in the 90s, hip-hop gets commercialized and it turns into a billion-dollar industry. So we have Wu-Tang, Snoop, Biggie, Dr. Dre, and at the same time in the late 90s, there's like this underground resurgence of black consciousness to have a lot of Afrocentric ideas. So we have Most Def, Talib Kuali, Dead Prez, Tony Touch.

And then these are actually the rappers that end up going to Cuba with this group called Black August. So let's talk about Black August. This is a sort of cultural exchange and show of support between. American rappers in the 2000s, going to Cuba, both as a political statement that you can talk more about and also as a way to simply make contact with and support Cuban rappers. How did Cuban see this? Yeah, so Black August was this project that many hip-hop artists in Cuba looked back to with a lot of nostalgia. There were, I mean, imagine they're in a global South country under an embargo.

They just went through the special period. There is very severe energy rations, food rations. And then you have these really famous rappers that are globally famous coming to Cuba and bringing free equipment in a way that is legitimized in Cuban wrappers on a completely other level. So a lot of Cuban wrappers still today, you can see pull some aesthetics from this era of cultural exchange. cultural exchange, and it's totally tied to the fact that these were the rappers that were coming. And especially, as you mentioned earlier, after the feeling that the kind of folkloric music in Cuba was given all the real resources, then you have these guys coming saying, here's equipment, here's this stuff, and, you know, legitimizing the people who would like that type of music. Yeah, totally. And also these projects, Black August, it was all under the umbrella of being in solidarity with Asata Shakur, who was granted asylum.

in Cuba. Yes, listeners may remember last week our discussion of the ties between the Cuban Revolution and black radicals in the United States. Probably the most high profile example of this would be Asata Shakur who fled a shootout with state troopers in America. She was a militant black radical and ends up fleeing the country and given political asylum in Cuba as an example of that solidarity. And Esada was was considered an important icon in the black consciousness movement in the United States. She was a radical. She was very very and continues to be today incredibly important to a lot of politically

clear visioned movements and ideologies. But then this is where it gets a little muddled because you have this group of U.S. American, mostly men, mostly from New York who are configuring the solidarity. program for Asata, and by extension, a solidarity program for rappers to get materials because they're blocked out by the embargo. But then at no point in that logical sequence of events is the solidarity with the Cuban revolution or the anti-American imperialist stance for the government made explicit.

So at the same time, you also have these trips called Venceremos, which is where people from in the United States are coming to Cuba to cut cane, to paint houses. This is earlier on, actually, but you have these decades of people coming and... In solidarity with the revolution. Specifically in solidarity with the revolution, specifically to help Cuba develop, specifically to do really hard manual labor. And then you, in the 2000s,

you start having these rappers come and the solidarity with the Cuban project is not made explicit. It's made implicit in the fact that Cuba has housed Asata and Asata is safe in Cuba. but it's really disconnected with a larger issue. So yeah, it's very interesting. Just to underline for people what you just said, you have artists from America going to Cuba,

praising that country for sheltering Asat Shikor. But at the same time, they are there to make connections with the Cuban rappers whose whole deal is basically criticizing the same government that gave Asada Shikor political asylum. So it's very interesting. Well, and also this is where it gets a little tricky, because at this point, I think

the formulation against the government, this is before Los Al diano. So the formulation against the government is not that strong yet. It's most, it's definitely there. It's not strident

and it's mostly around identity. And this is also something I think is really important to talk about when we're cultural organizers or intellectuals from the global north. You can't necessarily take

one set of issues and map it onto another context. So one example is you have things like this dead prez is cop shot that's track that is really important in the United States. It's a song about racism, police communities under really inhumane treatment. But when it's taken to a country with radically different situations, it can be seen as really disconnected from the lived reality. So, you know, even after a lot of the problems came to the surface during the special period, Cuba narrowed gaps on important markers of health, education, employment between its black and white citizens. Right. We discussed this in our last bonus episode that in the decades after the revolution,

the Cuban government makes huge strides in basically eliminating the structural racism in education, health, income, employment, things like that. Meanwhile, at the same time period in the United States, all of those indicators are either staying bad or getting even worse. You have the drug war. You have the serious juicing of the prison industrial complex under Reagan and then H.W. Bush and then Clinton. Now, Cuba has also a really tough time in the 90s for reasons we've discussed, the embargo plus the collapse of the Soviet Union. But there had still been real gains that have been made in those decades that they're trying to retain. Very, very different histories and trajectories and contexts there. But to see these rappers who are taking this context from the Global North come and do these types of songs from their context, it in really, reinforces the idea to the global South communities that if you talk about these certain issues, you can make money, you can travel, you can get shows. So it sounds like what you're saying is that an unintended consequence of a solidarity program like Black August

is that arms of the American government like USAID or the NED saw an opportunity there to foment unrest, you know, unbeknownst even to those organizers, you know, and that this could make an opening to twist around, the messaging and the themes of hip hop in America, put it into Cuba in order for something like the USAID program to gain footing years later. Now, does this stuff still happen? Are US rappers still coming to Cuba? Mainstream artists came a lot during the Obama era. So we had, you know, Beyonce, Rihanna, JZ, Major Laser. But by this point, there was really no sense of solidarity messaging in their trips. And it was kind of just, you know, a party. Because what it is is Cuba is seen as a tropical, fun backdrop for urban American music.

Right. So to wrap up here, I would think that all of this taking together, perhaps one of the lessons we can draw is when you're looking at the headlines and you see stuff like X song is generating X protests in X country, with all of this history in the background, maybe we should take stories like that, especially. from Western press, take it with a grain of salt. There might be more going on there that is not going to be reported or at least not reported for many years after. The U.S. State Department is smart, but the more transparency we have about how countries are getting sabotaged by U.S. funding, I think the better off we will be. And better off will be able to recognize how artists can make art without being pawns and being used, because at the end of the day, no one wants to be used.

Yeah, you don't get the sense that really any artist, or at least not many of them, get up in the morning and say, I want to be an investment of the U.S. State Department. I mean, maybe some of them do, but, you know, that's not a great way to go. And I think also something I learned with working closely with Cuban issues is that, you know, there are really big, violent ways that countries are and whole people and societies are under attacks, like military intervention. but there are also really boring economic subtle ways and Cuba is a perfect example from this the embargo is the most powerful way that we all know about but also there are other ways to slowly strangle a place that's it for this week

we want to again thank our guest Luna Olavaria Gallegos for sitting down and talking to us again if you'd like to watch the documentary she helped produce, it is called The War on Cuba, and it's on YouTube. You can watch it for free. Next time, next bonus episode, Noah will be back exploring the origins of U.S. nuclear policy, which will set the tone for the rest of the world during the Cold War, and of course, lead to the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis. We all know so well now. See you next time.

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