Blowback - S2 Episode 4 - "Secret Honor"

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

JFK outmuscles Richard Nixon on Cuba and into the White House. The CIA begins training Cuban exiles in Central America for an invasion. And Fidel pays a visit to Harlem.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The first question is from Mr. Niven and is for Vice President Nixon. Mr. Vice President, Senator Kennedy said last night that the administration must take responsibility for the loss of Cuba. First of all, I don't agree with Senator Kennedy that Cuba is lost. I believe that we are following the right course, a course which is difficult, but a course which under the circumstances the only proper one, which will see that the Cuban people get a chance to realize their aspirin. of progress through freedom. No, Cuba is not lost.

And I don't think this kind of defeatist talk by Senator Kennedy helps the situation one bit. Senator Kennedy, would you care to comment? In the first place, I've never suggested that Cuba was lost except for the president. Arthur Gardner, a Republican ambassador, Earl Smith, a Republican ambassador in succession.

Both have indicated in the past six weeks that Castro was a Marxist, that Rayal Castro was a communist, and that they got no effective result. Instead, our aid continued to Batista, which was ineffective. We never are on the side of freedom. We never used our influence when we could have used it most effectively. And today, Cuba is lost for freedom.

I hope someday it will rise. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is episode four, Secret Honor. Picture this. You are Richard Milhouse Nixon. You've won every election in your life by staking out the position that communism was the, you know, numerous uno threat to the American way of life. Right. Eisenhower, your president, steely-eyed general, he was even a little bit skewed by your zeal.

I mean, you ran ads like this. Mr. Nixon, what is the truth about our ability to fight the growing menace of communism? When Mr. Khrushchev says our grandchildren will live under communism, we must answer his grandchildren will live in freedom. When he says the Monroe Doctrine is dead, we say the doctrine of freedom applies everywhere in the world. The only answer to communism is a massive offensive for freedom. And then here comes John F. Kennedy, with the balls to call you saw,

on Cuba, to suggest the United States isn't doing enough to get rid of Castro when he knows that you were one of the guys who actually suggested knocking him off in the first place. Right. What this debate shows is the weight of a decade of rampant anti-communism smothering the discourse. In 1960, 22% of Americans lived in poverty, and yet the threat of a Soviet nuke was on everyone's lips, and that anxiety would soon be trained further south. In the last episode, we looked at how the years of 1959 and 1960 played out in Cuba. and how the Cuban Revolution took on a, you know, distinctly radical character, pursuing a policy of land reform unparalleled in the hemisphere.

We talked about how that radical policy program, especially the seizure of American business interest, led to an intense and escalating hostility from the American government. And for the Cubans, as we talked about last episode, this escalating hostility was not intellectual. This was not an academic debate you heard if you turned on the radio. planes were flying from the U.S. dropping bombs on Cuba, industrial sabotage of its economy. Several Cubans had died and been wounded in these bombings already. If you did switch on the radio, you might hear CIA broadcasts beaming into Cuba, and then things only get spicier after the Cubans, within their rights, buy oil from the Soviet Union, which the American refineries in their country refused to process.

Cuba then nationalizes those companies so it can run its own country, and Eisenhower responds by finally killing the U.S. sugar quota, the agreement to buy Cuban sugar, which presents the Cuban economy with a serious crisis. By October of 1960, the United States had established the embargo. On January 3rd, 1961, about two weeks before he would leave office, Eisenhower severes all diplomatic relations with Cuba. A spokesperson read a statement saying, There is a limit to what the United States and self-respect can endure. That limit has now been reached.

Meanwhile, our sympathy goes out to the people of Cuba, now suffering under the yoke of a dictator. Even before January, 1961, when Eisenhower cut off relations with Cuba, something that everyone knew was coming at that point, Eisenhower had already reached his limit with the Cuban Revolution. In fact, he, the CIA, and of course Richard Nixon, had already put in motion a plan to get rid of the Cuban Revolution once and for all. today's episode, we're going to be talking about the lead-up to the Bay of Pigs invasion. We're going to talk about how the CIA and the White House cobbled together a plan to definitively take out Castro. We're going to meet some of the anti-Castro Cuban exiles that the CIA recruited for the effort and examined the strange task force that was put together for

the operation. And finally, we're going to talk about where JFK fits in, how the choices that JFK made in his presidential campaign and in the early parts of 1961 set him on a course for disaster. Uh, testing, uh, one, two, three, four. Uh, Roberto, this is for, uh, eyes only, um, our eyes. Vice President Richard Nixon was obsessed with Cuba. I, uh, I hear that the gardener's wife, that Fernando's wife is in the hospital. Send her a new portable radio, please. Uh, make it a good one. Just make it, uh, anonymous. I don't. No, no, no, no.

that it is from friends of a free Cuba, Cuba Libera. One story actually has it that his top national security advisor, a guy named Cushman, was once almost struck by lightning, running one of Nixon's many anti-Castro errands. This is reported in a book by Peter Wyden. Cushman grew less and less fond of the project. Even when he got away from Nixon's prodding, it was no fun. One weekend, he found himself on a small CIA plane with Director Dulles. They were going to Palm Beach to meet William S. Pauley, the arch-conservative former diplomat and friend of Nixon.

There was a scheme afoot to print up some Cuban bonds, presumably to jar the Castro economy. On the way to Florida, the plane was hit by lightning. Crockery scattered all over the walls and the ceiling. Cushman was delighted to be back at his desk, where he merely had Nixon to contend with. Obsessive or not, though, Nixon had one thing correct, which was that Cuba, by the election year of 1960, had become part of America's domestic Cold War politic. By May of 1960, Gallup polling showed that 72% of Americans held an unfavorable view of Castro,

up from 48% at the height of a Sierra Maestra legend in 1959. Nixon was paranoid and obviously didn't want to look soft on Cuba. Even after four debates against JFK, debates that, you know, at least according to popular imagination, did not exactly go well for Nixon, Nixon was considering a challenge for a fifth debate where he planned to set the record straight about Cuba. In 1939, I went to Cuba.

Rebecca, would you erase that, please? And the second reason that was pushing Nixon to pay so much attention to Cuba was because he knew about what the Eisenhower administration had already set into motion at his urging. And that was, as we discussed last episode, W.H4, the January 1960 plan that Eisenhower first approved of, which examined ways to target and undermine the Castro regime. Very easy for you to take the high road. But you see, I couldn't do that. You delegated, I had to do all the dirty work right from the beginning.

In March of 1962, two months after the creation of W.H.4, Eisenhower approved a much more ambitious anti-Castro program. And by mid-August of 1960, Eisenhower formally approved in a meeting a $13 million budget for a plan to overthrow Castro. You said up there and you said, can't somebody do something about it? that Castro felon. I heard you say that. But you understand it was me that had to go out there and pull the goddamn trigger.

I mean, you are a... This is where I think historians and scholars generally designate the Bay of Pigs' plan, as we know it specifically, to come into focus. This is, you know, sort of a part

but related to all of the other counter-revolutionary planning, all of the other, you know, American sabotage operations and so on. all of that still goes on, but at the same time now there is a specific plan that is at least kind of on paper and that has a budget to actually move forward and get rid of Castro entirely. At that August 18th, 1960 meeting, which is as clean as start date as any for the formal operation that would become the Bay of Pigs, Alan Dulles laid out the four key axes of the

operation that Ike had pushed for and got some months earlier. One, developing Cuban exile support. two, establishing American military training for the exiles, three, ramping up the propaganda campaign, and four, creating a, quote, standby force, preferably of non-Americans, with special forces type training. The other thing that came out of this meeting was the biggest handcuffed that the plotters put on themselves. No U.S. military personnel would be allowed to be directly involved in combat. If this sounds familiar, it's basically because the entire playbook, as drawn up in this rough concept was taken from Guatemala. Richard Bissell, the deputy director of the CIA, who had been

put in charge of the Bay of Pigs plan, was an advisor on the Guatemalan operation, and two of the lower level agents on the Cuba operation, who will introduce shortly, were previously involved in Guatemala as well. They very actively positioned the Cuba operation as simply doing Guatemala 2.0, on a bigger stage, with more resources, and far higher stakes. We talked a little bit last episode about the Frente or the FRD, the political organization that the CIA assembled after the Cuban Revolution of Cuban exiles to, you know, sort of be this government-in-waiting-type deal. The recruitment effort for the Frente in the most aggressive phase of it began in the spring of 1960.

To go back to that moment for a second, I'd like to give the perspective of one of the exiles recruited, Manuel Artime. Artime was an ex-revolutionary, am I right there? Yes, he was an ex-revolutionary who was, you know, favored very heavily by some elements within the CIA to lead the Cuban exiles because of his military background and his charisma. And he's one of the people who will become a sort of key figure as a face of the Frente in the future. Artime was told by a pseudonymous handler to go from South America where he'd been going on a lecture circuit to drum up support for Cuban exiles. this lecture circuit was of course supported by the CIA. So our team A is told by his pseudonymous handler to go from South America to the Statler Hilton in New York

and to announce himself as George L. Ringo. And it was at the hotel that he was introduced to a guy named or at least calling himself Frank Bender, who was supposedly a rich steel magnate in Miami who wanted to support the exiles. In reality, as our T. May suspected, Frank Bender was not a steel magnet. In fact, Frank Bender wasn't Frank Bender.

His real name was Jerry Droller. and he was a CIA agent who reported directly to the chief of W.H.4, the anti-Castro nerve center run out of Washington. Yeah, it's a nerve center. It's getting on my nerves. Here's what the quote-unquote great Frank Bender wanted to know. I told him that Cuba could not return to the old corrupt government, Artime said, that a return to military dictatorship would lead once more down the road to communism. I told him I believed we needed a genuinely democratic government. We needed social justice.

Bender was apparently impressed. He listened quietly as Artime discussed his ideas for a guerrilla uprising in the Oriente province, and then Bender asked, why not an uprising all over the island? Artimei said he didn't have enough men or weapons for that. Well, Artime, what if I told you that we have men who will help you prepare for guerrilla warfare and others who will prepare men to fight in a conventional war with army training? And you will give us the weapons? All the weapons you need, Bender replied.

And also we will train radio operators so you could be in contact directly with Cuba. Bender wanted to know if Artime could get men out of Cuba to be trained for such an operation. Artime replied that he could. Fine, Bender said, as he got up and handed Artime a piece of paper. Call this number whenever you need me. Just say, to Frank Bender from Manolo, and I will come to the phone. He instructed our teammate to go to Miami, where more friends would be in touch with him, and he said he had reserved a plane ticket for him.

Our teammate could pick it up at the hotel. When you leave, the American said, don't bother about paying the hotel bill. Just throw the key on the desk in the lobby. As he left the room, Bender shook hands and said, Remember Manolo, I am not a member of the United States government. I have nothing to do with the United States government. I am only working for a powerful company that wants to fight communism. Jerry Droller, aka Frank Bender, was, in the words of multiple colleagues to visit the CIA,

a master opportunist and insanely ambitious. Born in Germany, he served in the OSS and, World War II. That's the precursor to the CIA. And had neither many friends in the CIA nor among the Cubans with whom he would be working as part of this new operation. Droller was one half of the dynamic duo assigned to wrangle Cuban exiles like Artime and the rest of the Frente. The other half of that duo was none other than Howard Hunt, his codename here being Eduardo. Eduardo Sanchez is a white man that lives near here. Stop digging for clues, Stevie. If you've heard of Howard Hunt, it's probably because of Watergate.

An active CIA agent from 1949 until 1970, Hunt was a spook characteristic of his time. Insanely right-wing, Ivy League educated, Waspy Beyond Measure, and involved in all sorts of devious shit, including the 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz. Hunt's intense right-wing politics and a generally intense disposition, the fact that he wrote dozens of maudlin spy and crime thriller novels, it left an impression on the people who worked with him. In fact, when a young William F. Buckley, fresh out of Yale, arrived in Mexico City in 1951 for a brief stint as a self-described quote-unquote CIA deep cover agent, his spymaster was none other than Howard Hunt, who would go on to be a lifelong friend. Droller and Hunt began

their work to organize a political movement shortly after Eisenhower gave the first major go-ahead for this kind of work in March of 1960. According to Joseph B. Smith, a CIA officer, and a contemporary of both droller and Hunt, the two men basically could not have been more ill-suited to the task. Here's Smith. How these two could put together a coalition of Cuban exiles involving the constant soothing of egos I could never imagine. Hunt was almost the epitome of the kind of wasp

that is not appreciated in Latin America, a man who had naturally talked down to Latins. And Droller, who always seemed to go out of his way to be the caricature of a Jew invented by Gerbil's propaganda ministry, and who, in addition, couldn't speak a word of Spanish. Negotiating with Latin political leaders did not make sense to me. Now, the CIA Inspector General Report, which was released about 20 years ago, has this to say about Frank Bender.

Quote, Bender's linguistic accomplishments did not include Spanish, and this may have diluted his effectiveness in dealing with Cubans. No. Yeah, big shock there. Like we mentioned last episode, a key challenge for the American government was to tap Cuban exile leaders who were not. not followers of Batista, with more and more Cubans leaving the island, including greater numbers of anti-Batista, middle-class and upper-class revolutionaries who had turned against Castro,

this was theoretically becoming a more viable strategy. All they needed was the CIA to set up such a political organization to give the rebels a little push. From the very early stages of that spring, the Frente did not live up to hunts and bender's expectations, albeit for both different and shared reasons. To hunt, benders, and some of his superiors insistence on not using any Batisteanos was needlessly limiting and offensive to the very people

who constituted their most natural base of support. What they were both frustrated with was the sheer amount of cash that the Frenti had requested from the government, which came out to $745,000 a month. That's Hunt's claim. The CIA Inspector General's report says that they asked for $500,000.

In the end, they got about $131,000 a month. To Hunt, this was well for, To the Frente, it was the basic amount of money needed to pay for supplies. The reason that they had asked for so much in the first place was because they wanted all that money to purchase arms and to train themselves. They didn't want the U.S. government to do anything more than sign a blank check. Quite obviously, the CIA and Howard Hunt, that wasn't their M.O. Setting aside the natural tensions between Hunt and Bender and the Frente and everyone else, both of these guys were just Weirdos. Bender would refer to himself in the pseudonymic third person, like he would say,

Bender says yes. Let's just see all my circuits to movie. Good point, Bender. Hunt was actually worse, if you can believe it. He was once responsible for losing a briefcase full of secret documents containing the details of agency operatives and was known for traveling around with, you know, huge amounts of cash, like as much as $100,000 at a given time. And these are the kinds of things that obviously draw lots and lots of attention.

But perhaps the biggest problems that Hunt and Bender and the CIA faced it in putting the Frente together was not really anything that they could have changed themselves. For one thing, the most powerful anti-Castro exiles were rich conservatives, and for another, trying to create a false political unity among the exiles basically just turned the FRD into a perpetual front for power struggles. A good example of this is the development of Radio Swan by David Atley Phillips, the one-time actor turned journalist, turned CIA agent, who had created the radio station La Vocellebracion,

which broadcast from Honduras into Guatemala during the 1954 coup. He set up a new, even more well-resourced radio station on Swan Island between Honduras and Cuba. The Swan Island broadcasts, although eventually would start sending out, you know, a kind of unified line designed to take down Castro. Initially, a ton of the programming was from anti-Cuban exiles. and those exiles constantly put out messages attacking one another and attacking the whole, like it was a total mess.

Lame war. Mods. Now the first two places for the foreign training sites that were going to help the Americans maintain deniability because after all, they couldn't be caught training the Cubans out in the open. That was one of the main bits of the mission that they decided on early on, right? Yeah, they had been located in, these sites had been located in Panama and Mexico. And Hunt had actually even relocated to Mexico City

with the expectation of helping to set up things there. But the Mexican government was opposed because they didn't want to be seen helping overthrow Fidel Castro, whom they had actually, you know, a fairly friendly posture with publicly. So the operations headquarters do get relocated to Miami, which will cause some press and secrecy headaches for the CIA and the Cuban exiles to come, and was what the Cuban exiles wanted in the first place. They wanted Miami. Yeah, they want to, I mean, why would you want to go far from home? Why would you want to go to Mexico. So the Frente and other elements that were previously supposed to be these Cuban exiles who would be run out of, you know, Mexico and have, you know, that kind of credibility. Nope, they and the

foreign training sites were going to be a bit closer to home. But with the Mexican government's opposition, Guatemala was designated as the new training site precisely because of the entrenched pro-American interests still around after 1954 and the $50 million a year that the Guatemalan government received an aid from the American government. So over the course of 1916, and into 1961, Guatemala once again becomes the site of American scheming against a left-wing government. The first batch of Cuban exiles to be trained for the invasion arrived in Guatemala in the summer of 1960.

Though the first group of 20 trainees had expected to arrive at a base, they arrived at a decrepit coffee plantation called Finca Helvetia, owned by a pro-American Guatemalan businessman who, in a weird twist, had actually once been Arbenz's secretary. There were no baths or showers, and the only building available for use was an administrative center. The place was dubbed Fort Trax. It was in the middle of nowhere, but this was also completely in plain sight. The plantation, this finca, was actually still operational. The laborers of the plantation could see in plain view that some sort of military installation was being set up,

and even though this finca was in the middle of nowhere, the private roads that crisscross to, you know, to get coffee in and out and transport the workers, they could also see what was going on. The other problem, though, was bigger picture. The premise of training gorillas in Florida, Panama, or Mexico had always been that the Cubans would link up with domestic Cuban rebels, basically an American remake of the classic that Fidel in the July 26th movement had done a few years earlier. At the time that Eisenhower had approved the budget in August of 1960, the idea of the operation hadn't evolved too much from there. But after, after August of 1960, the nature of the endeavor changed big time. Because months and months of guerrilla

warfare had achieved so little, and CIA intelligence indicated that the existing counter-revolutionary militants in Cuba were of highly limited value, it was clear to Richard Bissell, the deputy CIA director tasked with what would become the Bay of Pigs operation, it was clear to Richard Bissell and the Cuba program planners that a change in approach was required. It was at this point that the emphasis was placed on plans for a full-blown amphibious invasion. Here is how that plan looked in an October 31 cable that was sent from Washington to the Guatemala base. Now, this is a cable, so some of the writing is a little weird and stilted, so bear with me. One, plan employ not over 60 men for infiltration teams. Two, assault force will consist of

one or more infantry battalions having each about 600 men. Three, mission of assault force. To seize and defend lodgment in target by amphibious and airborne assault and establish base for further ops. Automatic sea and air resupply will be provided. Four, assault force to receive conventional military training. Five, possibility of using U.S. Army Special Forces training cadres for assault force being pursued, will advise.

Six, assault of size, now planned, cannot be ready. before several months. Do not plan strike with less than about 1,500 men. This is the first real idea of what the Bay of Pigs invasion would actually end up looking like. And it was also an acknowledgement that the original December invasion... The burp of pigs.

Try again. And it was an acknowledgement... God damn. And it was an acknowledgement that the December invasion timetable as originally envisioned would not end up happening. This October 31st cable also coincided with an overture to the Alabama Air National Guard, as the air guard had flown the old B-26 bombers that Cuban exiles were now expected to use in a surprise attack on the Cuban Air Force to clear the way for the invasion.

Nicaragua's Samosa, a dictator exponentially more brutal than any Castro could ever be credibly accused of being. Samosa graciously offered up an airstrip in his country for the training as well. Meanwhile, other CIA officials were searching for the ships they would need to transport their invasion force when the time was right. This was incredibly ambitious. An amphibious invasion, anybody will tell you, is perhaps the most difficult military maneuver to pull off. Dwight Eisenhower had overseen the most successful and well-known one of all time, but military leaders all the way back to Napoleon have famously struggled with this. The CIA, with the explicit blessing of President Eisenhower and the participation

of the Departments of Defense and State was in effect in order to accomplish this incredibly ambitious goal going to create its own, full-service, counter-revolutionary army. To bring it back to Fort Tracks, here's what Fort Tracks looked like when one trainee, Jose Basulto,

showed up on the 4th of July in 1960. This is an account he gave to a journalist after the Bay of Pigs invasion. It rained like mad, and his first job was to help dig ditches around the barracks. They lacked foundations and the rain threatened to collapse them. The downpour kept up for weeks But drinking water was very short

And no showers were built until October The four-hole outdoor latrine Was the social center A single tattered issue of Playboy Was the Camp Library Three of the trainees were growing their own marijuana And another was said to have developed a sexual affinity For a mule

This just sounds like me and my guys Yeah, this is just guys being dudes As far as I'm concerned And Basulto kept on making friends Among the men who kept arriving from Miami Last time we discussed how not long after the victory of the revolution in 1959, an assassination program against Vidal Castro was institutionalized by the United States. What began as simply trying to scramble a couple guys with telescopic rifles to bump him off,

mutated into a set of schemes involving chemicals and drugs and LSD, until it finally crystallized in 1960 as a contract between the Central Intelligence Agency and the American Mafia. Specifically, Castro was designated to be murdered by associates of Chicago gangster Sam Giancana. The method was to be poison pills. Now with the political and economic sabotage of Cuba well underway and the Bay of Pigs operation in the works by the middle of 1960, the CIA's technical services division was hard to. at work experimenting on guinea pigs and monkeys, drawing up both the poison pills themselves and a separate backup plan to lace Castro's cigars with a botulinum toxin. Meanwhile,

their point man for this operation, Chicago gangster Sam G. and Kana was openly boasting of his importance to the CIA in front of the McGuire sisters. If you are one of our 21-year-old Zumer ML TikTok-style listeners, or really under the age of 67 in general, the McGuire sisters were a popular 60s musical trio that were sometimes known to cavort with these mafia types. Giancana told one or more of the McGuire sisters that he was going to kill Fidel Castro that November, specifically mentioning poison pills. The odd thing was, November 1960 was not the the CIA's plan. Their poison pills, in fact, would not get to Giancana's guys until next year. Giancana was going off script. Was he bluffing to the McGuire sisters? Did he have his own

poison pills? And if so, when was he planning to use them on Castro? According to one memo by the House Select Committee on Assassinations years later, quote, if the mob's private plot to kill Castro actually worked and Castro died, then the syndicate had enormous blackmail potential against the CIA. However, if their intrigue backfired, then their position would be that they were only attempting to execute the wishes of their government. So while the CIA was using Giancana, or was it the other way around, another one of Giancana's associates was also an informant for both the CIA and the FBI. This was a former cop and then private investigator straight out of Blood Simple. He was talking to both agencies, informing on the other, and organizing arms deals for the

Cuban exiles, and planning a trip to tap telephones inside of Cuba at the behest of ex-president Carlos Prio, who was still angling for his return to power in Cuba. So as ever, gangsterismo was a key and, in fact, expanding element of the counter-revolution. When I was a boy, just a few months after Castro came to power, I was already a prisoner in the communist prisons of Cuba. I was there in the first conspiracy against the Castro government, and then in the prison of La Cabana. And when I arrived in Miami, the first thing I did was to join the glorious 2506 Brigade, to go to the training camps of Guatemala. I went to Puerto Cavesas. Here's the story of how Brigade 2506, the Cuban Exile Invasion Force, got its name, as recounted by

Peter Wyden, who wrote a well-regarded history of the operation in the 1970s. Dr. Jose Almeida, the brigade's first physician, arrived at track space on September 8th, around 2 p.m., and was immediately commandeered to help search for Carlos Rodriguez Santana, who had just fallen 2,000 feet off a cliff on a training hike. Rodriguez's brigade number was 2.506. Now, why was his number 2506 if there were only supposed to be something like 1,500 brigadiers? Well, that's because of a bit of CIA trickery.

the CIA, when they began bringing these militant Cuban exiles, the kind of revolutionaries to Guatemala, the serial number that they gave them, those serial numbers began at 2,500. The idea was that should these exiles become captured upon arrival or upon landing inside of Cuba, that the Cuban intelligence and military and the soldiers who picked them up would say, oh my God, look how big this invasion forces. Right. The idea being that they would see a dog tag that appeared to indicate. there were hundreds, if not thousands, more troops coming than there were. Right, and they had patches and all this other kind of, you know, iconography that sort of, you know, amped it up, supported, of course, by the Americans. According to an oral history, published by Brigade 2506 members after the Bay of Pigs, the brigadiers began to feel the operation shift from those, you know, guerrilla infiltration routes to the invasion strike force being imagined at the highest levels of the CIA in the fall of 1960.

Although there were other special trainings being conducted, pilot trainings, frogmen trainings in places like Panama and Nicarago and elsewhere in Guatemala, the core focus of the invasion planning was whipping this landing force, Brigade 2506, into shape. Pepe San Roman, a wannabe architecture student turned Batista-era military officer, was officially made the military commander in November 1960, supervising the by then approximately 430 men who had arrived. at four tracks. So this was the original right-wing Pepe? I believe so, yes. The training itself had mixed results. For an example, one of the first planes that an older Cuban exile pilot practiced on a C-46, he busted his landing gear on one of the first return flights, and the pilot got a herniated diaphragm and had to go to the U.S. for surgery. Another example was not just in the military training, but in the actual, you know, basic facts and figures kinds of stuff that the CIA brought in. Here's a Brigade 2506 veteran talking about it in his own words. The training was so bad,

he said. For example, a man came to talk about Cuba to us, giving us Cuban geography, and he said that Trinidad was the second largest city in Cuba. Everybody laughed out loud at him. What is the second biggest? It's... Probably Santiago. Yeah. The Cuban air trainees in Guatemala frequented a nearby brothel too frequently going AWOL all the time, and the Guatemalan president, Idigoras, had become aware of it. Edigoras proposed opening up a brothel closer to the base specifically for the soldiers. And he said that he would take care of it himself. Richard Bissell agreed. Idigora set up the brothel, and the women were brought in from Costa Rica and El Salvador.

Well-behaved trainees could get coupons to sleep with them. The AWOL problem would disappear. Although there has been a lot of revisionist history suggesting that the Brigade 2506 members represented this really incredible dynamic cross-section of Cuban society, that's not the case. They were whiter and wealthier than most Cubans, the people who had the most to lose from the Castro government. Here's a little told story that gives some insight. In November 1960, as the Cuban trainees were being trained in Guatemala, there was an attempted military coup against Idigoras. Idigoras, by the way, didn't just let Cuban exiles and the Americans

train in Guatemala. He'd been screaming about communism for a month, baselessly accusing Castro and the Cuban government of planning to invade Guatemala to spread the scourge of communism. Now, the Cuban exiles were duped into thinking that this coup was actually a Castroite plot. No, it was just a military revolt. And they were convinced to fly their planes to help suppress the coup, which they did. And as the coup was quashed, Eisenhower took the opportunity to announce that the Navy was moving ships to protect Guatemala in Nicaragua because of unrest from the possibility of a Cuban invasion. Part of the basis for the officers revolt in the first place, according to the historian Virginia Gerard Burnett, was the way that the Cuban exiles acted

in the country. I mean, they're very presence. It was embarrassing. You had men who got outrageously drunk in public and took extreme liberties and harassed people and women in public. And it's important to note also that per Cuban intelligence and other reporting, parts of the Guatemalan military were pretty sympathetic to Castro at this moment, and they certainly didn't appreciate Edigora supporting a U.S. assisted coup. Here's how the American ambassador to Guatemala at the time, a career diplomat later described the situation. Quote, you must remember that most of those Cuban youngsters were from the so-called better classes.

They had means, and they ran all over that country. I'm sure that more were killed on the roads of Guatemala than were killed at the Bay of Pigs. At around the same time that the Bay of Pigs plan was being spun from a guerrilla campaign to an all-out invasion, people were getting wise to what was going on in Guatemala. More than anything else,

The control freak Richard Bissell demanded secrecy. He believed that siloing intelligence operations, creating little fiefdoms entirely under his control. For example, like the U2 spy plane project, a huge intelligence coup that got Americans lots and lots of, you know, hard to get intelligence from high-flying planes. That was a project overseen by Richard Bissell, and it was kept entirely under his lock and key.

He believed that this kind of operational security was the biggest guarantor of success. That's why he approved of having the Cuban exosal, participate in suppressing the Guatemalan coup. It helped to preserve secrecy. And when you read Richard Bissell's memoir, and if you read his accounts of the Bay of Pigs or of Guatemala earlier or the U-2 program, he will always say that the endeavor in question failed or succeeded on the question of secrecy. But the thing is, secrecy in the case of building a plane is a lot easier than planning regime change. And in the case of Guatemala, it wasn't exactly written in the stars that it

would succeed. Alan Dulles himself had to intervene by getting a New York Times reporter off the story. Keeping a lid on the Bay of Pigs planning and training was a Sisyphian task. Castro's intelligence network among the exiles was even then notoriously effective, and the Cubans, at least according to the CIA, were too talkative, too willing to share confidences. One CIA official once remarked that two Cubans talking is a conversation, three is a riot. The CIA's gripes weren't totally wrong, but they missed two big points. First, the Americans were blabby as hell on their own. After all, the British Foreign Office

wired the embassy in Washington in 1959, asking for them to look into reports of, quote, U.S. authorities may be contemplating trying to stimulate or support an anti-Castro movement along the lines of the action they took in Guatemala some years ago. Can you find out? And there's another story that I think is a particularly good one that shows just how lackadaisical the secrecy was

from the very CIA agents who demanded it. So Howard Hunt, who I mentioned before, had once misplaced a briefcase of secret documents, never to be recovered. Well, he actually had the bright idea that it would be a really big morale boost to get the photos of brigade rebels taken in training, and Richard Bissell, for whatever reason,

thought that the idea was a good one. So Howard Hunt gets the photos taken, and then the next day, Tony Verona, sees them in the newspapers where Hunt has placed them and starts flipping out, because it becomes very clear what the entire purpose of the whole thing is. Now, while Dulles had been able to get a Miami Herald story killed in the fall of 1960 about training exiles in Florida and how pissed some people at the State and Justice Department

had gotten about that activity on U.S. soil, it wasn't until a Guatemalan paper published a story in October 1960 where you had the first time revelation of the existence of CIA-built bases reported as such to train Cuban counter-revolutionaries for an invasion. In the Guatemalan foothills, there's a mysterious training depot, where some of the raiders may have been based. The government there denies that Cubans are among the soldiers being instructed, but observers have said otherwise. Professional soldiers are among the teachers. And once trained, the men mysteriously disappeared. A subsequent visit to Guatemala by a Stanford professor revealed that practically everybody in Guatemala knew about the American's presence and the purpose of their presence.

By mid-November, the Stanford professor was quoted in the American magazine, The Nation. about the camps in Guatemala. On January 10th, the most famous of these stories was published by the New York Times. It was a headline item about a feared clash with Cuba prompted by the discovery of secret anti-Castro U.S. bases in Guatemala, complete with a map and everything. But these stories didn't really break through to the public. Most contemporaneous press shows that the news didn't really make a splash at the time. In fact, Cuban foreign minister Raul Roa made an accusation at the UN General Assembly,

not dissimilar to the one that Jakobo Arbenz made less than a decade earlier. He said that the U.S. was preparing an imminent invasion from Guatemala. Cuban intelligence, as early as August of 1960, had known that dozens of U.S. military advisors were training as many as a couple hundred, quote, old Batisiano's and simple mercenaries. The American government denied all charges, telling the New York Times that the charges were, quote, ones we have heard before. end quote, false and absurd.

At the end of December, as evidence of the American planned invasion kept mounting, the Cuban U.N. delegation supplied the Security Council with detailed evidence of the U.S. plans, including the airfield in Guatemala, where the exile pilots were training. Just as they had done two months earlier, the Americans denied it again, with the U.S. ambassador calling the accusations, quote, empty, groundless, fraudulent. He said that Cuba had been, quote, crying wolf for the past six months over an alleged imminent invasion of their country and thereby are fast making themselves ridiculous in the eyes of the world.

The Security Council did nothing. Back in our CBS News election headquarters, let's look at that popular vote. With something over 5% of the precincts in, Kennedy is holding on to his very narrow lead. In his campaign book that he put out, upon reference. running for president in 1960. John F. Kennedy wrote that American Cuban policy needed nuance, understanding, a fresh start, taking swipes at the outgoing Eisenhower administration. Fidel Castro, he wrote, is part of the legacy of Simone Bolivar.

Castro is also part of the frustration of that earlier revolution, which won its war against Spain, but left largely untouched the indigenous feudal order. He chided the Eisenhower administration for its close-mindedness, called Fuencio Batista a bloody brute, et cetera. But as the presidential race began to narrow in the fall, Kennedy changed his tune. He began to rant about the radicalism of the revolution, of Fidel Castro and the communists in his orbit,

saying at one rally in Jersey, quote, The Iron Curtain is 90 miles off the coast of the United States. He also played the Cold Warrior more broadly, banging on particularly about the missile gap that the United States could well lose, against the Soviet Union. Now, Richard Nixon, as we pointed out at the top of the episode, was not one to be outdone in this area, so he called the Cuban Revolution, quote,

an intolerable cancer just for good measure. But further complicating things for Nixon, and perhaps soon everybody, was that John F. Kennedy had in the fall been briefed by Alan Dulles and past intelligence by friends about the nascent Bay of Pigs operation that was planned for the next year. It was scuttlebutt. So armed with this information and running to the right, basically, to Nixon on Cuba, John F. Kennedy starts to call for something like a Bay of Pigs operation in his public campaign remarks. This put Nixon in a pretty tight spot. Our policies are very different. I think that Senator Kennedy's policies and recommendations for the handling of the Castro regime are probably the most dangerously irresponsible.

recommendations that he's made during the course of this campaign. He could not reveal the top secret operation that he had spearheaded as vice president, and that was still underway, no matter who was going to be president the next year, but he also could not bear to be perceived as soft on communism. In effect, what Senator Kennedy recommends is that the United States government should give help to the exiles and to those within Cuba who oppose the Castro regime. provided they are anti-Batista. So he muddled through with this line about how Kennedy was being irresponsible with all this loose talk of an invasion of Cuba. We've agreed not to intervene in the internal affairs of any other American country, and they as well have agreed to do likewise.

So once again, America's Cuba mania now allowing John F. Kennedy to out Nixon, Nixon. Goddamn CIA, they went and they told Kennedy all about the track two operation against Castro, and then Jack, he out red, abated me by attacking Castro and then made me look soft. I mean, she, they promised me that the invasion of the executive action against Castro would take place before the election. I mean, God, how they screwed me. But in truth, anti-communism was not something new to John F. Kennedy. He had long as a senator been on record as a cold warrior. In fact, anti-communism ran in the Kennedy family. His brother, Robert Kennedy, one of his first jobs was for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who himself was. a chum of Joseph Kennedy, patriarch, investor, politician, and bootlegger. Yeah, actually, while

working for McCarthy, RFK actually lost out on a job to Roy Cohn. Apparently it was because RFK, at that young and age, was not considered enough of an asshole to get the job. He was too soft. And McCarthy, as a matter of fact, was actually made the godfather to RFK's first kid. But there were other people involved in the Kennedy family that also had some connections to Cuba that we've already discussed. There's reporting that shows that likely at the strong encouragement of patriarch Joseph Kennedy, the Illinois mob helped put their thumb on the scale for JFK in the 1960 election in Illinois.

This includes some of the gangsters we've already talked about, like Sam G. and Kana, who reportedly met directly with Joseph Kennedy at the time and who had significant business interests that we've discussed in Cuba. The unexpectedly delayed climax saw Senator Kennedy the victor with a clear. margin of electoral votes. At 43 years of age, he is the youngest man ever voted into the White House and the first Catholic chief executive in the history of the nation. Not till the middle of the next day was the victory recrenched by one of the closest margins recorded, a plurality of barely over 300,000. On November 9th, the day after the 1960 presidential election, JFK rang up Alan Dulles

and told him he wanted him to stay on board as the director of the CIA. JFK was known for thinking quite highly of the CIA. He believed that you know, they were guys like him, Ivy League educated, blue-blooded, and that it was their technical competence and World War II bravado that would, you know, be the proper kind of approach that he would want to bring to his presidency. Nine days after that, on November 18th, Dulles and Deputy Director Richard Bissell paid the incoming president

a formal visit for the first time giving him an official scoop on what was going on with the Cuban invasion plans. By early January of 1961, things have gotten toxic between the Cuban, Cuban and American governments to the point that, as we discussed earlier in the episode, Eisenhower made the decision to sever diplomatic ties. This prompted the Joint Chiefs and the CIA to give a quick status assessment of where things were with Cuba now that this big diplomatic rupture had taken place. The military chief of the Cuban invasion operation was told to come up with a summary of where

things stood with the invasion force. The state of the forces was, according to this report, abysmal. Here are some of the dismal conclusions of this report. Quote, the number of qualified Cuban B-26 crews available is inadequate for conduct of strike operations. The number of qualified Cuban transport crews is grossly inadequate. It is probable that the assault brigade can reach its planned strength of 750 prior to commitment, but it is possible that upwards of 100 of these men will be recruited too late for adequate training. Unless special forces training teams are sent promptly to Guatemala,

the assault brigade cannot be readied for combat by late February as planned and desired. Quote, the question of whether the incoming administration of President-elect Kennedy will concur with the conduct of the strike operations outlined above needs to be resolved at the earliest possible time. Inaguration, 1961. At the final meeting between Ike and JFK shortly before JFK took office, Eisenhower stressed to him, quote, we cannot let the president government there go on. Those were Ike's last words in the Oval Office to JFK before handing over the reins of power about what to do with Cuba.

The honor of your presence is requested at the ceremonies attending the inauguration of the president and the vice president of the United States January 20th, 1961. To our sister republic, south of our border, we offer a special pledge to convert our good words into good deeds in a new alliance for progress to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join. with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americans.

And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house. A couple days before Kennedy's inauguration, Patrice Lumumba, leader of a newly independent Republic of the Congo, who shared with Fidel Castro a place on the CIA's hit list, was assassinated in his country. Kennedy came into office, and it was extremely clear that if he was going to have some sort of diplomatic reset with the region, and if they were actually going to mount some kind of defense against communism with meaningful cooperation, that you would need to have

some sort of new aid program, which is why in March of 1961, he introduced the Alliance for Progress. If we are to meet a problem so staggering in its dimension, our approach must itself be equally bold, an approach consistent with a majestic concept of Operation Pan America. Therefore, I have called on all people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress, Allianza Para Progressor. The Alliance for Progress was explicitly designed to diminish the appeal of communism with development aid. The historian W. Michael Weiss put it this way. Quote, it sought to reforge pan-Americanism and its political arm, the OAS, into a sword to use

against Castro and every other potential revolutionary in the Western Hemisphere. By comparison, the Marshall Plan delivered $13 billion in three years to post-war Europe against the $9 billion over seven years that Latin America, a much poorer and more underdeveloped place, would get through the Alliance for Progress. A vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude, magnitude, and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work, and land, health, and schools. Tetyo, Trio, etiara, salute, and eschuela. So while Kennedy is savoring his election victory and his first few weeks in office,

he is also beginning to be intensely lobbied about the final plans of the Bay of Pig invasion. In late January of 1961, JFK gets his first briefing on the invasion plan. The Pentagon officials tell him that the things that are active right now, the sabotage operations, the infiltration attempts, supplying counter-revolutionaries in the mountains, that's not getting the job done. It's time for things to be escalated, and it's time to pull out these invasion plans that they've been developing. JFK signs off on this via a memo written by his national security advisor McGeorge Bundy. Quote, the Defense Department with CIA will review proposals for active deployment of

anti-Castro Cuban forces on Cuban territory, and the results of this analysis will be promptly reported to the president. A week later, on February 3rd, the Joint Chiefs give their approval of what's called the Trinidad plan, which would, quote, not necessarily require overt U.S. intervention. A few days later, on February 7th, a group of state, defense, White House, and CIA officials gather and collectively acknowledge, the plan has some flaws. The president's boy wonder advisor, Richard Goodwin, says, well, JFK wants pros and cons, presented as, you know, specific arguments.

He wants a pro argument and he wants a con argument if there's not going to be some consensus on a course of action. In a meeting the next day, Kennedy basically asks if they can go backwards, actually, and just do a guerrilla plan, which, of course, you know, has... Dropping supplies to people already inside Cuba and hoping that they, spark a mass movement. Right, because again, you know, just as Eisenhower was concerned, Kennedy is even more concerned about actively showing the U.S. hand in this invasion. A week after the oral argument's invitation, State Department official Thomas Mann and

Richard Bissell give their memos to JFK. Thomas Mann has the anti-m memo, and Richard Bissell gives the pro. After rejecting the Trinidad plan that was cooked up by the Joint Chiefs earlier for being too spectacular and not easy enough to mask as a Cuban operation, Kennedy told Dulles and Bissell to go back to the drawing board. According to Bissell's memoir, the problem that Kennedy kept having with all this was, quote, noise. The Trinidad landing spot near the city of Trinidad and on the southern coast of the island, it was too noisy. The daytime landing was too noisy. And most ominously for Brigade 2506, air strikes were noisy. By mid-March, the plan was rearranged, and the invasion location was shifted 100 miles to the west to a swampy stretch of

coast called Playa Girone. The invasion was exactly a month away. In JFK's mind, he was about to check a major campaign promise off his list, and he was getting to do it in the first six months of his term. As all of this planning was going on, let's skip back a bit to September 1960. In New York for the General Assembly session was the greatest gathering of world leaders in modern times, all vying for the friendship and support of the new African states. One of the most fateful of many informal meetings in New York was that of Khrushchev and Castro, whose threat to Western Hemisphere solidarity was background for Ike's talks with Pan-American leaders. In September of 1960, Fidel Castro touched down in New York City. He was there to participate in the upcoming United Nations General

Assembly. The U.S. government, which was less than four months away from severing all diplomatic ties with Cuba, gave Fidel tight restrictions on where he was and was not allowed to go. Secretary of State Christian Heter instructed him not to leave the island of Manhattan. Of course, a year before, when Fidel had showed up in the U.S., he had been a TV sensation, and the public was actually quite enamored and curious about the bearded freedom fighter they had read about in the paper. But a lot had happened since then, as we've described. All through 1959 and 1960, the American press and American press and American

politicians had demonized the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro personally. For many, he was now persona non-grada. The tabloids called him, quote, El Beardo and quote, a spoiled brat. Barry Goldwater described Castro as, quote, a bum without a shave. Long Islanders literally burned him an effigy, which is perhaps the greatest testament yet to his character. AIDS recalled that this time around, unlike the year before, as people watched his motor cave drive by in New York's city, they were not cheering. But this is not to say his admirers did not show up. In fact, 3,000 people waited for Castro on the rainy day that his plane landed. But when he tried to get out of his car to greet the crowd on the other side of the fence, police officers

used nightsticks to beat the people, and they prevented Castro from even leaving his car. About a day after arriving in New York, and after some lurid press reports, alleging that Castro's crew was killing chickens and cooking moldy steaks in the Ritzie Shelburne Hotel, on the east side, the Cubans ended up making other arrangements, cementing the legend of Fidel's visit in 1960. This would be the moment that Fidel and the Cuban delegation checked into the Hotel Teresa in Harlem. Raul Roa Corey was the junior most member of Cuba's permanent delegation to the UN at the time. In an interview with us, Roa explained how he had heard about the possibility of putting Fidel and the Cubans up in Harlem. When the Cuban delegation had arrived in New York, as we mentioned, they were told to restrict their movements to Manhattan.

Prior to Fidel's arrival, Raul Roakuri and his Cuban U.N. colleagues discussed what hotel Fidel and the delegation should check into. The Waldorf Astoria was mentioned as a possibility, but most of the group dismissed it, as it had been where Batista himself stayed. The group ultimately settled on putting Fidel and his crew up at the Shelburne Hotel in Murray Hill, which was both close to the UN and easier to secure. But they didn't stay at the Shelburne Hotel for very long. Here's how Raoul tells the story. I was in charge of relations with U.S. organizations and intellectuals and people who were sympathizers of revolution. And therefore, I got a message through Bob Tabor, who was a CBS reporter. And a member and founder of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, yes.

Yes. And through him, Malcolm X. told us that there was this hotel Teresa in Harlem, which was at Fidel's disposal. But before Raoul could suggest the Teresa after this offer by Malcolm X, the delegation had decided on the Shelburne, and Fidel made his way there. But eventually, the manager of the Shelburne came to bother Raoul by demanding a conspicuously large deposit. The hotel manager told me that he wanted to see Fidel, and I told Fidel that the manager wanted to see him, and he said,

No, you go talk to him and see what he wants. So I went, and he said that he wanted a $20,000 deposit. The manager wanted a $20,000 deposit. Mm-hmm. So when I told Fidel that this guy, he did $20,000 deposit, he says, he is a bandit. You go and tell him he's a bandit, and we're leaving this hotel. What were his exact words in Spanish, do you remember? De like a humband do.

And I told him, as a matter of fact. You passed on the exact words. I used the exact words, and I told him the prime minister. says that we're abandoned and that he is leaving the hotel, and he will not make him a deposit. Known in its glory days at the Waldorf of Harlem, by the fall of 1960, Hotel Teresa was perhaps past its prime, but given the raucous reception that Fidel and his entourage immediately received upon their arrival uptown, that didn't matter one bit. Fidel's Harlem shuffle, as black activists and intellectuals would call it, quickly brought

people into the streets. Maya Angelou, who was then 32 years old, was at the scene that day. And here's how she later described it after learning Castro's move uptown from a fair play committee member. In moments we were on the street in the rain finding cabs or private cars or heading for subways. We were going to welcome the Cubans to Harlem. To our amazement at 11 o'clock on a Monday evening we were unable to get close to the hotel. Thousands of people filled the sidewalks and intersections and police had cordoned off the main and side streets. I hovered with my friends on the

edges of the crowd, enjoying the Spanish songs, the screams of Viva Castro, and the sounds of conga drums being played nearby in the damp night air. Juan Almeida, a senior Afro-Cuban rebel commander, crowds chanted his name and asked him to come out of the hotel. Historian and activist Rosemary Mealy would put together a book about Fidel's trip, compiling many testimonials. Among them was Sarah E. Wright, late black radical feminist and novelist, who said of this celebration and chanting. But these were not Cubans. These were my people, the poor, the abused, the disinherited, the trampled leavings of this country, offering their protection and love to the leader of another poor, abused, and disinherited people. The streets were packed, but the

crowd kept going, bringing light and warmth to a dark September night, bringing light and warmth into the bleakness of their own lives. Hundreds of heavily armed police tried to do their intimidating thing. The people did not even notice them. We spoke with Bill Fletcher Jr., labor activist and former director of Trans-Africa Forum, about the significance of Fidel's trip to Harlem. The Cuban Revolution was then viewed by so many people, including the Black America. This is a revolution.

This is a breakthrough. And there was a great deal of excitement about the Cubans being at Harlem. Harlem was the capital of Black America politically and somewhat argued culturally. But in 1960, it was clearly the capital of Black America. So it was something that to this day, I think, shocks many people. The first of the many illustrious guests Fidel would receive at the Hotel Teresa. and, in fact, the person who got him into the Teresa, was Malcolm X. Even through the language barrier, Fidel made a striking impression on Malcolm X,

who later told a journalist that Fidel was, quote, the only white person that I have really liked. There was an article about their meeting in the New York Citizen Call, written by black journalist Ralph Matthews. Malcolm X told Fidel, quote, downtown for you, it was ice. Uptown is warm. The Premier smiled appreciatively,

Yes, we feel very warm here. Then the Muslim leader, ever a militant, said, I think you will find the people in Harlem are not so addicted to the propaganda they put out downtown. In halting English, Dr. Castro said, I admire this. I have seen how it is possible for propaganda to make changes in people. Your people live here and are faced with this propaganda all the time. And yet, they understand. This is very interesting.

There are 20 million of us, said Malcolm X, and we always understand. We spoke with Rosemary Meeley, not only about the meeting between Fidel and Malcolm X, but what it signified. This infamous meeting between Fidel and Malcolm X, it was not the beginning of the Cuban nation's solidarity between African Americans and the people of Cuba. This encounter really represented a continuation of over a hundred-year-old history of a solidarity that was born in the enslavement of African people in Cuba and the United States. During the abolitionist movement, there's quite a few black abolitionists who were linked to the struggles the Cuban people were having against Spain. and then later on, in later years, the U.S., there were also ties were doing Bookerty, Washington's era. We have criticism of Bookerty's philosophy,

but black Cubans came to study at Tuskegee Institute. Black women were trained as maids and maids to go back, of course, to work in white Cuban families' homes. Then, you know, when Jose Marti lived in New York, he had ties to black radicals, you know, to black radicals. And that's what I tell people that that the 1960 visit was just the continuum of that history. And the meeting between Fidel and Malcolm solidified those bonds. And what does Fidel's visit to Harlem do to Harlem?

How do Harlemites? How did the Harlemites experience it as they told you? Well, they told me, you know, it was an acknowledgement, number one, of black folk in New York. You know, it was of our reality, our existence. And also the recognition of Harlem at that time was where that was the safest place that black folk could live. I mean, and it was just not just, and when I say black folk, I'm not just talking about African Americans. It was a large Panamanian community there. There was a large Dominican community, Puerto Ricanos.

So for Fidel and the delegation to come to Harlem, it was an acknowledgement that we existed. This visit from Fidel put Harlem on front pages all over the world. One Harlem resident told a news reporter, quote, I'm glad Castro came up here to show these people we are somebody. Another was a bit blunter. Quote, Castro sure made a fool out of them white folks. British historian Simon Hall also wrote a book about the 10 Days in Harlem, and in an interview he explained how the U.S. government

would often try to keep foreign dignitaries and foreign press out of Harlem, such as the year before all of this in 1959, when Nikita Khrushchev tried to visit the neighborhood. When Nikita Khrushchev visited the U.S. in 1959, he was really insisting that he wanted to go to Harlem. And he kept on, kept on, he kept on, he wanted to go to Harlem. Eventually, his minders, the American miners agree that he can go to Harlem. But they take him then basically at 5 o'clock in the morning on the way to the airport. So he just sort of whizzes through it and there's no one around. Because they don't want it to become a kind of a thing. because the last thing the American government wants is to draw attention to its domestic race problem,

and particularly to draw attention to its race problem in the north. Because the story the Americans tell is that this is a southern problem, it's being worked out, you know, peace-free and democratically through our constitutional form of government. But it's a southern problem for historic reasons. What they don't want is people to be looking, and particularly the international spotlight, to fall on the problem of race in one of America's most important northern cities, a city which has a reputation as a kind of bastion of American liberalism. Castro forged other relationships during this trip.

He met with North Korea's Kimil Sung, Indian Prime Minister Jawahar al-Nehru, president of Ghana, Kwame and Krumah, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He also met with the leader of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who, as we mentioned earlier in the episode, would soon be assassinated in his country. And that's an important meeting for all kinds of reasons, but one of them was that this was a year and a meeting of the UN at a moment in which so many African nations had kicked out their colonial overlords and become independent.

And this was a point made by someone we spoke with, an activist and educator in New York, Joe Kay. In 1960 was the year of Africa. That was the year when so many countries became independent of their colonial masters. The mumma epitomized became the most important focal point for that struggles, these struggles

that I've been describing. And not only did he represent a key element of the African liberation movement, but he was also had a much more progressive social outlook and identified with the

masses in a way that certain other African leaders who were independence leaders had not. Therefore, he was doubly dangerous and he had to be gotten rid of, not to mention the, of course, that the Congo was the richest country

in the world in terms of its natural resources. Raulita Roa also recalled for us when Fidel met Lumumba. And Fidel also met with Patrice Lamumba, leader of the newly independent Republic of the Congo. Yes. And Fidel met him and told him

we supported this trouble that it was a just trouble and that he couldn't count on Fibu's support and said, that he should be careful with the Western countries and with the United States, which were not necessarily in support of changes in the Congo. Finally, of course, this trip to New York would be where Castro met Khrushchev. One thing you've got to give Khrushchev, is his memoirs, at least I find, to be very fun to read.

Once the Cubans had been browbeaten and then moved to Harlem, he writes, quote, we were furious when we heard about this swinish behavior toward the Cuban delegation. After consulting with the members of our delegation, I proposed we make a trip to the new hotel and shake Fidel's hand and express our respect and sympathy. No, not sympathy, but indignation. Now, on his journey to Harlem, he writes, Our comrades told me the head of the American police guarding us was asking that I not go there because unpleasant incidents could happen in that neighborhood,

and he was talking against this visit in every possible way. That convinced me more than ever of the necessity to make the visit. When we arrived at the hotel, Castro and his comrades were waiting for us by the entrance. This was the first time I had ever seen him in person, and he made a powerful impression on me, a man of great height with a black beard and a pleasant, stern face, which was lit up by a kind of goodness. He bent over me as though covering my body with his. Although my dimensions were somewhat wider, his height overpowered everything. Khrushchev noted with distaste the obvious evidence of the inequalities of America when visiting Harlem,

but he was very excited to have met Castro. They only spent 20 minutes together, but Khrushchev and Castro's meeting was, as Simon Hall writes, highly symbolic for practically everyone. My favorite day, to put it that way, is the 22nd of September the Thursday, because Eisenhower gives his speech at the General Assembly, and then he hosts a lunch for the representatives of Latin America that he deliberately excludes Fidel. And so Fidel goes back to the Teresa,

and he treats the employees of the hotel to lunch, to steak and beers, and makes a big show about how he's much more happy to have lunch with the humble people of Harlem and with, you know, the great sort of imperialist Eisenhower. You know, that was Spidell. That's the Cuban delegation. When they're insulted and pushed to the side,

they know who their friends are, you know. So they returned back and they set up, they made the luncheon at the Teresa. All of this was linked together with Fidel, the coming up to Harlem of all the major leader, independence leaders of the third world. Khrushchev came to the Teresa. And that was quite a symbol of the most powerful leader in the world

next to the American president was paying homage and making a pilgrimage to Harlem. That did not pass unnoticed by both by the peoples of Harlem because Harlem became for a time those 10 days an international capital, the international capital of the world, as it were. It creates and helps to reinforce this bond of solidarity. And you see later in the decade,

people like Sturichael, Michael, Angela Davis, traveling to Cuba. They increasingly view the struggle in broader terms as part of the struggle against imperialism rather than simply as a struggle for kind of civil rights. So I think that this 1960 trip is an important kind of part in the evolution of that wider story of kind of black internationalism and the kind of anti-imperialism of the 1960s. Justi Castro, he was very smart. Oh boy, oh boy, see, when Eisenhower refused to meet with Castro, when he came to this country before the election,

He went up there and he had lunch with the goddamn colored waiters at the Teresa Hotel in Harlem. I mean, I wouldn't have got him. We already had the poison for Christ's sake. We had tested it on some monkeys. Shit, where's my fucking drink? By March of 1961, Howard Hunt had been taken off the job of wrangling the Frenti. With D-Day approaching, Hunt's incompetence, and his insistence on trying to make his friend Manuel

Artime, the leader of the exiles, resulted him in getting tossed from this job. After all, as he bragged in his memoir, there were enough Cubans going in and out of his Coral Gables apartment to make his landlady think he was just a really promiscuous gay guy, which he insisted to her he was not. Good. And there was, of course, all the cash, the lost secret documents, the photographs, etc., etc. His time was up.

So the responsibility for forming the exile political coalition moved upstream very fast. Jose Miro Cardona, Tony Verona, and other members had agreed to make nice, after being strong-armed. Manuel Ray, the, you know, self-styled, most progressive of the bunch, who obviously all the Batisteanos thought was a Marxist. Right.

You know, he had been convinced by JFK and the White House directly to join this new group with Verona and Miro Cardona, what would be called the CRC, the Cuban Revolutionary Council. This was the successor to the Frente, and its defining quality was that it was completely pliant to the CIA, because the CIA's ultimatum was if you don't fall in line right now and do this thing with us, it's all off, it's done,

and you won't get to go back to Cuba and have your little country again. At the press conference in late March of 1961 announcing the formation of the CRC, what should have been a moment for unequivocal relief for Richard Bissell? Finally, the Cubans, they've been wrangled, of course it had to come with some heartburn.

Tony Verona said, quote, we have the forces necessary to overthrow Castro, end quote, and saying that they'd been trained in camps in the Western Hemisphere. They don't suspect the thing. And Jose Miro Cardona, the head of the organization, he declared that the CRC would, of course, be the provisional government should any regime change in the future happen to Cuba. Uh-oh. Did I say that or just thinking?

So as all these pieces of the Bay of Pigs come together, bit by bit, something else takes place in March of 1961. In this corner, Ingemar, Johansson. In the middle of the month, Florida kingpin Santo Traficante, Chicago, Capo, Sam Giancana, and Mob Associate Johnny Raselli meet in Miami Beach in town for the Patterson-Johansson heavyweight match. In this corner, weighing 194 and 3 quarter pounds from Rockville, Central New York, Floyd Patterson. CIA handler Jim O'Connell arrives and passes three capsules of botulinum to Johnny Raselli.

Resselli, in turn, will get the pills into the hands of the actual assess. A pair of tired heavyweights. Here at Miami Beach, Florida. And he's found someone very close to Castro. Less than a minute, Patterson is still wobbly. Someone who is inside of the revolutionary government. Not only that, someone who's inside of Castro's office. Another hard left.

All they have to do is somehow slip it to Castro. 30 seconds in the round. Just in time for the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. All these two fighters have gone 15 rounds in their career. Five rounds have been completed, so at the start of the sixth, that'll be the farthest that they've gone against each other. Forin Johansson's primer, as you see, is Whitey Bemstein is working over the cut in the white eyebrow,

which has been reopened in the final 22nd of the round. Thank you.