Chapo Trap House - Blowback Season 2 Episode 1 - "The Jupiter Menace"

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

Check out the first episode of Season 2 of Blowback. The new season of Blowback is on Stitcher Premium, and you can get a month free if you go to stitcher.com/premium, select a monthly plan and use the promo code: BLOWBACK. Once you sign up you can listen on your browser, or you can download the Stitcher app on your phone

The President of the United States. Hola. October 10th, 2003. This government will establish a commission for the assistance to a free Cuba to plan for the happy day when Castro's regime is no more and democracy comes to the island. This commission will be co-chaired by the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Mel Martinez. They will draw upon experts within our government to plan for Cuba's transition from Stalinist

rule to a free and open society. 1992. The White House has also been receptive to the message of the Cuban American National Foundation. At a 1991 meeting of the Foundation, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Bernard Aronson played a taped message from George Bush to Fidel Castro, which was being broadcast over Radio Martí, the U.S. Radio Service to Cuba. So today, we again reiterate our wavering commitment for a free and democratic Cuba. Nothing shall turn us away from this objective.

Jeb Bush, the President's son, lives in Miami. He's known as one line of communication to the White House. Well, I'm not the liaison. I may be one of many people that, from time to time, pass on messages, try to express concerns that might be down here, that might be unique to the Cuban American community. My relationship is really not a political one with Cubans in Miami. I live here. The pressure to break Castro's hold on Cuba has, if anything, intensified during the Bush Administration.

June 2002. A subcommittee looked at whether Cuba is capable of manufacturing and exporting biological weapons. We convene this morning in order to review certain public statements made by members of the Bush Administration in recent months concerning the topic of Cuban biological weapons capabilities. John Bolton, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, received a great deal of attention when he spoke on this topic on May 6 at the Heritage Foundation here in Washington. Secretary Powell at that time said, and I quote him, as Under Secretary Bolton said recently,

we do believe that Cuba has a biological offensive research capability. Unfortunately, Secretary Powell has refused to allow Mr. Bolton to testify on this matter today because he did not believe he is the appropriate official to answer questions about this matter. That puzzles me as chairman of this subcommittee. Moreover, I do not know how the secretary can justify making Mr. Bolton available to a non-governmental entity to speak publicly about a serious matter such as this, yet deny the United States Senate and this committee of jurisdiction access to Mr. Bolton to discuss a terribly important subject matter. Spring 2003.

For more than 10 years, this woman pretended to be an opponent of Cuban President Fidel Castro's government, but she's actually an undercover spy for Castro's government. Godines and other agents helped Castro's government round up 75 dissidents. They were convicted of being U.S.-backed mercenaries. Cuba further shocked human rights organizations last week by executing three men by firing squad for hijacking a ferry to Florida. Cuba's foreign minister defended the executions, saying they would prevent further hijackings. The death penalty is not in accord with our philosophy of life.

It is but an ultimate resource that we only use in extreme need, a resource that we have used to defend a country that has been treated with hostility for over 40 years and still is. In Washington last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Cuba has long had a horrible human rights record. Rather than improving as we go into the 21st century, it's getting worse. It should be an outrage to everyone. It should be an outrage to every leader in this hemisphere, every leader in this world. So today, we are confident. No matter what the dictator intends or plans, Cuba will be free.

De nuevo, Cuba libre. Welcome to blowback. Welcome back to blowback. I'm Brendan James. You wrote NK. I go by Noah Colwin. Just say your name. I'm Noah Colwin. And here we are against all odds in episode one of season two.

And I suppose the first thing we should do here is say thank you to everyone who listened to season one, because you would not be hearing this now if it weren't for the wonderful reception to the show last year. And we did not expect that, so we are very grateful and we are very excited for this season. Season two, we've tried to up the ante a bit and put together something new and something special for you. This episode, just like we did last season, is going to be a prelude episode. We're going to talk about what this season is about, why we're doing it, what it's going to cover. We're going to introduce the characters and the figures that are going to factor into this story coming up. And once you've listened to it, episode two is ready waiting for you at Stitcher Premium.

Because, just like last time, the initial run of episodes is going to be in Stitcher Premium before getting a wide release. And if you're not yet a member of Stitcher Premium and you'd like to jump into episode two after this episode, go to stitcher.com slash premium in your browser. Select a monthly plan and use the promo code blowback, one word, to get a month of free listening. Once you sign up, you can listen on your desktop or your laptop or get the Stitcher app for your phone and enjoy the rest of the show. From 1961, the year of the Bay of Pigs to today, the government of the United States has been embroiled in a series of events which have continually led our nation to crisis after crisis and to the brink of war. Assignment Kill Castro, a true story, is one of the most confusing and frustrating historical events that might have led to a world power showdown.

It happened yesterday, it is happening today, it can happen again. Names of persons and places have been changed to protect the individuals who are called upon to aid their country and in so doing, place their lives in jeopardy. I will give my all for the love of my country, right or wrong. G.W. Bell, Chief of Caribbean Operations, Central Intelligence Agency, November 1, 1978. This motion picture is dedicated to all people who desire to live in a free, democratic society. So, this season, we are going a bit further back in time. Yes.

No more early 2000s kitsch, no more Palm Pilots, no more SNL, no more Apple Bottom Jeans, Boots with the Fur. We are turning back the clock to the peak of the Cold War in the 1960s, to the Caribbean, to a place separated from the U.S., not by continents, but by less than 100 miles. Yes, our subject is the origin of the U.S. war on Cuba. How about the Cuba missile crisis? Cotsuckers moved nuclear warheads into Cuba, pointed them right at us. That was real? I saw that movie, I thought it was bullshit. There are a lot of reasons we thought this would be a fruitful subject. Probably the most basic one is that Cuba,

particularly in the decade after its revolution, is a classic case study in almost every weapon in America's arsenal, our bag of tricks, to stamp out any alternative, an alternative to capitalism, an alternative to the American agenda, an alternative to how to build a country, how to run a country. And we're not just talking about, you know, invasions or, you know, the things that we might call straightforward warfare, but false flags, economic sabotage, assassinations and, of course, psychological warfare. Cuba is not by any means the first example where the U.S. uses these methods, but it is one of the most exhaustive examples, one of the most fanatical and long-term efforts of the U.S. because, in fact, it still goes on today.

I think listeners, certainly to our first season, know that although our show is a history show, it's about history, we always have this ulterior purpose because, well, we're in history right now, buddy, and these strategies we talk about from the past are still very much in use today against places that we are told over and over again on the news or online or in Jack Ryan, places that are supposedly desperate for American intervention. So telling the story of our war on Cuba, trying to capture its scope and also its deeper root, core, true purpose, was an obvious choice for us in season two. Right, because the story of the American War on Cuba is really the story of how we couldn't tolerate

anybody who wanted to dare a different dream than the American one, you know, let alone 90 miles off the coast of Florida. In this hemisphere, certainly. And finally, one thing we're really pleased about this season, and we'll talk about this more later, is that we were able to conduct many interviews, quite extensive, with Cuban guests who will be in the show in their own words throughout the season. I told you, Noah, probably to the point of aggravating you, that I didn't really want to do this if we couldn't make that happen, and I can tell the listeners that Noah, chiefly, did an excellent job getting out there and reaching all of these different people living in and a few living outside of Cuba, many of whom were there during the events that we'll be talking about.

So take heart, it's not going to be just a couple of gringos mouthing off the whole time. Just most of the time. Just most of the time. Just most of the time. And I said you were very good at speaking Spanish. Senator Lefler keeps mentioning on the campaign trail an incident from 1995, when you were a youth pastor at a New York church which hosted a speech by Fidel Castro. Now, you've said you had nothing to do with that invitation.

Senator Bernie Sanders defended his praise for Fidel Castro. Teaching people to read and write is a good thing. Democrats like Congresswoman Debbie Mercosel Powell from Florida, a battleground state with a large Cuban American population, blasted the comments. Those comments are extremely hurtful to so many people here in my area, and very offensive. But just to clarify for our viewers, did you attend the speech?

And do you understand why there are so many people who view Castro as a murderous tyrant and not someone to be celebrated? I think you just called him a tyrant. He was a murderous thug. Yeah, Viva la Revolucion, am I right? He burned books, he banned music, he personally oversaw execution squads, he was a mass murderer. It's like if you walked into a Jewish home wearing a Hitler shirt. One day at a time premiere, Tuesday at 9.30. Holy on pop. Much like we remember with Iraq, Cuba has been demonized within the United States and without for decades.

What is the result of that, I guess? What's the common view of Cuba in the United States? The canned history, the stuff that were mostly taught, you know, not only in schools, but the consent that is manufactured in the news and so on. A romantic revolution, popular revolution attains power, but its leaders betray the cause and betray the people, turning the island into part of the quote, Soviet Empire, a backward little totalitarian nightmare,

making everyone poor and hungry inside of the country, which leads to those poor and hungry people fleeing to America, land of opportunity. And this is obviously a view promulgated by conservative politicians and media in America, obviously the Republican crowd, but really no less by the Democratic Party. Senator Bob Menendez from New Jersey, who is a Cuban American himself, he's the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who as he would put it, would probably make his first and foremost goal getting democracy and human rights back inside Cuba.

And as we were working on this season, there were actually several sort of Cuba moments in the 2020 election in America. Senator Bernie Sanders was attacked during the primary for saying anything even tepidly positive about Cuba's achievements in education. The Castro literacy program did teach hundreds of thousands of people to read and write in the 1960s, but it was also used to spread communist propaganda. When Congresswoman Karen Bass was up for consideration for Biden's Veep spot, one of the things that I guess sunk her candidacy was the fact that Florida would be so offended

that she had spent some time in Cuba in the 1970s. Which then started to affect questions that other Democrats were getting in their campaigns. We just heard Raphael Warnock on Jake Tapper. I was a youth pastor. I had nothing to do with that program. I did not make any decision regarding the program. I've never met the Cuban dictator. I think it just goes to show the natural knee jerk treatment of this socialist country 90 miles to our south that really everyone across the spectrum in America sort of accepts.

Let us move on to our next question here at the microphone over there. Welcome to America, Mr. Mandela. I'm Ken Edelman. Those of us who share your struggle for human rights and against the apartheid have been somewhat disappointed by the models of human rights that you have held up since being released in jail. You've met over the last six months three times with yes or error fat. You have praised, you have told Gaddafi that you share the view and applaud him on his record of human rights and his drive for freedom and peace around the world. And you have praised Fidel Castro as a leader of human rights

and that Cuba was one of the countries that's head and shoulders above all other countries in human rights despite the fact that documents of the United Nations and elsewhere show that Cuba is one of the worst. I was just wondering, are these your models of leaders of human rights and if so would you want a Gaddafi or an Arafat or a Castro to be a future president of South Africa? One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies. Our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle. Yes or Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, support our struggle to the hilt.

They do not support it only in rhetoric, they are placing resources at our disposal for us. How were you able to convince the Bush administration to let Minnesota trade with Cuba? I don't know. Today I think I'm the only elected official who can say while elected met with Fidel Castro over the objections of the Bush administration. They didn't want me to and my response was, well, am I supposed to just believe you guys? I want to go to Cuba and see the place. If I get to meet with Fidel Castro, I get to meet him face to face and draw my own opinion of the man. Not what my media or what you tell me. That was an exciting.

I now have a huge picture of me and Fidel Castro on my wall at home. How many people can say they have that? There is a very different view out there of the situation, not least of all in Cuba itself. A few basic facts here that tend not to be discussed in mainstream U.S. channels. For one, according to the United Nations World Food Program and the UN is actually not always the fairest institution when it comes to Cuba, the revolution's comprehensive social protection programs have, quote, largely eradicated poverty and hunger. The revolution, of course, overhauled a deeply unequal education system, eliminating illiteracy in record time on issues of racial inequality, while Cuba, like any other country, still confronts major problems of racism.

Scholar Alejandro de la Fuente writes that after the revolution, quote, Cuba had advanced a great deal, dismantling key pillars of inequality and providing more or less egalitarian access to education, health, employment, and recreation. On the foreign policy front, Cuba, through sending tens of thousands of its soldiers to Angola over several decades, helped end apartheid, which helps explain why Nelson Mandela himself was such close friends with Fidel. In 1975, as Angola moved towards independence from Portugal, the CIA, along with the apartheid government of South Africa, tried to bring down a new Angolan government. At the request of the Angolan president, Fidel sent 36,000 troops to keep the South African forces from attacking Luanda, the capital.

In 1988, Fidel sent in more Cuban troops for the decisive battle at Cuito-Cuanavalle and directed operations from Cuba. The defeat of the South African army drove a large nail into the coffin of apartheid and helped advance the struggle of the South African people. An Africa as a mother country to so many Cubans needed to be addressed as part and parcel of the worldwide thing of African liberation. When the invasion of Angola occurred by regular troops from South Africa, we could not cross our arms.

And when the MPLA asked for our help, we offered them the necessary help. One area that not even mainstream American channels can wholly ignore would be Cuba's achievements in the field of medicine and healthcare and biotechnology. These include scientific breakthroughs. I'm looking here at a report from the World Health Organization when Cuba became the first nation to confirm eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. But it also includes programs of international humanitarian missions all over the world, where Cuba sends thousands of its doctors and also technicians and construction workers to aid other countries.

And in especially poorer countries, these services are free. The CIA itself at one point reported, quote, the Cuban technicians are primarily involved in rural development and education and public health projects, areas which Cuba has accumulated expertise and has experienced success at home. The bastards. And of course Cuba's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, where they're distributing necessary goods and services at home or sending its doctors and specialists abroad,

are things that have been impossible for anybody to really ignore. Right, including Jake Tapper's own network. Cuba is the first country in Latin America to develop two vaccine candidates that have advanced to the final phase three trials. The government said it couldn't afford to compete with richer countries for a limited supply of vaccines, and that a biotech industry first started 30 years ago by Fidel Castro was the island's best chance at controlling the virus.

Cuba says its vaccines will comply with international standards and eventually the island hopes to sell or donate their vaccines to other countries. And the fact that all of this has taken place under 60 years of embargo and sanctions and as we'll get to a covert war by the United States on Cuba, perhaps it suggests that we need to take a closer look at the revolution that we caricatured earlier. Have we made these preliminary remarks? Let me turn now to the witness that the department has made available to the committee. Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, Carl Ford.

Have we ever had any plans to use biological weapons against Cuba? I personally don't know. I hope to God we didn't. But, you know, I can't speak for what happened back in the 50s and 60s and stuff. I don't know. It's also unlikely that most Americans know much at all about the extent of the many American aggressions against Cuba, both covert and overt. Our season will cover the first several years following the revolution in detail. That's the beginning of the 1960s. But here's a little list of things that people may not know about, things that we've done to Cuba.

Looking at the San Francisco Chronicle, 1977, quote, with at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Michael Issacoff at Yahoo News, quote, documents shed new light on Jeb Bush's role in freeing a Cuban terrorist. And, you know, one key part of this season, we'll be looking at the origins of the 60-year terror campaign against Cuba, often managed, funded and executed from Miami.

I don't know if a lot of people have heard of Operation Peter Pan, in which a CIA scythe kicked off a massive program that removed as many as 14,000 Cuban children out of their country, many who never returned. In this season, we speak to a guest who was one of those children. And, of course, there are the myriad attempts to poison blow up and, in general, kill or deeply mess up Cuba's deeply popular leader, Fidel Castro. But also, there were the assassinations of, say, the teachers and volunteers who, in the early 1960s, helped Cuba's education drive that eliminated illiteracy on the island.

And then, of course, just the actual extent and scope of the embargo against Cuba. Which has been in place since John F. Kennedy first implemented it in 1962. The embargo has sort of been the touchstone of all American Cuban policy for decades. America is the most powerful country on earth. We're 90 miles to Cuba's north. We have an embargo that we do not allow most kinds of commerce to happen with Cuba, at least with our allies. It has had a strangulation effect on the country's economy.

And good, good conscientious liberals have never really adequately dealt with the human cost of the Cuban embargo. You know, for example, here's the now New Yorker staff writer and, you know, Obama health care whisper, Atul Gawande, in 1998 writing for Slate Magazine about his visit to Havana. It's disingenuous to argue that the embargo doesn't actually hurt many people. After all, the point of the ever tighter provisions is to cut off goods, including food and medicine.

But imposing suffering can be justified if it averts greater suffering or serves a larger good. And the embargo once served worthwhile purposes, forcing the Soviet Union to spend resources propping up Castro and denying Cuba resources to foment revolution elsewhere. Now, however, Cuba poses no threat to anyone. Now, Gawande, after writing all that, then returns us quite nicely to the theme of our season by writing this. We could justify continuing to cause pain and death

if the embargo fueled enough discontent to cause Castro's overthrow. But it shows no sign of doing so. There's an argument that history should not focus or be told through individuals, or even narrative arcs, really, because it distorts the real movements of social forces. And I think there's something to that, but I also have to admit to myself that we host a 10-part podcast in which we need to condense and make entertaining a very eventful stretch of time.

We will, of course, try often in our daily lives to show what faced regular people and what they had to say. But with that in mind, there are some real characters in this season, be they world leaders or mafiosos or spies or bureaucrats. And so we thought we'd take a moment here to kind of give you a sense of who we're going to be meeting. Hello, Fidel Junior. Hi.

That's a very good-looking puppy you have there. Is he yours? No, it's somebody gave it to my father for a present. Of course we have Fidel Castro. Fidel started his career, his unlikely career, as a bit of a baby-faced, mustachioed lawyer. He didn't have his beard yet. A lawyer dedicated to representing the workers, the peasants, the outcasts of Cuba.

He was the son of a well-off sugar grower, and he followed that path of an ambitious but also sincere activist. Till in his late 20s, he sort of went one step further. He tried to take a final stand against Cuba's dictatorship. The dictatorship of another character we'll get into this season, Fohencio Batista. Batista was the latest in a long line of many brutal and corrupt regimes since America began calling the shots in Cuba at the turn of the century. Before that, of course, the brutal and corrupt regimes were run by the Spanish,

which we'll get to. But this final stand against Batista that he attempted in the early 50s failed. Failed big time, and it was more like the first step for him, his brother Raúl, and other fellow revolutionaries who will become important as well. They attacked an army barracks in the east, and while it was a bold effort, it failed. They would find themselves first in, then out of prison, and eventually in Mexico, where they would train a guerrilla army to sail back to Cuba and actually carry out the Cuban Revolution.

So he had a very, very colorful life even before he became Cuba's leader. And when he became Cuba's leader, he would make education, social services, ambitious projects in science and medicine, and internationalism, especially key aspects of the Cuban Revolutionary government. And a lot of the stuff, as he put it once in his spoken autobiography, didn't jibe with the Chicago boys, or what today we'd call the quote, pro-Yankee neoliberals. And from the first days of the Revolution onward, he survived, it is said by one of his security chiefs, over 600 attempts on his life.

His prominent enemies included Richard Nixon, John and Bobby Kennedy, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. Prominent friends included Malcolm X, Hugo Chavez, and Jesse Ventura. What was discussed with Raúl? I'd love to meet with him, without internet. I'd love to meet with Fidel today, shake his hand and say, you did it. You beat the United States of America. For 50 years, they tried to destroy you with terrorism, and you beat them.

Jack Kennedy was Bobby Kennedy's big brother by about eight years, and they were the prinsling sons of the sprawling Catholic dynasty of Joseph Kennedy, their father. Joe Kennedy would have been a billionaire by today's standards, having made his fortune from speculating bootlegging and investments across a vast array of industries from Hollywood to shipping. Joseph Kennedy was obsessed with a few specific things, making money, having sex with different women, and advancing his sons further in society than he himself had been able to go.

Oh, and he also hated communists, and was in fact an infamous Nazi sympathizer. Sometimes this stuff would all just collide together. In 1941, for example, when Jack would have been in his mid-20s, serving in the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI caught JFK sleeping with a Nazi-linked Danish journalist. Only his father's intervention kept him in the service. Joe Kennedy had tried to make his own moves on this Danish woman, and her son would later say there was something, quote, incestuous about the family.

But, you know, JFK did go on to actually have a pretty illustrious military career. He commanded a PT boat, and he was able to, with the help of a ghostwriter provided by his father, turn that into a national bestseller, which he was then able to parlay into a career in Congress, first in the House of Representatives, and then into the Senate, where he emerged as a strong, humane, liberal, anti-communist. Bobby Kennedy was a different story. He had a much more severe and moralizing personality than his brother. Bobby began his national political life by working for Joe McCarthy,

and his anti-communist seal was matched by his passion for prosecuting organized crime and labor racketeering. When Bobby was his older brother's attorney general, he became something like JFK's Malcolm Tucker, screaming at subordinates and the like. As the head of the Justice Department, he zeroed in on Jimmy Hoffa, an associate of various organized crime families that you'll hear about, creating his infamous, quote, Get Hoffa Squad. Bobby's sharp elbows would not make him a lot of friends in D.C. during those early 60s years.

One remembrance of Bobby Kennedy I wanted to highlight comes from an elderly woman named C.G. Harvey, who was interviewed at an Indiana senior citizen's home in 1999. Harvey's late husband was the FBI agent turned CIA officer William Harvey, a notorious alcoholic who ran the agency's assassination plots against Fidel Castro, a task that he carried out while working as basically a direct subordinate to Bobby Kennedy. You know, Bobby Kennedy and my husband were absolutely enemies, I mean, just pure enemies. He really was very narrow and he did not have very good philosophy and he had no confidence in himself because his brother put him in a job

that he wasn't really capable of handling. Entrepreneur, financier, and criminal Myerlansky was born in the Russian Empire, began his career in New York City, built an empire in pre-revolutionary Cuba, and tried to escape prosecution in Israel. Mr. Lansky, why are the American authorities after you? Because the new state of man started a campaign against me and it snowballed to such an extent that I guess it can't be stopped anymore. Lansky was a towering figure in the so-called golden age of the American mafia.

Jewish lineage precluded him from ever being a proper boss, but he was really just as influential as any of the Italian guys and in fact avoided getting too entangled with some of the nastier elements like his pals, who were bosses, which kept him relatively speaking, viewed as on the up and up. And in our story, we will find Lansky pioneering the casino and hotel scene in Cuba before the revolution. It's an exaggeration, you sometimes find that the bulk of Batista's revenue came from criminals like Lansky, but a lot of money came from criminals like Lansky, and as a preeminent businessman inside of Cuba, Lansky would deal directly with Batista's government.

Post-revolution, Lansky will lose millions upon millions, as the revolutionary government not only breaks up the mob run casino ring in Havana, but then nationalizes businesses, leaving no hope for the environment of free enterprise that Lansky had built his kingdom in. And we will find him therefore not only arranging for terrorism against Cuba, as he had against Israel's enemies in the 40s, but also hand-picking politicians to succeed Fidel Castro. The man who created the U-2 also planned the Bay of Pigs. One was a fantastic success, but the other wasn't.

Richard Bissell is now a private citizen and a thoughtful one. Mr. Bissell, it's a truism in our society that moral ends don't justify immoral means, and yet you and your colleagues in the CIA must on many occasions have had to abandon that principle. How do you deal with it? I think the morality of, shall we call it for short, the Cold War, is so infinitely easier than the morality of almost any kind of a hot war that I never encountered this as a serious problem. Another figure I wanted to highlight from our cast of characters is Richard Bissell,

who I think is probably the most infamous American spy who never got his credit. Richard Bissell grew up in the former house of Mark Twain, you know, Connecticut blue blood royalty. He was an economics professor at Yale after, you know, going through the whole usual Ivy League education pedigree process, and he was recruited from his teaching post at Yale after World War II to help administer the Marshall Plan. Now, Bissell's reputation as, you know, this brilliant, competent administrator

was so legendary among the Washington set that he ran around in that CIA director Alan Dulles personally recruited Bissell to come work under him. Bissell quickly developed a reputation as one of the smartest men at the agency, but also one of the most arrogant, and one of his first tasks was to work on regime change in Guatemala. There is Celia Sanchez, who had taken part in planning the attack on Moncadabrax, and who now is constantly at Castro's side. Her communist connections are hardly a signal.

One of the most unsung figures in the revolution, at least as far as the cursory American history goes, would be Celia Sanchez. She's sometimes referred to rather dismissively as Castro's secretary, which is a pretty shabby way of summing up her achievements. She was actually a revolutionary fighter that went back as long as Fidel or anybody else, and in fact, when Fidel's guerrillas rather disastrously landed back into Cuba after training in Mexico, it was Sanchez and the people in her network that made sure that the rebels were able to recover from the huge setbacks of that landing.

Initially, she worked in the urban clandestine movement, not with the guerrillas in the hills, but in the towns in the cities. And this was a place where you worked in doing sabotage and clandestine stuff, like spying on Batista, organizing strikes, necessary things like that. She did eventually then join the rebels in the hills, which she described, according to one biographer, as the greatest time of her life. She was also a huge part of archiving the history of the revolution. And unfortunately, in our story, there isn't as much there written down

about what her input was, say, and what her actions were during a lot of the foreign policy stuff, stuff like the Bay of Pigs or certainly the Cuban Missile Crisis. But we will see her in, say, the next episode, the episode about the revolution, and also when she is starting to look out for Fidel's security as things start to heat up between the United States and Cuba. We wish you success. You could show us American possibilities, and then we could say, here is what American possibilities are.

How many years has America existed already? 300? 150 years of independence. Well then, we will say America has existed 150 years, and this is her level of achievement. We have existed not quite 42 years, and seven years from now, we will be on the same level of achievement as America. And the following years, we shall continue to surge ahead,

and when we shall overtake you at the crossroads, we will greet you amably. Finally, we have Nikita Khrushchev, chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the time of our story, and he's a more interesting character than maybe he gets credit for. A bit of a right-winger as far as communists go. He's definitely a mixture of crass and clever. He's often heard to say things like, to an American diplomat, we can now swat your ass, or to the Soviet leadership,

we can put porcupines down the Americans' trousers. But he can also be quite eloquent. At the height of the tension in the Missile Crisis, it's Khrushchev who writes a letter to Kennedy that is almost poetic in how it discusses the threat of nuclear annihilation and what the goals of any humane leader should be. Also, by the way, that thing about him banging his shoe on the table at the UN is a myth. But of course, he plays a very important role in this story

and is making some pretty important decisions that give Cuba an ally in their struggle against the United States. What we'll actually find is that, far from the Cuban Revolution being some red plot from the very beginning, Moscow, including Khrushchev, was quite cautious at first. They didn't even send anybody to the island until late 1959 after the revolution had already been victorious. And there were moments where the Cubans are speeding things up

a little bit to the discomfort of the supposed masterminds of all communism everywhere over in Moscow. There's an interesting ebb and flow to Khrushchev and Castro's relationship and therefore the relationship between the two countries. Their correspondence between Khrushchev and Castro might be something to read from, especially near the end of the story. Yeah, hello, Jerry's place. They're real Cubans. They're human beings from Cuba.

I said Cubans. What did you think I meant? Cigars? Jerry, Cuban cigars are illegal in this country. So to give you a rundown of this season, we're going to start with the revolution in the next episode, episode two. I say that. We're probably going to go back in time to do one of those patented blowback deep dives

to look at the seeds of the revolution, the conditions, and draw a straight line from the occupation of Cuba by the Spaniards all the way up to the breakout of revolution in the 1950s. And for anyone out there who's looking at this episode linked right now and is annoyed that it's too short, go to episode two because you'll see there was so much we had to cram in. It is well over an hour. In fact, most episodes of this season go over an hour.

So we've warned you. If you get what you want, don't complain later. After covering the revolution, we will see the reaction from the United States government and its press and its industry, its capital, as well as the reactions within Cuba from the upper classes and then the middle class. Specifically, we start looking at how the CIA, organized crime,

and those counter-revolutionary Cubans all teamed up in these really, you know, various and elaborate schemes to try and take out the Cuban revolution. By the middle of the season, we'll be up to our knees in the muck of the Bay of Pigs. We'll talk about the scheming that went into that invasion and the execution of the invasion itself. And then the even larger covert war known as Operation Mongoose that comes after. Right. And we're also going to see how the Cuban revolution naturally drew Cuba and the Soviet Union closer and closer into one another's orbits.

All of this, of course, leading to the climax, what the Americans call the Cuban missile crisis, what the Soviets called the Caribbean crisis, and what the Cubans call the October crisis. You know, in 1996, for example, your car was set on fire in your driveway. An explosive device had been placed in a car for political reasons. It wasn't a bomb. It was an incendiary device like an incendiary bomb. It exploded, though. 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. 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. You know, there were these women who were close to the rebel leadership who, even though they're well known, they don't always necessarily get their proper due. Well, it's interesting because you would think that a blockade or set of sanctions and embargo that has been in place for 60 years, you know, couldn't be significantly strengthened.

And yet the Trump administration found ways and methods to make it excruciatingly more stringent. Malcolm X told us that there was this hotel for us in Harlem, which was at his disposal. The Cuban Revolution was then viewed by so many people, including the black Americans. This is a revolution. This is a breakthrough. So as we mentioned at the top of this episode, we're really happy to have a lot of interviews this season that strengthen the show and the story we're trying to tell. And just to lay our cards on the table, we'll tell you now that after the main run of the show, when that goes wide release, we will be doing a further set of 10 bonus episodes.

So these interviews we're doing will sort of interweave in the main narrative, the first, you know, main 10 episodes. But then some of them will really get a spotlight in the bonus episodes, where we'll be a lot more conversational. Most of our guests are Cuban, but we also have some interviews with people who have spent a lot of time working in Cuba or studying Cuba. And we haven't finished all of the bonus episodes yet, but we can tell you now there will be topics like singling out the role of women in the revolution, a conversation with our friend Cuban sociologist and lifelong revolutionary Marta Nunez Sarmiento and American scholar Michelle Chase. There's one where Noah does a deeper dive into the nuclear politics of the Cold War. And we have on the lighter side, much like last season, a movie episode looking at a couple of the lesser known bombs or clunkers that Hollywood tried to put out about Cuba with Mystery Science Theater 3000's alumnus Bill Corbett.

So a lot of stuff coming down the pike as far as bonus episodes as well. Here comes the real shameless plug. Besides the show itself, we have had some really lovely reception to the music that I composed. Last season was honestly a rushed mess, but I can tell everybody who does enjoy the music that there is going to be a standalone soundtrack of my stuff coming out about probably halfway through the initial run here. I worked on it with Marty Sulkow and Joe Valley and had a lot of fun doing a track with the very talented Robin Hatch. So you'll hear the music in the show in the following episodes and the soundtrack itself will come out soon and we will announce it here. So that probably does it for this prelude episode.

And if you're dying to hear episode two, head on over to sign up for a free month of Stitcher Premium. Go to stitcher.com slash premium in your browser and enter the promo code BLOWBACK when you select a monthly plan. That's stitcher.com slash premium promo code BLOWBACK. Last thing I'll say, we want to plug a fundraiser here that friends of the show told us about to help support Cuba getting medical supplies as it finishes its vaccine trials amid COVID-19. It's www.support-vaccination.org. This is a fund to help buy disposable medical supplies such as syringes, needles, etc. to support the final phase of clinical trials for vaccine candidates developed by the Cuban government's biopharma company.

One of the reasons this needs to happen is that Cuba is still under the U.S. embargo. And in fact, two other fundraisers have been shut down due to the embargo because U.S. companies that are in any way connected with the financial transactions are saying we're not allowed to raise money for this kind of thing. It's Cuba. So we will stress here, the funds are not being sent to Cuba. Instead, the disposable medical supplies are purchased by the fund and shipped to the island. And they really need this stuff because of the U.S. policy we've been describing in this episode. So if you can, please again go to www.support-vaccination.org.

Once you've done that, we would love to see you on the other side in episode 2. See you later. Thank you.