Blowback - S2 Episode 3 - "New Normal"

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

The Cuban Revolution takes power and the counter-revolution begins. The U.S. government, organized crime, and Cuban exiles carry out a campaign of terrorism, assassination, sabotage and psy-ops to turn back the clock.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

CBS Radio presents is Cuba going red? Good evening. The inescapable fact is brutally simple. The island of Cuba, 90 miles off our shores, site of the American naval base that guards our southern defenses, anchor for our defense of the Panama Canal, and key to the political future of Latin America. This Cuban island is today a totalitarian dictatorship and is rapidly becoming a communist beachhead in the Caribbean.

Cuba is today a one-man government held together by promises and fear That is why this report will be told in my voice rather than the voices of Cubans themselves. Welcome to Welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is episode three, New Normal. there with a clip from CBS in May of 1959, asking, is Cuba going red and calling it a totalitarian

dictatorship? We'll see in a little bit why that broadcast might have aired in that month of that year, because last episode we traced the origins of Cuba's relationship with the United States, which culminated in the uprising, the revolution against Fohencio Batista and his cronies. Now, in 1959, the first year of the Cuban Revolution, the revolutionary government will start to enact some revolutionary policies. This will start a chain of events that send U.S.-Cuba relations spiraling until Cuba is down one superpower trading partner and up one blockade. We'll see in this episode how the revolution's initial moderate government

gives way to a bolder socialist revolution. We will see the origins of the Cuban counter-revolution. We'll see the beginning of a terror campaign directed against Cuba, launched from the United States, a mysterious explosion in Havana's Harbor. We will see the beginning of the assassination programs against Fidel Castro. And in the face of all of this, we will see the budding friendship between Cuba and the Soviet Union, which will only drive America further toward a manic obsession in the Caribbean. So last we left our story, the revolution had triumphed.

Its leaders in the masses of Cuba, workers, Campesinos, the peasants, but also its middle classes and bourgeoisie, were enjoying an afterglow, while the upper crust of American government and industry types were feeling a distinct chill. This chill went from Ford Motor Company all the way down to the old mafioso Meyer Lansky, who still hoped to carve out some space in post-revolutionary Cuba.

The victory of the revolutionaries, in fact, spelled doom for the mafia's racket in Cuba, which was, you know, entirely despised by most people. Yes. In fact, cleaning up Havana and cleaning up the mob-owned casinos and hotels was one of the more obvious points on the agenda for these guerrillas. Yeah. And the organizers who had campaigned so hard against the dirty mob-ridden government of Batista. Florida mob boss Santo Traficante, attempting to find a weak link here, tried to infiltrate the new

Cuban government the way that mafia guys would do back home. but he didn't get very far. In fact, he was soon arrested on suspicion of heroin dealing by the Cuban authorities. Traficante, after making it out of this jam and returning forever to the United States, said this. Quote, I thought we would never stop making all that money in Cuba. Those were great times. Who would have known that crazy guy, Castro, was going to take over and close the casinos? I thought the Marines were going to straighten everything out.

We were talking with Rafael Hernandez, editor of the Cuban magazine, Temas, about this moment in which the mafia was still open to doing business with the revolutionary regime, but they did not get any love back. I have a friend who was one of the top leaders of the Cuba's state security in the early months of the revolution. He was a commander from the Sierra Maestra. He had been fighting with Raul Castro. He told me that he remembered the day when the mafia guys, the representative of the mafia business in Havana, came to see him to his office to tell him, we are ready to do business with you. And let me guess. He said no. And, of course, the mafia was not very happy with that. So the mob would have to wait a bit before they had the chance to really start.

strike back. I'm asking you to leave, sir. Yeah? Fuck you in this bullshit. That's what this is, you know. Satanic black magic. Sick shit. In early January 1959, just days after the victory of the revolution, you saw the first real anti-Cuba campaign waged by U.S. officials and the press. This moment was key in shaping a long-term boogeyman out of the Cuban revolution, in the minds of both Americans and future counter-revolutionaries. The big story coming out of Cuba, supposedly, was this. Barbaric executions of Batista-era war criminals. Castro has accused the Batista forces of 20,000 murders.

Now, he takes revenge through a series of war crimes trials that convict and execute more than 600 army and police officers. Immediately after their victory, the first thing that the revolution, did was to make good on another one of their long-standing promises, which was to bring in the worst of the torturers, killers, and thieves of Batista's military, I mean, not even government, military, and bring them to what was, you know, called revolutionary justice. Now, one example of these trials would be, as Time Magazine offered, a naval officer who roasted six people alive in Pilon in 1956, and who supervised 300 people slaughtered all at once in Sanfuegos after an uprising in 1957. convicted war criminals are lined up, shot, and buried in a ditch by a bulldo. The trials were swift, and they were held in public areas like football stadiums, as crowds cheered while they watched a lot of these men go to the firing squad. Castro wanted to know how his countrymen felt on the subject, and the historical reception

shows that Cubans would support just about anything he did. But let's look a little closer at this. Scholar Michelle Chase writes, most concede that the men were probably guilty as charged. And according to Cuba's own Revolutione magazine at the time, there were acquittals, and some avoided the death penalty. Still, the New York Times, who had actually once provided the rebels with much-needed press coverage, now tutted and scaremongered. The new Republic, the Atlantic, all the usual suspects, started running anti-Castro pieces. Just 90 miles away, Miami feels the backwash of the revolution, as refugees stream in to avoid the firing squad. The Washington Daily News would tell you that, quote,

Fidel Castro's determination to proceed with, quote, rebel justice, drumhead trials, mob juries, and arbitrary executions, cannot avoid stirring second thoughts among those who had hoped the revolution signaled the end of tyranny. Joining the media chorus were actual American politicians. One Senator Capehart of Indiana told of a, quote, spectacle of a bearded monster stalking through Cuba, presumably Fidel Castro. Another congressman from Ohio said that the U.S. needed to, quote, calm Castro down before he depopulates Cuba.

If Batista was like Hitler, truly Castro will prove to be like Stalin. The unfortunate people of Cuba will discover that they have been betrayed. Let's have a look at this so-called depopulation. Reliable counts put the estimate of those Batistiano's executed north of 500. This was, frankly, conservative compared to the numbers following the 1933 coup ousting Herardo Machado, in which at least 1,000 people were killed, and the United States had supported that coup. And of course, this was far, far fewer than the thousands and thousands that Batista security forces had killed in the preceding two years of civil war.

It was, for example, as the Times of Havana put it, lower than the number of bodies, quote, found in the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft showing evidence of evidence of torture by agents of Batista during the war. And if you thought all of this was coming from some caricature of a bloodthirsty revolutionary propaganda mill, in fact, American expatriates, including another New York Times correspondent, remarked that the aftermath of 1959 was far more disciplined and controlled than 1933. And why might that be when many Cubans were depending on justice for the thousands of their own slaughtered by Batista's military? Well, one reason might be that the revolutionary government was in fact containing a potential bloodbath, not carrying one out.

Fidel Castro personally appealed to the people of Cuba not to take matters into their own hands, declaring it was the duty of a government and not vigilantes in the streets. Castro broadcast speeches urging the people to be calm and telling them that every war criminal will be tried, arrested, and punished. One priest in Cuba at the time recorded, quote, thanks to the wise campaign directed by Fidel, seconded by his people in the villages and the cities, the people of Cuba gave a high lesson in civic responsibility, incomparably superior, he added, to that of the European peoples. Still, as one-time CBS journalist Robert Tabor put it, the U.S. press, which had viewed the atrocities of Batista, and for that matter, the Holocaust

of Hiroshima, with equanimity, was horrified at these 500 Batisteanos killed. but perhaps it wasn't really about the number of deaths or killing in general. Members of the press and the U.S. government seemed to just not like the look of these ruffians that had taken over the U.S. sugar colony. And interestingly enough, it was Alan Dulles, head of the CIA, who seemed unfazed, telling a congressional audience, quote, when you have a revolution, you kill your enemies. They have to go through this. It looks as if the ex-President's followers are not worth a cupful of burnt sugar.

Despite outside criticism of Castro's methods, trials and executions will continue. The Cuban revolutionaries are now in government. What now? Order has returned to Havana, but enthusiasm and fervors still fill the air, following the final assumption to power of the revolution. regime, now the legally recognized provisional government. Let's start with money, because one of the less pleasant things about successfully pulling off a revolution is that you get stuck with the bill. Right, because there was a reason you carried out the revolution in the first place.

That starts to become clear. The Cuban rebels took over a very dismal balance of payments, courtesy of the lopsided trade deficit that Batista was running all those years. And by the benevolent magic of capitalism, $300 million was sucked out of Cuba in dividends and interest, while only $120 million in foreign capital was going in. And that doesn't even mention the millions of dollars belonging to the Cuban government that were frozen by the United States government,

or the hundreds of millions today, again, billions of dollars that had been sucked out of the Cuban government by the rampant corruption under Batista's rule. Maybe most alarming was that gold and foreign exchange reserves were depleted. And it would be Che Guevara in a role maybe no less intense then his time as a medic and a guerrilla commander who would be put in charge of the national bank soon enough. It would be his job to stop the bleeding, so to speak, and build up reserves right quick. So this is an insane situation for anybody to be in.

I mean, we see governments all the time today run by people with PhDs and that have, you know, theoretically been around for decades and they can barely manage to get their affairs in order. Sure. The Cuban revolutionaries had never run a government before. On top of it all, they were extremely young. Yes, the average age of a minister, according to Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, was 33 years old. And in a self-crit, many revolutionaries would later stress the improvisational nature of these early days, bemoaning their, quote, inexperience. Because while there were still elements of the professional classes inside of Cuba, we will see that they will not prove to be the sturdiest plank of the revolution.

And oftentimes, and increasingly, there was a choice between poaching someone eminently, qualified, so-called, or someone genuinely loyal to the revolution. But still, a lot was accomplished even within the first few months. To run through some of it here, there were price control laws, confiscation of property that had been stolen or embezzled by the Batista cronies. There was a whole government department dedicated to it, actually. Rents and mortgages were slashed up to 50% for apartments costing under $100 a month, and a ceiling was put on housing prices, and a home building program was initiated. Several New Deal type programs were slated for fields like education, housing, and health. We'll see more about how that developed later.

The electric company, a U.S. subsidiary worth $300 million in supplying 90% of the island's power, was ordered to reduce its rates by 20% and extend its services to the neglected countryside. Cuba's telephone company, a $150 million investment, was forced to abolish recent rate increases and also improve its services. You had taxes reduced, made more. more progressive and well-to-do tax dodgers were hunted down. Journalist Robert Tabor adds, quote, the business classes had asked for honest government, and they found to their surprise that they were getting it.

All of this was set in motion in the beginning of 1959 by a liberal government. Yes. Fidel Castro did remain the commander-in-chief of the new rebel army, which had completely taken the place of the previous military edifice. Because, as Paul Sweezy puts it, quote, previous Latin American revolutionary regimes risked being thrown out by the old army if they move to implement their declared program. Fidel's regime risks being thrown out by the new army if it failed to do so. Dr. Castro, it is reported that you feel that your role in

the revolution is about over and that you plan perhaps to return to civilian life. Is this true? And if not, how soon do you think it'll be before you can do that? My obligation with the people, what I have to do now and in the future is that would be good for my country. And if for my country, is necessary I renounce to any position. I would gladly renounce to any position because sincerely I don't ambition power, money, not only to serve my country. So let's look at the civilian leadership. The president of Cuba was a guy named Manuel Urutia, a middle class politician who led a government made up of mostly middle class professionals. They wanted reform and they wanted independence from the U.S. to a point. And that's a point that will become clear in just a bit.

So from the get-go, there was this tug of war between radicals like Che and conservatives like Arutia. And so in February, Fidel becomes prime minister. Arutia is still president, but Fidel becomes prime minister. Because the government is starting to show that some in it are unwilling to break with the status quo, what many felt that the revolution was really meant to deliver. And from there, this friction, you know, what the radicals were driving for, and what, you know, those representing the more respectable people were driving for, this friction only increased, and things took on a new momentum. Right. By July, 1959, Orutia would resign as president.

He had been making a bunch of the same anti-communist noises as many a counter-revolutionary in the U.S. and elsewhere, and he had picked a fight with the immensely popular leadership. Yeah. And he was replaced by a Fidelista. By November 1959, Che would be put in charge of the National Bank. And by the next year, you had a government that much more closely meant, the orientation of both its army and its peasantry. The 26th of July movement holds meetings all over Havana,

and almost always Celia Sanchez takes her place near Castro. Known as a dedicated communist sympathizer, she now holds an important spot as private secretary to him. And this process we're describing is an important thing to stress or to underline, because remember, at this point, the Cuban government is not carrying out a communist or socialist revolution, Not even the radicals or the Cuban Communist Party is claiming this, and it's not clear that Fidel is anything more than a left-leaning nationalist, as Alan Dulles himself told Congress when the

revolutionaries were taking power. But the acceptance of communists and the more radical policies being discussed in the new government set Cuba apart from other revolutions or reform movements that fairly quickly or easily dissolve into more of the same U.S. clientilism. And the moderates the conservative middle class types that were fellow travelers against Batista only a short time before, they are starting to fall into a very well-trodden path toward anti-communism. So out of either fear of the United States or genuine principle, maybe a mixture of both, the moderates were not showing themselves willing to truly break with what had made the revolution happen in the first place.

One could argue that they were taking a lesson from Guatemala, which is that the association of our bends with any communist was what resulted in the destruction of his regime. Sure, I suppose the lesson of Guatemala, you could be taking this one of two ways. The moderates were thinking, okay, we don't want Guatemala to happen to us. We don't want to test the patience of the United States and lose the gains we've made after overthrowing Batista. The more radical position said, well, let's take a lesson from Guatemala that we should not resubmit ourselves to be servants of the United States.

and in fact, let's get working on a way so that we don't have to worry about what they think, no matter what we choose to do as a country. And the real moment of truth about all of this came in May 1959, the same month that we heard that CBS broadcast in the beginning of the show, which just so happened to be when the Cuban Revolution kicked off land reform. On May 17, 1959, the agrarian law was signed. Fidel handed a $100,000 check to Commander René Vallejo and said, Produce!

You're a producer, Dan. Produce. This law would deliver a key promise of the revolution, certainly one the guerrilla fighters owed to the Campesinos and the Sierra Maestra, to take the land and therefore the wealth and power of Cuba, from the few and give it to the many. Now, the basic points of the agrarian reform law were this. Most holdings over 1,000 acres, would be expropriated by the state to be distributed to the hundreds of thousands of landless rural workers, the families of whom were guaranteed around 66 acres free with the ability to buy additional land.

No more sharecropping, and in the future, land would only be transferable by inheritance or to the state, so there could be no private concentration or amalgamation of property. Compensation for those expropriated was in the form of 20-year government bonds, which paid 4.5% interest, payable in pesos, not convertible into dollars. And within one year, around 60% of land was taken over, and 250,000 acres of previously uncultivated land was used to start trying to diversify crops, so Cuba would not have to import as much. We spoke with Raphael about the importance of land reform. In May, May 1959, five months after the beginning of the revolution, we had the land reform.

The land reform was hitting the heart of American big companies as big as the United Fruit, King Ranch, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we were fighting the United Fruit, really making the United Fruit angle. nine months after the revolution. So Fidel Castro understood that that was going to happen very soon. The radicalization of the revolution was the consequence of the way the Cuban-Ople class reacted to that land reform. As important as this policy was, a policy laid out by Fidel's speech in 1953, if you recall,

making this mass of people who own no property owners of land overnight, The law would go beyond redistribution. There was an agency created that became very powerful for the first several years of its existence, the Institute for Land Reform, or INRA, INRA. InRWA would build new homes and people stores. These were shops funded by the state so people could buy goods where they couldn't before. Cooperatives were established, where workers could live, send their kids to school, and where they made wages two or three times higher than they used to.

And at the end of the year, a cooperative that had made a profit off of a work. what it produced, split the profits among its members. Now, this was certainly a victory for the masses in Cuba and therefore a revolutionary policy. But in the grand scheme of things, it really wasn't that radical. For example, when the U.S. enacted land reform in post-war Japan, the terms given to expropriated owners were actually less generous than in revolutionary Cuba. The difference here was that it was U.S. landowners and their associates being told by a smaller former client colony to cough up, not the other way around. And it was, would cost them billions of dollars in expropriated property, forcing the U.S. to pay much higher

prices for imports of the raw materials that they were previously able to get on the cheap. And for them, these cheap raw materials, you know, it's sort of the whole point of exploiting these countries in the first place. The United States immediately denounced Cuba's land reform. But every cloud has a silver lining, and this did make one thing much easier for our friends at the State Department and the CIA, and that was recruitment... for the Cuban counter revolution. Fidel Castro is not only the architect of the Cuban revolution.

He also made Miami what it is today. After his successful revolution, hundreds of thousands of Cubans poured into Miami. The exiles came from Cuba's upper and upper middle classes. They were professionals, industrialists, property owners, politicians, even some gangsters among them. They made Miami an economic and trade center of the Caribbean and Latin America.

It was a Cuban psychologist, Dr. Franz Stetmeier, of the University of Oriente, who once identified a key aspect of counter-revolution as, quote, the anticipation of loss, unquote, the fear of losing status, not only for yourself, but for your legacy, for your family down the line, your children and your children's children. And this anticipation of loss, this was felt by the middle of 1959 in Cuba, but by the upper and some of the middle class who had enjoyed comfortable, charmed lives while the average working person

had been languishing until now. It was felt by the old military aristocracy. It was looking around at a new and strange rebel army. It was felt by landlords whose income had been halved. Large landowners whose empires were marked for expropriation. It was felt by bankers and businessmen who faced credit and import restrictions. And, as we were just discussing earlier,

it was felt by political and professional leaders who realized they were not really fitting in to the flow and momentum of politics post-revolution. Even some commanders who had fought Batista in the muck with Fidel and the rest would soon show their true colors as anti-communists through and through who would become enemies of the new government. When the Cuban Revolution occurred, the people who obviously had the most to lose were the wealthy and the well-educated doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs,

as well as a few gangsters here and there, of course, who had no desire whatsoever to hack away at the sugar cane in the fields. We spoke with Marta Nunez Sarmiento, a Cuban sociologist and lifelong supporter of the revolution, about this moment in which the middle classes are starting to get spooked and beginning to leave the island, especially because she comes from a family of middle class professionals, Catholic middle class professionals at that. But her family decided to stay. Well, my family was, my milieu was an upper middle class family. My father was a very well-known journalist in one of the main Cuban newspapers. My mother was a teacher, high school teacher. And my father was also a public relations person for two American companies in Cuba. So I'm coming from several generations of professionals. Our families didn't have properties to just have the university, Tyler,

and they were quite well paid. You said that you attended an American school. Yes. I'm assuming you were still at this American school at the time of the revolution. Could you tell me a little bit about, you know, sort of what the other families at this school, like, you know, you described this experience to me

of how you were the only one left standing or something, to that effect, in the school as a student over the course of the revolution. Could you describe how that happened and why? Well, this school was a very prestigious, just very elitist, very expensive school. It was called Ruston Academy, R-U-S-T-O-N. I was raised, I was really brought up, as well as my brother, to become a Cuban-American, a real Cuban-American. Now, in 1959, in January, and during the first months, there was a sort of a joy towards

a revolution, even in my school, even in my school. These things started to go down, to decrease when the agrarian reform started in May, 1959, because the majority of the students were either, their parents were working in the American embassy or were working in American enterprises in Cuba and had properties in Cuba. So when they started nationalizing first the agrarian reform, and then in October 1959,

they started, the revolution made the urban reform, which meant that the owners of homes were nationalized, we all became owners of homes. Let's say there was another thing that affected the parents of my Cuban classmate. And what was your experience, your journey really, from this middle-class, conservative, Catholic scene into becoming a revolutionary? By the beginning of a revolution, the sector which I belong to, the upper middle class, yes, the majority of us, were Catholic. Now, Cuba has never been a Catholic nation. Never. We have been portrayed always at the Catholic nation. We have never been. The Catholic Church in Cuba was very against the revolution, very, very against a revolution because there were no Cubans there. The majority

were Spaniards coming from Franco. And so that was a type of church that we had in Cuba. So that was something I belong, my parents belong. A movement that nobody talks about it was very important. that beginning of revolution. It's called With a cross and with a homeland or the motherland. That was a name. It was not a very big one.

It was only in Havana. It was upper middle class white association of Catholic revolutionaries. And in that milieu, it was really when I became a revolutionary because at the same time I was a member of the Young Catholics League. in the school that was very, very against revolution.

And you know what gave me the notion of being revolutionary, not seeing, not watching the poor people in the streets or around the churches? The revolution, there was one of the first things the revolution did. We stopped seeing poor people on the streets while a Catholic church just did charity. We never did something to erase that power. already upon that people. And the revolution did that. And I saw that. And there was one of my main arguments when I was debating in my American school with other Catholic students. See Wright Mills put it well. Every revolution has its counter-revolution. That is a sign

the revolution is for real. The original organizer of counter-revolution was, of course, Fulhencio Batista, the immediate former leader. Batista had fled to the Dominican Republic, after being denied entrance to Florida by Eisenhower. But under the hospitality of fellow right-wing dictator Raphael Trujillo, and with a fortune stashed away of his own embezzled public funds, Batista set out to become the central figure, the dawn of Cuban exiles. And the once-in-future king. Right. He was, after all, the fallen leader of the old order.

So Batista, remotely from the Dominican Republic, starts to fund counter-revolutionary operations through Florida, to which the Eisenhower administration helpfully turns a blind eye. In fact, historian Jack Holhoon notes that Batista's former interior minister was in the United States, quote, sponsored by the CIA at the time, perhaps indicating tacit support of these operations. Right. By the middle of 1959, it was basically an open secret that Cuban counter-revolutionaries

were being trained, equipped and recruited in Florida. The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Miami Herald. They all published photos and reported on it. police were paid to look the other way. And the main operation he was running was this. Batista used the money he'd stolen from Cuba to buy the Biltmore Terrace

Hotel in Florida and run it remotely as a counter-revolutionary headquarters. Yet another mafioso, for our story, a guy named Norman Rothman, managed the Biltmore, and more importantly managed guns and ammo to Batista's nascent

network of exiles. Rothman, as a mobster, was close to both Santo Traficante and Meyer Lansky, and as James Cocaine writes, Lansky, who had perhaps lost more financially and politically as a result of the Cuban revolution than any other mob leader, pushed for a mob counterattack. This was, by the way, not Lansky's first rodeo here. He had been involved in the U.S. invasion of Sicily, and also in running guns to Israeli paramilitary cells in Palestine at the end of the 40s.

So according to FBI documents, quote, Rothman supplied dynamite to an unnamed Cuban exile group to blow up Cuban aircraft at the Miami International Airport in August 1959. He supplied another hundred pounds of dynamite to, quote, blow up the Revolution newspaper offices in Havana. Rothman also assembled a private air force to carry out bombing missions inside of Cuba. And this was the first wave of terrorism sponsored against Cuba that would become a fixture for many years to come. mercenary pilots at this point would fly small airplanes into the country to bomb sugarcane fields and sugar mills in order to destabilize the Cuban economy. According to the FBI at the time, the Biltmore Terrace operation had already hired a group of pilots to fly 10 firebombing

missions over Cuban sugar cane fields. Rothman also met with a feared Cuban ex-Senator and really warlord named Rolando Masferere at the Biltmore Hotel. They planned a hit on this one mercenary who, having been discovered by the Cuban intelligence, was now operating as a double agent. They wanted to knock this guy off for betraying them. The gangster Rothman said he was, quote, in solid with the Manorino organized crime family in Pittsburgh. He offered Masferere financial assistance for sabotage operations in Cuba, quote, in exchange for certain concessions for the Manorino crime family if Masferre toppled Castro. This is the kind of network that the counter-revolutionary exiles

were organizing from the very beginning. Pure, uncut, gangsterismo. The most ambitious Batista-sponsored operation was known as the Pedraza Plan. It was organized by a bunch of thugs from the Batista era who had escaped Cuba united under the tutelage of a mob-connected general, and their plan was an invasion of Cuba.

Yeah, it was called the Padreza Plan. It was named after that general. And the FBI monitored this operation, with Jay Edgar Hoover reporting, quote, former Cuban president, Valhensio Batista, has contributed $2 million, and 30 or 40 other wealthy Cubans also made large contributions. The backers and leaders were, quote, influential Cubans who are anti-communist and pro United States. In August 1959, this exile invasion force,

which had already been discovered by Castro and his men, landed by plane in Trinidad inside of Cuba. The rebel army, waiting in the bushes, emerged and smashed the invasion rather handily. Not long after this, Fuencio Batista soon realized that outside of this motley gang, he did not command the respect of the growing exile community. Batista eventually shut down the Biltmore operation, moving to Europe and spending his golden years in Spain and Portugal. In an odd little end note here, at the time of this recording, if you go and look up Batista's Wikipedia, it claims without citation that he rather ironically went on to become the chairman of a Spanish life insurance. company. But I cannot find any evidence for this, so our tireless fact checker for this season, Matthew Giles, reached out to one of Batista's biographers, Frank Argolde Frere, of Kane University, who was in touch with the Batista family and says they deny this. And as Argoet Ferre put it,

quote, Batista was so wealthy, he did not need any employment. Job title, exile dictator with a boatload of money. And with that boatload of money in Europe, Batista would grow old and fade from relevance and from memory. But the Cuban counter-revolution was not going anywhere. In fact, it was about to pass over into much more capable hands. In mid-April, 1959, Fidel made a trip to the United States. He was actually greeted by huge crowds and a lot of press, and was meant to improve the fraying relations between Cuba and the United States. One can imagine that while Fidel was aware that his giant neighbor to the North was not particularly enjoying the trajectory of Cuba's new government. He wasn't going to have any

easier time running the country with the U.S. looming over him as a full-blown enemy. It appears he thought some level of mutual respect and recognition of each other's government was possible, even desirable. But not only did President Eisenhower refuse to meet Fidel, his Secretary of State met the Cuban leader in a hotel rather than the State Department, making it clear, apparently, that the visit had no official character. Eisenhower skipped the meeting to play golf, sending Richard Nixon to meet Castro in his place. Nixon's opinion of Castro, he needs to be watched carefully. Shortly after that, in Buenos Aires at a meeting of the OAS, the Organization of American States,

Fidel challenged the United States to give Latin America the kind of help that Europe got after World War II with billions in direct loans to industrialize. The U.S. would ignore this idea for now. Now, by this point, Alan Dulles, who, as we heard last time, initially hedged on the ideological character of the Cuban rebels, now a few months later, he was stating that Cuba was the biggest problem in the Western Hemisphere. Dulles, of course, was the id of the American secret police, but as Jack Colhoun puts it, quote, with the passage of Cuba's Agrarian Reform Act, land reform, a new consensus toward the Cuban Revolution began to take shape in Washington. The Eisenhower administration's attitude hardened as policymakers considered

the implications of the nationalization of properties of large U.S. landowners in Cuba. Because in effect, the Cuban Revolution had been a declaration of independence from the United States, which had treated it like a colony since 1898. So land reform had the effect of juicing talks of intervention. Even the relatively straight-laced associated press, you know, a wire service was writing that the U.S. might have to step in to intervene and save Cuba from, quote, chaos. When a new American ambassador arrived in Havana after the revolution, the first question, he asked the Cuban foreign minister was, quote, what do you intend to do to clean up communism in Cuba? Phrased a little bit differently, but making essentially the same point, the demands of the

Eisenhower government in the aftermath of the land reform was, what compensation is coming to U.S. stockholders for all the sugar land and cattle land and other things that have been expropriated under your land reform. Fidel would later tell the UN General Assembly, quote, notes from the State Department rained down on Cuba. They demanded three things, speedy, efficient, and just payment. That means pay right now, in dollars, and whatever we ask for. Business bad, fuck you pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you pay me. The place got hit by Lightning, huh? Fuck you pay me. We began the episode with this in May of 1959.

CBS ran a radio special titled, Is Cuba Going Red? As one Western observer put it, if it looks like a tiger and growls like a tiger, and has claws and teeth and muscles like a tiger's, if it produces cubs that act like tiger cubs, it would be the prudent decision of a reasonable man not to open its cage and invite it home to lunch. This is Stuart Novins. Good night.

According to one-time CBS newsman Robert Tabor, this report was produced under the supervision of Alan Dulles and the CIA. CBS News stands behind its initial report. The material was carefully researched, reported, and checked. Despite all of these stories in America in 1959 about Cuba's new hyper-communist left-wing government, it was, in fact, only until October 1959 that the Soviet Union sent someone to Havana.

Alexander Alexiev wore thick glasses and was the owner of, quote, a big-boned body. During World War II, he was posted in Moscow in case of a Nazi takeover and became a career KGB man, spending time in Iran, North Africa, France, and in the 1950s, Latin America. And although he was simply designated a cultural advisor, Alexiev, more than any future official Soviet ambassador, became the guy that the Cubans dealt with on the island. And what were his first observations upon arriving in Cuba? Yeah, he got there in October, as we just said, and later confessed, quote, I could not understand what kind of revolution this was, where it was going.

Now, Alexiev's initial thoughts there reflected in general the USSR's stance on Cuba at that point. The Soviets had sent a few Warsaw-packed weapons in late 1959 as a little gesture, and they had sent Alexiev, but that was it. Even Che Guevara, one of the most open and gung-ho communists on the Cuban side, said that the country's relationship with Moscow should probably grow more gradually due to the open hostility coming from America. Meeting Fidel for the first time,

Alexaev wore a nice suit. And Castro, still in his signature military fatigues, teased him. He said, Alexandro, how old is your revolution? And Alexiev says, since 1917. And Castro said, so then in 42 years, we will also be as bourgeois. Alexev supposedly never wore a tie again.

In their meeting, Fidel's main concern as expressed to Alexeyev, was economic strangulation, as he put it, by the United States. He rather presciently worried that the U.S. could destroy the Cuban economy in as little as two years. Alexeiv, for his part, noted that the one thing Castro would refuse to budge on was accommodation with American imperialism. In a dinner meeting with Alexeiov, Castro told him that he desperately needed to import oil and export sugar, which Alexeiov promptly related to the Soviet first deputy and top diplomat Anastas Mikoyan. So we're in late 1959 now in the fall, and the State Department and the CIA have plans

not only to destabilize the new revolutionary government and economy, but in the long term, to overthrow it. Assistant Secretary of State Roy R. Rubottom, very much an Assistant Secretary of State name, recalls, quote, on October 31st, in agreement with the CIA, the State Department recommended to the president approval of a program, which authorized us to support elements in Cuba opposed to the Cuban government. This is the key part, while making Castro's downfall seemed to be the result of his own mistakes. U.S. policy in Cuba was being rebranded, as Jack Calhoun puts it. The Cold War rhetoric would increasingly obscure the origins of a confrontation

between the United States and the Cuban Revolution, which evolved out of Cuba's turbulent history and the U.S. role on the island since 1898. In other words, and we see this process often on the show, we were going to pretend as though the relations between Cuba and the United States were a blank slate, if anything, we had always been nice to them, and that the Soviets were the real empire, bringing this poor country into their orbit with their perverted favorable trade deals and defense pacts. Simultaneously, Fidel Castro was painted as both a duplicitous fire-breathing radical, and a complete sellout who had given his country and his revolution over to a nefarious foreign influence. Fidel Castro, he began as an idealist, a patriot who was

hailed as the George Washington of Cuba. But Castro betrayed his revolution and sold his country's birthright to the communist. It really doesn't matter whether Castro is a communist or a willing dupe of communists. The resulting Cuba is the same. To the Cuban people, it is unimportant whether Castro was a communist from the beginning or whether he sold out to the Reds after he took power. Fidel Castro, hungry for approval and adulation, will persuasively tell any given audience what he thinks it wants to hear. Those who fought with him supported him and hailed him are painfully aware that Fidel Castro has betrayed their revolution and their nation. As these types of broadcasts went out, air raids that we've previously discussed continued dropping arms to, quote, rebels in Las Vias in the middle of the island.

They were still bombing Cuba's all-important sugar cane, and one of them in October caused several casualties. The U.S. knew nothing of this stuff, wink-wink. The Eisenhower administration's official moves against Cuba were just as devastating. They stopped selling them planes for crop dusting, cut off U.S. technical assistance to the island, credit, even from Europe, was blocked. And then there were noises, really scary ones for the Cubans, that the U.S. would eliminate its longstanding deal to buy Cuban sugar. Obviously, the U.S. was the market for the one crop that Cuba was still dependent on. In late October, 1959, Eisenhower threw sharp words at Castro for alleging U.S. complicity in the terror attack.

on the island. Here is a country that you would believe, on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends, Eisenhower said. The whole history of our intervention in 1898, our making and helping set up Cuban independence, it is a puzzling matter to figure out just exactly why the Cubans would now be so unhappy when, after all, the principal market for sugar exports is right here. And if that's Eisenhower's attitude publicly, then it's no surprise that by January 1960. New year, new approach. Eisenhower tells his special group on Cuba, a group of advisors closely held who informed him specifically on this issue, that it was time to get serious about Castro and his rebels.

Not long after Richard Nixon met with Fidel, he realized Castro was actually definitely, in his opinion, a communist. quote, I cited strongly with Alan Dulles in presenting this view in the National Security Council. I was present at the meeting in which Eisenhower authorized the CIA to organize and train Cuban exiles for the eventual purpose of freeing their homeland from the communists. Indeed, in March of 1960, Alan Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, brings in Dick Bissell, head of planning, his protege, a guy he had previously brought in with the goal of grooming him, to take the top job at the Central Intelligence Agency,

which gives you a sense of just how high-profile Cuba was becoming to these people. And many of these guys were alumni from doing a coup in Guatemala in 54. Yes, yes. So Dulles brings in Dick Bissell, and he also brings in Nixon, Secretary of State Christian Herder, Admiral Arley Burke, and Colonel J.C. King. And they're all gathered in the Oval Office. And now the sabotage of Cuba, up until now, was a somewhat improvised kind of affair after 1950.

But now it was going to be given the formal imprimatur of a U.S. government covert operation. And this memo by Secretary of State Herder sums up their reasoning as good as anything else. Quote, Not only have our business interests in Cuba been seriously affected, but the United States cannot hope to encourage and support sound economic policies in other Latin American countries and promote necessary private investment in Latin America, if it is or appears to be simultaneously cooperating in the Castro program. So now we're starting to see it's not only that U.S. interests within Cuba are threatened.

The United States is now realizing that the Cuban Revolution may be serving as an example to other countries in the region that the U.S. has had a similar relationship with. Maybe it will even start to help people within those countries organize their own revolution. This kind of lofty official memo was one way of understanding. understanding the United States on the subject of Cuba. But another was the way Richard Nixon would soon talk about it on the campaign trail. The right way is to deal with a pipsqueak demagogue like Castro without losing our other friends in the world. Now, the first recruits to counter-revolution right after the revolution in 1959 had been these hyper-wealthy Batisteanos.

And we saw how, aside from a few air raids or some hairbrained invasion plans, they really ended up lacking the goods to get the job done. But in 1960, there was a second wave of counter-revolutionaries who were made up more of the, you know, middle-class, bourgeois-type nationalists. But as the CIA would underline, these people were reliable because they were no less, quote, anti-communist. And so in 1960, as Jack Holhoon observes, the CIA shifted from support for counter-revolutionaries inside Cuba

to organizing an exile network inside the U.S. Now, the ultimate goal of this, as Dick Bissell laid it out, was to get a political alliance, that could command something like a paramilitary force of Cubans to, quote, land on the island and detonate a coordinated resistance at the appropriate moment. Economic sabotage inside of Cuba, Colhoun notes,

would be complemented by sanctions from the U.S. Meanwhile, a paramilitary force of 500 exiles was set up in Guatemala with training scheduled to be wrapped up by November 1960. The CIA had already begun meeting with potential leaders for its umbrella group known infamously as the Frenti, including some in Castro's own cabinet. In addition to the CIA, you also had the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department

on the prow for this future post-Castro set of leaders, but it was a tough search. Batista was obviously out. Carlos Prio, the ex-president and rumored Coke Runner, well, this is what one CIA report read about him. Quote, Carlos Prio would be a great man if he had morals. His weakness of character leads him to a tolerance which does not cease even before gangsterism. His economic ambition causes him to cultivate

all forms of robbery and petty thievery. But otherwise, he was a good guy. I think more attractive to the CIA was Tony Verona. Yes. Bald, round-faced with big tortoise-shell glasses. Verona had been a senator and a prime minister of Cuba in between the Batista years. And he had already proven his true colors

by shutting down communist newspapers inside Cuba in 1950. Sure. Not only had he been pitching himself already for this kind of job, he was already a CIA asset, and wouldn't you know it, connected to gangsters inside and outside of Cuba. Yes, in fact, Tony Verona, in a pattern we'll see again of a kind of parallel campaign against Cuba from the United States government and the mafia,

was courted not only by the CIA, but by Meyer Lansky, from Jack Colhorn, quote, In August 1960, a telltale bargain was struck between exiled Cuban politician Antonio Verona and organized crime leader Meyer Lanski. In the meeting in Miami, Lanski offered Verona several million dollars to form a Cuban government in exile to replace Castro's revolutionary regime. Lansky also promised to arrange a public relations campaign in the United States to polish Verona's political image.

In return, Verona endorsed the mafia's single-minded objective, to reopen its casinos, hotels, and nightclubs, in a post-Castro, Cuba. And the public relations firm that they would use here was also connected to Santo Traficante, myriad mafia gangsters, and completing the loop, the Central Intelligence Agency. And then you had Manuel Artime,

who had recently broken with Castro over the communism issue, and had founded the MRR, the movement to recover the revolution, which was funded by rich guys like himself, and also Catholic hardline. CIA liked him, too. But there was one motif that would make itself known early on, and Dulles would brief Eisenhower a bit later in August of 1960, saying of the

Frente and its leaders, quote, this has been successful up to a point, but the problem is that there are no real leaders, and all of the individuals are prima donnas. Now, aside from organizing the Frente, the U.S. would also have spies inside of Cuba, much to the pleasure of types like the CIA and Richard Nixon. Speaking of, this is where history lobs you a softball. One of the spies working for the U.S. inside of Cuba, was Philly-born Frank Fiorini, later Frank Sturgis, of Watergate fame. He moved to Cuba years earlier and ended up fighting Batista on behalf of Carlos Prio, but then sounding the alarm on the communism of Raul and Che Guevara. Frank did, in his own words, a, quote, black bag job while spying on Castro for the U.S. government via the Air Force attach in Cuba.

Quote, I broke into the chief of the Army's HQ. I broke into their file. and I did photograph and steal documents. Now, of course, this new covert war would need a propaganda campaign. And so naturally, the U.S. government turned back to the Guatemala bag of tricks. There was an extensive propaganda radio war, the apparatus for which was resuscitated for this new fight against Cuba. Outposts like Radio Swan, a CIA station based in Honduras, were set up to spread misinformation, disinformation, and calls to abandon the new revolutionary government. This was like your radio free Europe.

Voice of America, like most types of things we describe on this show from history, stuff that still goes on today. But one of the biggest propaganda achievements was Operation Peter Pan, or Pedro Pan. This was a campaign of disinformation and scaremongering beamed into Cuba by the CIA from its nearby station off of Honduras, Radio Swan, as well as counter-revolutionaries within Cuba. The central messaging of the campaign was this. Cuba's new and ambitious education drive, an attempt to create a modern egalitarian education system on the island, was in fact an insidious plot by which the revolutionary government would steal children from the care of their parents, maybe even shipping them off to Russia for re-education. This rumor campaign was based on bogus documents

cooked up by the reactionaries on the island with the help of the U.S. government, but that did not stop religious groups, particularly right-wing Catholics, from eventually organizing a massive project to remove over the course of the next several years, as many as 14,000 Cuban children from their homes in Cuba. And the parents of these children, largely of the middle classes, helped these religious organizations ship their kids out of the country, ironically thinking that they were saving their kids from a mass kidnapping. Due to the ongoing tensions in the following decades, many, if not most of these children, would never return to their homes and grew up in the United States, known as, quote, Pedro Pan Kids. We spoke with Nelson Valdez, Professor Emeritus,

at New Mexico University, who himself was a Pedro Pan kid. It is true that indeed there was a bogus document that was prepared by an agent of the U.S. government to the effect that soon it would be announced that Cuban parents no longer had authority over their children. This was called the patria potestas, that is, the father's power. over how to raise their children and so forth. Despite the fact that we do know now, that there was no such legislation that the legislation that circulated around Cuba

was written by, we do know who voted, a member of the Central Intelligence Agency. This whole thing was also connected to a portion of the Catholic clergy from Poland and Hungary that were exceeding right wing. When Nelson got to the U.S., he spent time in several foster homes

and witnessed in himself and others a real struggle with what had happened. He also noted that you often hear this whole story presented as one in which, A, the CIA is not mentioned at all, it was just an organic thing that happened, and B, that the Pedro Pan kids are just overwhelmingly happy now that they're grown up to have been, quote, Americanized in the first place.

According to Nelson, the story is far more complex, to say the least. It was traumatic for both of us, those who left and those who stayed behind. The parents sent children were even seven and eight years old. I live in three different foster homes. And that was true for many other kids as well. We had no choice, but to... go through a mad rush of learning English and becoming Americanized. You have Peter Pan kids that experience, regardless of their ideological position nowadays,

they experience separation from the most important elementary, primary social relations. That is, a relationship with parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, so forth. We also ran into Pedro Pan with Marta, who mentioned to us that the principal of her school, where you may remember she was brought up to be Americanized, turned out to be involved in the Peter Pan plot himself. You know something else? My school was very important in the Peter Pan plan. The principal of my school, Mr. James Baker, was one of the promoters of this Peter Pan plan, the principal of my school. So none of us, none of the students of Rustin Academy was involved in the Peter Pan plan. Why? Because they just simply started leaving.

Was the target of Peter Pan people like the people who went to your school? Or were the people who went to your school, the kinds of people who organized Peter Pan to get other Cubans to leave? To get at the Cubans, lower middle class people. Lower middle class people to get the children outside of Cubans. Cuba and the parents here in Cuba, so they would just revolt against the leaders of the revolution, overthrow the revolution. The principal was one of the leaders of that Peter Panplan. Then, of course, there were the poison pills. Back in July 1959, the editor of Look Magazine, who was in Cuba to interview Fidel, attended a party of upper-crust Cubans that included some CIA officers as well.

And at this party, the topic of assassination of Fidel Castro was openly discussed. Quote, I was told quite flatly by Julian Lobo, a sugar magnet, one of Cuba's richest men, quote, that Castro would not live out the year, that there was a contract on him. Between then and early 1960, the CIA flew two Cuban exiles with high-powered telescopic rifles to Cuba. You can probably guess what they wanted to use those for. Now, these assassins never reached Castro as they were arrested by Cuban authorities. But the plotting did not end there. Fidel at this point was well aware of the different contracts out on his life

and began to take some precautions. Nancy Stout, biographer of Celia Sanchez, writes this. Fidel survived because he was elusive, did not barricade himself in the classic manner in a presidential palace with a tall fence surrounding it. Forever the gorilla, he stayed on the move. Yet many people told me he lived in Celia's apartment, arriving often in the middle of the night.

The security detail was still rather light compared to later years where state security would be assigned to Fidel almost anywhere he went, and it was made up by women volunteers coming from the militia. Stout writes, quote, the police would select two young women each day and put their names on the roster. The girls would check the bulletin board, then get into olive green pants and a gray jacket with an olive green stripe down the sleeve. Uniforms designed by Celia Sanchez,

and similar to the tunic she wore in the Sierra, a loaded, quote, bullet belt about two inches thick, plus a magazine of ammunition that fit into a leather pout. They'd be handed a check rifle, and they'd go with their policemen to their assigned location. And then he said, I've got to go in front of some committee. He says, left for a crime again. He says, not a CIA. They had us trying to kill Castro.

The CIA's assassination programs against Fidel Castro are probably one of the more infamous examples of the agency's activities over the past century. And this is where they start to really institutionalize the contract. murder of Cuba's leader. There were already early schemes and bizarre plots against Castro being cooked up by the CIA's scientists. Some of the first of them were to make Castro trip in public, thereby humiliating him and causing him to lose control. One plan was to contaminate the air of the radio station he broadcast from with an LSD-type substance. Another version of this plan would lace it into his cigar during a public speech. There were also schemes to de-beard Castro, depriving him of his masculine charisma,

experimenting with thallium salts so that when he ingested them, his beard would fall off. But the more direct assassination thread became much more real when the CIA made contact with the disgruntled former viceroys of Havana in the American mafia.

Now, Dick Bissell, by this point, had told a subordinate that the CIA, quote, needed an asset to carry out a gangster-type action against Videl. The CIA had decided to go through Iron Bob Mayhew. D.C. representative of Howard Hughes and who had been a CIA asset since 1954.

Mayhew's boss, Howard Hughes, had his own reasons to back this kind of thing. As journalist Warren Hinkle and William Turner write, quote, Hughes wished Mayhew to increase his empire's collaboration with the CIA in return for government favors. And Hughes had his own designs on Cuba. According to a former aide, Hughes envisioned a Castroless Cuba as a giant tax dodge for himself. As soon as Castro was gone, the aide said, Hughes intended to rush into Cuba and buy up casinos, as he later did in Vegas, develop a series of resort parks on the beachfront,

and build his own jumbo airport, thus setting himself up as the new king of Cuban tourism. Quote, Hughes had a lot of respect for the mob, especially Meyer Lansky, a former aide said. My guess is that he hoped to form some sort of partnership with Lanski. Thus, the billionaire joined the secret war. Mayhew got in touch with Johnny Raselli. We remember Johnny Raselly.

He managed mob clubs in his... Nevada before the revolution, largely on behalf of Chicago's mob family. And Raselli, in turn, introduced Bob Mayhew to Sam Giancana, godfather of the Chicago mob. Now, Giancana rejected the CIA's suggestion of a traditional gangland shooting of Castro, because Giancana thought that no mafioso would risk getting that close to a head of state to carry it out. Yeah, Giancana, who knew a thing or two about pulling one of these off, would begin to work with the CIA on a much more subtle method, poison. assassination plans, sabotage, spies, sanctions, propaganda, politicking, and covert training of paramilitary exiles.

This is how 1960 started for the Cuba Task Force. In Cuba itself, the revolutionary government was making good on its promises of land expropriation, including tens of thousands of acres once held by the mighty United Fruit Company. but foreign aircraft continued to strafe Cuba's sugar mills and caneland. In February 1960, one plane bombing a sugar mill was shot down. The body of a U.S. citizen was found in the wreckage. So the Cubans were at this point attempting not only to solicit loans from other countries, but to buy weapons and equipment to defend themselves from what was clearly going to be an ongoing American campaign of sabotage and bombings in covert action.

One place that the Cuban government turned to was Belgium, sealing an arms deal that the U.S. had tried and failed to block. And then... On March 4, 1960, the French freighter La Cobra, carrying ammunitions from Belgium to Cuba, explodes in Havana Harbor. This kills as many as 100 Cubans and wounds hundreds more. She's the French freighter La Coupe, which blew up in Havana while unloading munitions. There was heavy loss of life. And when more explosions followed, the fire spread to warehouses along the dock.

Cuba hires a Belgian arms expert to investigate. They don't find evidence that it was an accident, and in fact maintain it was sabotage. Earlier, as Timothy Naftali writes, quote, a Colonel Sanchez, U.S. military attaché in Havana, had been observed telling the Belgians not to go through with the arms shipment. Che Guevara, upon hearing the news,

breaks away from a meeting and shows up at the scene to tend to the wounded. And it was at a memoriam for the dead the next day that someone snapped a portrait of Guevara that you've no doubt seen before. Meanwhile, in an emotional speech, Fidel Castro points the finger at the CIA. But Dr. Castro, the Cuban Prime Minister, added fuel to the political flames by saying that sabotage caused the disaster. His implication that United States officials were responsible

brought an immediate and rigorous denial and protest. The late journalist, Jean Guilla, Lard reported later, quote, the complete file of the investigation by the shipping company of the vessel is being held in the strong box of a French merit time foundation with a 150-year restriction

on its release. We spoke to Marder about what it was like in the aftermath of the La Cobra explosion in Cuba. La Cobra was very early in March, 1960. In March 1960, my school was still open. I was there. And it was a shock because it was horrible. We saw the people that were torn to pieces there.

So many people did. And it was immediately said that it was something that had to do with the CIA. So that was something obvious. I mean, we started seeing obvious things. In a speech several months later on May Day, Fidel begins to prepare people for the possibility that the United States really might launch a war against Cuba.

Privately, he predicts four steps the United States will take. One, more terror attacks. Two, a break in relations. Three, economic sanctions. Four, an overt attack. After the explosion of the Lakubra in March, establishing tighter links with the USSR was a no-brainer, though you couldn't tell that to Washington. Anastas Mikoyan had already visited in February before the Lucubra, and hammered out their first big trade deal. The Soviets would buy one million

tons of Cuban sugar per year for five years, payment, partly in cash, partly in credit for the things the Cubans desperately needed. Machinery and replacement parts, trucks, tractors, a variety of manufactured products and whole factories, along with technical assistance to get them up and running for the rapid industrialization of a lopsided economy. One major factor of the deal was an old friend of this show, oil. A crucial part of America's overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran were attacks on their oil supply, and Castro was sensitive to a similar weakness in his country. After the Lucubra, the Cubans also appealed to the USSR for weapons. And this was the moment, with a clear escalation in tensions between Havana and Washington, that the Soviets would have

to choose how close they wanted to get with Revolutionary Cuba. Much of that was up to Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev had been secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union since 1953, and premier of the country since 1958. As we described him in episode one, Khrushchev was generally considered to be a mixture of crass, cunning, and clever. Described by Nixon as, quote, a crude bear of a man, he was also by now being criticized by the Chinese communists

for being insufficiently militant in support. World Revolution. Sending a message, perhaps not only to Washington, but also Beijing, under Khrushchev's direction, the Soviets accepted all of the terms for arms requested by Fidel, Roel, and Che, agreeing to send 100,000 automatic rifles and around 30 tanks. Moreover, the Soviets surprised the Cubans by coming right out and saying that they did not expect any payment for the weapons purchased. According to Khrushchev's son, quote, Father continued to watch Castro closely for some time longer, but already, as a

a potential friend and congenial thinker. He found more and more to confirm Anastas Mikoyan's opinion and admired the heroism of the Cuban people. We as internationalists must help Cuba, Khrushchev thought. We will not allow the revolution to be choked. This is what happened next. On display in Moscow, the wreckage of pilot Francis powers U-2 reconnaissance plane. May 1960, the Soviets send the oil. Also, an American U-2 spy plan. is shut down deep within the borders of the USSR. Christoph himself at the Moscow press conference, lose a furious Tyree, charging America with deliberate aggression.

June, the oil begins to arrive in Cuba, but American firms, such as Standard Oil, Texaco, and Shell, all refused to refine the oil at the direction of the U.S. State Department. Cuba, determined not to be deprived of the fuel, seizes the oil refineries, and nationalizes them. July, Eisenhower, enraged by the nationalization of the oil refineries increased trading with the USSR, cancels the U.S. sugar quota. This leaves 700,000 tons of sugar unbought. The move cost Cuba, $93 million in USA. The Soviet Union steps in and announces it will

pick up the tab and purchase the product. Khrushchev personally adds that American aggression toward Cuba will put it in direct conflict with the USSR. As the Soviet launches its most belligerent anti-American propaganda barrage in recent years. By September, Cuba has also nationalized electric and telephone companies, the oil refineries, and sugar mills all over Cuba, announcing that their owners will be compensated when the U.S. starts buying sugar again. Cuba also nationalizes banks across the island, including those owned by America. Castro had promised foreign investments will always be welcome and secure. He confiscates American industry. Cuban security services and the people's militia thwart an attempted U.S. mission to deliver guns to counter-revolutionaries and the Escombray Mountains.

On the 2nd of September, Fidel gives a speech to a massive crowd. This comes after a resolution by the OAS to oppose the Cuban Revolution. Fidel lays out what becomes known as the Declaration of Havana. He proclaims the right of all peasants to their land, the right of workers to the fruit of their work, the right of children to education, the right of all races to the full dignity of man, the right of women to civil, social and political equality,

the right of nations to their full sovereignty. By the end of it, the crowd climaxes chanting, quote, Cuba Sea, Yankee, no. And Che Guevara watches, quote, more than a million hands raised to the skies, one-sixth of the country's total population. Later that month, Castro visits Manhattan for the UN General Assembly. The Cuban delegation leaves their appointed hotel to stay in Harlem. There, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev meet for the first time. October 19th, Eisenhower establishes an embargo.

Fidel would one day tell his biographer, if you're not radical, you don't do anything. You organize a party, you hold 20 elections, and nothing happens. But by the end of 1960, Cuba had had a very radical couple years, and a lot had happened. These years were messy, confusing, at times frustrating. The new government still needed money. It still needed experts, technical assistance,

as the upper and middle classes were abandoning the revolution. But these 24 months had also brought changes no one had really imagined were possible before. In a country that until the revolution saw a lopsided distribution of medicine, of housing, education, of basic nutrition between Havana and the rest of Cuba, the Cuban government had put the biggest share of new housing, roads, and goods to the countryside,

electrifying rural areas and expanding medical services. The land reform, combined with the new minimum wage, spurred year-round employment for rural workers at new state farms. These workers entered pension plans for the first time in their lives. The countryside supported the revolution overwhelmingly, as we know by now. But how about the more traditional working class in the towns and the cities? Scholar Maurice Zaitland conducted a series. study on the Revolution in the 60s, published by Princeton. And in it, he interviewed workers

inside of Cuba. And here is what some of them had to say. A copper miner. Cuba is a cup of gold to me. It is the only country in the world that is now moving forward. A Havana brewery worker. For the first time, one can do what one wants without fear. A former farm worker now employed at a nickel plant, before I couldn't look a boss in the eye. I looked at my feet. Not now. Now we have liberty and walk where we want. It is a great joy to be alive now.

And a shoemaker, who was a bootblack before the revolution. I was left in the streets by my dad. I grew up there. Now I have three sons with a future. I have an 80-year-old grandmother who was young during the war against Spain in the 1890s. She is proud of Fidel. She was not proud of any government before this one. These interviews were conducted not in the honeymoon period of 1959, but years afterward.

Zeitland concludes, rather over two-thirds of workers consider themselves in favor of the regime several years in. In fact, another study reads, support for the regime is evidently strongly correlated with former income, as it is also with skin color, since race itself correlated with income. The government is supplying a good deal of what previously would have had to been bought, a social security bill established benefits for incapacitation and widowhood. Private clubs, including racially segregated ones, had their doors thrown open to everybody. Domestic servants were brought out of servitude to be trained in new jobs.

And all of this is before the revolution would begin the year of education in 1961, which will eliminate illiteracy inside of Cuba. After all these years of gangsterism, of Americanism, of capitalism, this was the alternative that was being built in Cuba, under great strain. We asked Marta what it was like to witness this transformation. Initially, there was this great joy. What did that give way to more broadly as the hostility of the Americans became more and more overt? Well, the joy became a little more, I'd say, this is the first time I've been answering such a question.

It's very interesting. That joy, among the population, that majority of the population in Cuba, But that joy, it was like a big party, we just a jubilee, that joy became, let's say, committed to some sort of national security. I mean, we have to defend this. We have to defend this. And the main enemy is starting to be the United States. In 1960, Che Guevara gave an interview to Look Magazine, and he said this. What lies ahead depends greatly on the United States.

With the exception of our agrarian reform, which the people of Cuba desired and initiated themselves, all of our radical measures have been in direct response to direct aggressions by powerful monopolists, of which your country is the chief exponent. U.S. pressure on Cuba has made necessary the radicalization of the revolution. To know how much further Cuba will go, it would be easier to ask the U.S. government how far it plans to go.

The next time, we will find out. Thank you.