The Underworld Podcast - Fidel Castro: Cuba’s Cocaine Trafficker-in-Chief?

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

In 1959, when Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries toppled Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, they wasted no time booting out American business owners, casinos and drug kingpins — much to the delight of US law enforcers. But as time passed, and Castro’s socialist regime sought ever-trickier income streams, the Caribbean island proved an irresistible  stepping stone for cartels getting product from the Andes through Central America into Florida. Ambassadors, generals, and madcap American financiers: they were all on the take. But was El Jefe? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's June 25, 1989, at a courthouse in Havana, Cuba. One of the nation's greatest heroes is in the dock and is accused of crimes that have shocked Cuba's revolutionary hente. Arnaudo Ochoa Sanchez. tall, slim, debonair, stands dressed in his grey military uniform, bed decked in ribbon showcasing his remarkable loyalty to the communist cause, and it's almost unrivaled. Ochoa joined Fidel Castro's revolution in 1957, two years before Castro-toppel dictator for Hensio-Battista and began throwing foreign businesses out of Cuba, including its drug traffickers.

He was the only survivor of a botched attempt to invade the Dominican Republic in 1959 and he'd helped repel the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Ochoa had also seen action in a multitude of Cold War theatres. Angola, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ethiopia. By 1984, Castro awarded Ochoa the title of Hero of the Republic of Cuba, its highest honour. He's as close as a godless state. gets to a saint, which makes Ochoa's downfall, his alleged downfall, all the more spectacular. A judge reads out the list of charges.

Corruption, consulting with drug traffickers, smuggling cocaine, diamonds, ivory, sugar, and, gravest of them all, treason. Ochoa doesn't deny a word of it. He doesn't dare. Instead he offers up communist contrition, an apparatchiks mere corper. While our party was declaring that it had nothing to do with drug trafficking, I was involved in it, says Ochoa. I want to tell my comrades at arms that I believe I have betrayed my country, and I say in all honesty, one pays for treason with one's life. Ochoa doesn't go into the grisly details of the shady deal

that looks like it's brought an end to his career, and quite possibly his life. That is the job of state propagandists, who over the coming weeks tell an incredible tale of grafted and high crime, Medellin cartel men, six tons of cocaine, Florida, and a $3.4 million bribe. Ochoa has done atrocious things, he admits, in a procession of political aphorisms aimed, perhaps, at sparing himself from the bullets of a firing squad. Everything was his own doing, he says. Neither Raul Castro, the vice president, nor his bearded brother, El Hefe, had anything to do with it, he says. Were he to be executed, Ocho adds, my last thought will be a Fidel, and the great revolution he has given our people. The court strips Ocho of his title's the very next day and expels him from the Cuban military.

Five days after that, he faces court martial alongside 13 other officials for their roles in the megal. cocaine deal, providing a through line for Pablo Escobar's narcoterrorists to flood the US with product. The legal process lasts a little more than a week. Of course, Ochoa's guilt is a foregone conclusion. Cuban trials have all the transparency of a golfing weekend on Little St James Island. On June 7, 1989, 10 of the 14 accused a sentence to prison terms raging from 10 to 30 years. for however, including Ochoa, will be put to death. There has never been a judicial process with so much participation, information, clarity and fairness, Fidel Castro tells his Politburo proudly a couple days later.

He refuses to commute the four men's death sentences. It's a monumental breaking form for Cuba's presidente, the first time in his nation's 30-year past that sitting high-ranking, regime members have been publicly condemned and sentenced to death. Back in 1963, Castro had even spared a Cuban, the CIA had explicitly sent to assassinate him. The revolution, Castro had said back then, would not, quote, eat its own children. This time, however, it will.

The whole thing is recorded and broadcast to the Cuban people. With a two-day delay, of course, wouldn't want anything spontaneous and anti-revolutionary getting in there. It's a warning to the people, of course, not to get involved in a drug industry taking over Latin America and thriving in the seas and skies around Cuba. But it's more than that. To outsiders, it looks a lot like Al Hefe's cleaning house, virtue signaling to lost Yankees in Washington, that he's not, as has widely been reported over the past decade, deeply involved in drugs through a mysterious interior ministry department. Look at me, Castro seems to be telling the world. My hands are clean, drug-free, and I'll sacrifice my favourite sons to prove it.

This is the Underworld podcast. Hello and welcome to the weekly podcast that takes a big old dive into crime, gangs, narco terror and flam. I'm Sean Williams, an investigative reporter and writer-based here in New Zealand. I'm Demop happy after finishing draft one of a 10-year project in the Philippines. I've already been harping on about a million times. show and I'm joined by Danny Gold, filmmaker, reporter, Racconteur, and some bathing hobbyist in New York City or a different shade. Every time I see, you must be enjoying that jersey coat. Yeah, man, I actually, I went to the bars where the Jersey Shore was, like where they went on the show, like the original

show, maybe two weeks ago, and it's incredible, dude. I mean, not just from like an anthropological perspective, but it's actually, it's a great time and definitely, definitely go if you can go. Right. Well, you know when I'm out there. So, yeah, let's make that. happen, although it'd be freezing when I'm there. So, quite, not quite as fun. Anyway, anybody watching or listening to us the first time? We are both jobbing reporters, bylines at Wig magazines, TV channels you heard of. And yeah, we've been out in the for years working on stories about crime from Burmese, people, traffickers, Salvador and street gangs to Nigerian cults and Yakuza bosses. So we like to think that we bring a bit of journalistic rigour to podcast in.

And for the blessed of you who sign up to our Patreon, in addition to bonus interviews, in the occasional Stash House Roundup. We just put one up actually, I think this week or a couple of days ago as we're putting this out. We publish our scripts, reading lists, notes, and we welcome corrections

and tips for episodes. So hit us up, The Underworld Podcast at gmail.com. And yeah, that's patreon.com slash general world podcast. You can also sign up right on Spotify, on our page, or even on iTunes.

Yeah, and keep email on us if you want to see us do a live show in November in New York. Yeah, Danny. Danny hates it and it's worth those messages alone. Anyway, that's quite enough for that.

Cuba, live la revolution, or, because we're politically unbiased here, ordiamos la revolution. My Spanish lessons, yeah, are they paying off yet? Maybe not. We've done plenty about crime in Cuba over the past few years. Danny's done a lot on the Cuban exiles who became gigantic bosses, Santo Traficante, Jose de Bato. We did a great cocaine in Cowboys episode

on Willie Falcone and Salma Glute's to my shows on Klaus Barbie and Ted Shackley's. CIA focused on Cuba 2. In case I need to mention it, there is the one and only Bum Fatto del Cuda Music. You better put that in. Anyway, this show is going to get

into something a little bit different, namely the decades-old accusations that Fidel Castro himself, El Hefe, was directly involved in the drug trade, and the revolutionary Cuba was knees-deep, brokering deals with some of the most dangerous narco-trafficers on the planet.

through the 70s, 80s and 90s. And we'll go back from the beginning of Fidelismo and his toppling of Fulhencio-Bastista, fugitive American fixers, speedboat enthusiasts, and a Colombian lawyer named, pretty weirdly, Johnny Crump. And yet, we'll head back into the crazy story of Arnold Orchor and the Medellin cartel, something that made serious global headlines in 1989, too.

And then you'll know for absolute certain, depending on your politics, that Fidel Castro is either a venal drug smuggler or an innocent victim of imperialist, is this really, yeah, it's a really fun episode. Yeah, and a note to new listeners,

you know, we are not a political podcast. Do not argue in the comments. Go like to 95% out to the internet. You can do that there. We're just, we're here for two reasons, right? One is to sell you sneakers like Michael Jordan.

And two is to encourage you to traffic huge amounts of Tusi, sort of an instructional know-how on how to accomplish that. And that's really what this podcast is all about. Yeah, yeah. Just tell us that the ban,

terrible or whatever other people that's fine but uh politics uh castro of course he died in 2016 so is his older brother ramon uh rao castro is still alive in him but cuba is now in a post castro era of socialism led my miguel diaz

canal bemudes i so so badly want to go to cuba and watch baseball there is very up the to do list when i moved to buenos siders next year anyway very difficult to get a measure of organized crime in cuba these days because, well, yeah, I mean, it's an insular socialist nation. The global organized crime index ranks at 170th of 193 countries, largely because it's such an unattractive and unconnected place

for major gangs to do business. Apparently, human trafficking and smuggling are the biggest criminal enterprises, which makes a lot of sense. But a lot of that would normally be sex trafficking and because prostitution is legal in Cuba, few sex workers are therefore associated with organized crime. You do get a lot of low-level corruption and extortion. This is a country that does rationing and strip capital controls, of course.

And pharmaceuticals are allegedly like the most sought-after thing via so-called hineterismo or hustlerism. I guess hinaterismo is almost the same. It's just like an Anglicism. The index also says that, quote, the local demand for heroin is also low in the country, which is created by tourists. Who is going to Cuba looking to get smack? I mean, I feel like a young Sean Williams was. but also I really like hustlerism, like hint that's a good term. It's a good, it's a good term.

It's really cool, hey? Yeah. As you might expect from a subject involving drugs, Cuba and the Cold War, picking through good and bad sorts of materials, pretty much 99% of putting this show together. There's some proper steaming piles of Mietta, stuff written by Reaganite think tanks from back in the day that is just a bit more anti-Cuba than Ted Cruz's Twitter drafts. Stuff that's put out by pro-Soviet rags, you wouldn't even find plasters on the walls of a Berlin tanky bars. toilets. Here's a 1997 dissertation at the University of Miami that sums that up pretty well. Writing about Cuba's involvement in narco trafficking is a complicated task. The secretive nature of the international drug trade coupled with Cuba's pervasive and paranoid internal security

apparatus makes finding the proverbial smoking gun difficult at best. In addition, 35 years of intense ideological hostility between the United States and Cuba makes any accusation by the former, easier to refute by the latter. So yeah, we're going to try our best here, folks. And we're going to start back in 1959. The year Fidel Castro's guerreras topped the dictatorship of Fulhencio-Bartista and set about building a socialist Cuban state. Castro sets himself up as a moralistic leader, paternal,

with a zero-tolerance policy for drugs, which just happens to dovetail with his campaign to boot Yankee Hotel, casino and business owners out of Havana. In early 1959, Harry Anslinger, chief of the Bureau of Narcotics that will later become the DEA, demands that Cuba deport the various mafia box who own casinos in the Cuban capital, claiming, correctly,

that they're responsible for important drugs from Cuba to the United States, usually via Florida, which is just 90 miles away from Vadadero, a beach town on Cuba's northern coast. I only mention Varedero because it's going to come up later again. In the writing game, that's called foreshadowing guys or plant a payoff. This is real pro stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's why you get paid the big bucks as a writer, which is actually the same amount of bucks that like a third-tier dental assistant in suburban New Jersey

gets paid as well, with like two years experience. Chabby, chip-ish. Yeah, it's, that's depressing, in it? Anyway, Castro kind of outmaneuver's Anslinger here. Not only does he ask for a list of the traffickers, he then tells America he wants the list because instead of deporting the He'd rather just have them brought before a firing squad. Of course, at the top of this list is Maya Lanski. The Bureau of Nocococytes says, should quote, never be allowed to return to Cuba. Danny, you want to do a 30-second rundown of Lanski

and his involvement in Cuba now? Yeah, I mean, you could just watch the Godfather part too, even though they kind of do him dirty at the end. But Lanski was, I think, the number one architect of setting up the casino sort of business in Havana, turned it into like a vacation entertainment hub and a mob hub as well I think they also used it to launder money

and it just actually sounds really fun like I really wish I could have been in Havana in 1950s man it sounds like a really good time yeah Graham Ging seems like he was having a great time there as well there are a lot of major organized crime figures hanging out in Havana during the Revolution Revolution and actually as Castro's forces take over the country they make enough rest

and anti-narko noise that even Anslinger, who is a pretty rabid anti-communist, admits a film magazine article in April 1959 that, quote, we are pleased to have seen that the new government has taken an interest in fighting drug trafficking in Cuba. Cuba is a member of Interpol, and that organization is representative in Havana. Jorge de Castro Verde has also demonstrated great interest. The Castro Verde's activity is further proof of the interest shown by the new Cuban government, a fact which pleases us enormously. It's pretty rare stuff to get a quote like that. Between May and August 1959, Cuban authorities arrest Jake Lansky,

Meyer's brother, and Dino Chalini, Myelanski's Casino Point Man in Cuba, and Santo Traficanti Jr., one of the most notorious mobsters on the planet. They take over the post of the following year, part of a wider project nationalized all foreign-owned corporations. In 1960, Cuban courts process almost 600 cases related to marijuana trafficking. They even tell the US they've executed one weed trafficker. All of this is to illustrate the point that at the beginning of socialist Cuba,

Fidel Castro has actually won the respect of American counterparts, despite their obvious political differences for pursuing drug crime on the island. But in 1961, the US attempts an invasion of Cuba via the pigs. it ends in disaster and relations between the two countries plummet. American media steps up campaign against Castro, claiming he's a cocaine addict who uses the drug to deliver his notoriously unending speeches and that it makes his quote, appetite for women insatiable,

which, yeah, I'm just going on anecdotal evidence here. Not true. See, you know what I like about podcasting is that we can, we can editorialize like this. And I also,

I have to agree, it's also not true based on anecdotal evidence. Yeah. There's a lot of anecdotal around. Charles Seragusa, a top official in the Bureau of Narcotics whose nicknames, Sabal was the brilliant Charlie Cigars, goes all in on this line of anti-Castro attacks, saying, quote, Fido Castro had found relations with the mafia not only profitable, but also in line with his communist objectives.

Pumping cocaine into the United States in order to weaken and even destroy the minds of American and would certainly be applauded by the dictator's bosses in Moscow. A lot of this early stuff is coming from a book. I'd highly recommend, by the way, called The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Sainzrovna. Have you used it in your research before? It's really, really interesting stuff. No, it's cool.

It's one of those sort of slightly academicy, wonky books, but it goes through the whole history of pre-revolutionary Cuba. Harry Anslinger then hops on the Cuban drug story. He accuses Castro's regime of since, ending opium acquired in Maoist China to the United States to quote, break the will of Americans and get Cuba some dollars, which is another neat foreshadowing of the current story with fentanyl, I suppose. But at least in the early 1960s, none of these stories really check out that well. When two Cuban men are called trafficking cocaine into Miami in 1962, neither is found to have connections to Fidel. In fact, one is a former intelligence officer under Batista, and the other demanded a land.

landing craft at the Bay of Pigs invasion. Stories change. They did when I was caught smoking opium around the back of the science labs in Year 10, Danny. And they do, as Cuba's revolution takes hold through the 1960s. It's enmity with the United States grows with the Cuban missile crafts, Operation Mongoose, J.M. Wave, and all the wild attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Out of all the drugs to, like, do in high school, you were smoking opium? Like, did you go to high school in 1908?

What's going on here, Bud? Super. super weird and it was like wrapped up in proper like Cuban cigar starve leaves it was a that was a time man imagine doing that and listening to UK garage

that was a that was the era anyway yeah there is a ton more depressing my youth actually almost yeah universally again I'll get back to Cuba actually that's probably a good idea we've gone into a ton of like all those things I just mentioned in other shows and there is far more to

of course than exploding cigars. But pretty soon, as the cocaine industry ramps up across the Americas, Cuba is going to play a role. It can't not play a role. It's right there on the US's doorstep and right next to the Bahamas, which is also going to become one of the region's biggest cocaine traffic and shipment points. And it will become involved for a constellation of strange and larger-than-life men, foreign facilitators who drag in members of the revolutionary regime. So let's begin with possibly the wildest of them.

all. Robert Vesco, a kind of Milo Minderbender, Willie Lohman for the tropics, with all the character arc of a Marvel villain. But Vesco's insane career doesn't begin in the Caribbean, but Detroit in 1935, where he's born into a lower middle class family and quickly acquires three life goals. Become a millionaire, lead his own company, and quote, get the hell out of Detroit. I've actually, I've done two of those things. It's pretty amazing, eh? And to be fair to Mr. Vesco, he fulfills one of those dreams pretty quickly. He shuns regular education. He teaches himself the ways

of industry and he goes from low-level design work at auto factories to engineering to sales before age 21 transferring from Michigan to New York City where he gloms on to the glamorous life of international investment. Three years later

and Vesco strikes it out alone buying a cash-strapped O-ring manufacturer in New Jersey and somehow convincing ony-garts like Baron Edmund De Rothschild and David Sarnoff to pump a million dollars into it. By 1965, Vesco's incorporated its investment vehicle, international controls called ICC, and by financial slight of hand, he takes it public without a shred of SEC scrutiny by buying controlling shares in a public company and then merging it with ICC and renaming the new firm, yes, you guessed it,

I see C, I can't even figure out how to pay a parking ticket, so no wonder I'm going to pay check to paycheck. Yeah, this guy's got great hustle. I'm liking what I'm hearing so far. Yeah, yeah. I just, just before this call, actually, I got paid for an expenses check that I took out in January. That's how well I'm doing.

Anyway, Vesco is just 30 years old at this point, and he's carried out all three of his life goals. But of course, he's not done there because, yeah, he wouldn't be in this show if he had. Turns out his biggest skill is in corporate restructuring, but endless self-promotion.

and a level of over-consumption to humble the average Premier League footballer. According to his biographer, Vesco walks around in a double-breasted suit, Homburg and gloves like the fucking Pink Panther, and loudly tells his quote, chauffeur, to circle the block while he's with clients, the chauffeur, of course, being his factory plant, major. Vesco's his graduate from university when he never went, and he's an inveterate gambler who delights in squirming out of his losses. Vesco buys his wife a 65 grand ring and gets his firm to,

pay him a bonus to cover the cost. He buys homes in Switzerland and Costa Rica, a yacht, and a Boeing 707, he fits out with an office, bedrooms. And yeah, disco, why not? You know, you don't get classic, kind of classy flim-flam guys like this anymore, right? You just get, like, YouTube fitness and business weirdos, hawking supplements and courses and, like, the worst suits you've ever seen with the worst tattoos and worst hairdoes,

just real, real cornballs, like no class like this guy, you know? Yeah, that would actually be a pretty good bit if you were going to do. Like, remember back in the day stand-up routine, that would be quite, you know. Bring back Robert Vesco, man. I mean, I'm not funny, of course. In 1970, Vesco slips across the threshold from Flimflam man into full-blown criminal. Age 35, EIs up a struggling mutual fund called International Overseas Services or iOS, owned by an Istanbul-born American playboy financier named Bernard Cornfield.

Vesco swoops in with a $5 million dollar bailout for. the company, but he then proceeds to siphon $500 million from iOS to cover a bunch of lousy investments in his own firm ICC, plus all the luxury bells and whistles that he's been used to over the years. Just as the SEC is preparing to indict Vesco, he disappears, alongside his family, his money, his yacht and his planes to Costa Rica. Now things get really juicy. In April 172 while on the lamb, Vesco secretly dispatches one of his employees. employees with 200 grand in a $100 bills to Richard Nixon's Commerce Secretary, who is also the chief fundraiser for his presidential re-election campaign. This gets found out too. And now Vesco is on the hook not only for bilking on a half million from iOS, but for bribing a federal employee.

All the while, Costa Rica seems delighted to have this Yankee con man pumping money into its coffers. When has any country rejected the money that's coming to it from abroad? The Costa Rican president says, twirling a mustache perhaps on national TV. Vesco renounces his U.S. citizenship, but in 1978, he flees Costa Rica when its administration changes and moves to the Bahamas. And it is here in the small archipelago nation off the coast of Florida that Vesco's second career in narcotics really begins. He facilitates the trafficking of German-Columbian drug lord Carlos Leda-Rivas, co-founder of the Medellin cartel alongside Pablo Escobar by bride. Birmingham officials and helping leaders set up aerial shipments of cocaine from a DIY landing strip on Norman's K, a tiny slither of land southeast of the capital city, Nassau.

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And remember, stay safe. Yeah, speaking of Carlos Letter, a friend of the show and guy who runs Crash Out Media, Owen Grillo, who's one of the best writers on Narcos out there, he just got an exclusive interview with Letter, who I think served, what, upwards of 30 to 40 years in prison and just got out. And he's talking. And Owen got that interview, I think, like last week. So definitely go give that a listen if you can.

Yeah, I listen to the snippets. And I can't wait to get into the whole thing because I didn't realize he spoke such. I mean, I guess he would do being in prison for that long. But it's a really interesting stuff, man. All this is a pretty wild step up for Vesco back in the day. Of course, he's gone from fugitive road banker to narcotics. terrorist and unsurprisingly, he gets a bit too big even for his boots in the Bahamas and he's got to flee in 1982, having attempted to bribe Jimmy Carter. Okay, all right, listen to this. He's attempting

to bribe Jimmy Carter's administration into greenlighting the sale of military C-130 planes to Colonel Gaddafi's Libya. I mean, this guy, yeah, I mean, he's insane. Vesco then sets up briefly in Antigua, which is home of the Great Civ riches, of course, and he contemplates. setting up his own sovereign kingdom on one of the country's small islands because of course news of a planned air strike from the US then prompts Vesco to flee Antigua back to Costa Rica. But that doesn't last long. And later in 1982, he's aged just 47 at this point. Vesco lands in Cuba. He goes by the name John Adams, although everyone on the island knows his true identity. And by all accounts, Vesco lives as one of Fidel Castro's favorite capitalists.

sending his kids to swanky private school, and giving his government assigned bodyguards Rolex watches so they could keep time because he keeps complaining that they're too lazy. We're going to come back to Robert Vesco soon. But by this point, according to a variety of good sources, Fidel Castro is getting involved in the international drug trade. In 1974, he sets up a government office called the Department of the Americas, whose remit is essentially to help foment socialist revolution

across the Caribbean and Latin America. Cuba's not poor, remember. It's got huge backing from the Soviet Union and a network of spies that far outweighs its population of 10 million people. Castro appoints his chief spy master to the new ministry, a man named

Manuel Pinyaro Lossada, a.k. Barbaroja, or Redbeard, for his principal identifying feature. I mean, you'd have to have a red beard to be called Red Beard, wouldn't you? The CIA regards this guy as, quote, cunning and dangerous, according to the New York Times report,

quote, the Cuban equivalent of the East German espionage wizard Marcus Vodz. Here's a Mexican scholar describing Pinyado. Quote, from the very beginning of the Cuban Revolution, this man paid a key role in building what became one of the most successful security agencies ever constructed. In the mid-1970s, Pinyado views Colombia as one of the rightest places for revolution, and sends one of his top agents to Bogota. His name is Fernando Ravelo Renéidel, and he becomes Cuba's ambassador to Colombia.

But he doesn't stop at champagne dinners and Ferreira Roches. Revello meets up with members of M19, Marxist guerrillas waging a dirty war against the Colombian state. He encourages the rebels to finance their struggle with drug money, particularly, of course, the coca that's flooding out of Colombia's Andean forests. And he promises them that he will have. help them get it to the world's biggest consumer market. Here's think tanker Rachel Ehrenfeld speaking to a PBS frontline team in 1991.

Disclaimer, Eranfeld has a political worldview only slightly to the right of Joe McCarthy. Nonetheless, quote, the Cubans will help them transfer drugs to the United States. They will provide them with safe haven, with fuel, with radar and everything else. And in return, the same boats will bring arms to the insurgencies, the communist insurgencies that the Cubans were supporting. Latin America, in this case, specifically the M-19 in Colombia. In 1975, Erinfeld writes in her book Narco-Terrorism, some of Colombia's biggest cocaine kingpins meet secretly in Bogotar with Ravello and discuss the terms of release of a bunch of their property, boat, cargo and crew from Cuban internment.

Here's Erinfeld again, quote. Havana was not only prepared to ignore drug-laden motherships operating in its waters, but also to provide fueling and repair services in its ports, shelter privileges that were coming handy in the treacherous waters of the Florida Straits. Havana also offered to escort the narcotics boats upon leaving Cuban ports, as well as provide Cuban flags to disguise their origin all the way to feed a vessel stationed off the Florida Keys. In return for this package of protection and provision,

the Colombians would pay $800,000 per vessel, a bargain to the cash-laden Colombian narcot trafficantes. You know, I think at this point it's safe to assume that like every single actor in the Cold War on every single side across the spectrum just turned a blind eye or was actively involved in drug trafficking. Yeah, it's, I mean, you know, we're not even that far through this show, so there is plenty more to come. In 1978, 60 Minutes reports that Fidel Castro has provided startup funding, like he's like a seed investor or something, for Miami Bank,

alleged to have laundered the proceeds of drug trafficking. The following year, a former Cuban spy, alias Mario Estevez Gonzalez, tells federal investigators how Cuban bureaucrats had agreed to facilitate a shipment of 23,000 pounds of marijuana and 10 million methacquone tablets, aka quailudes, from Cuba to Florida, in return for a share of the cartel's profits. This whole time, as the regime has tightened its grips on citizens' rights, increasing members of Cubans have attempted to gain asylum elsewhere by breaking into and taking refuge in Havana's foreign embassies. In May 1979, for example, 12 Cubans had smashed a bus through the chain-link fence of the Argentine embassy and camped out there.

In January 1980, even more people forced their way into the Peruvian and Venezuelan embassies, and there were reports of gunfire as Cuban soldiers try to prevent them doing so. By April 5th that year, there are over 2,000 Cubans camped out of the Peruvian embassy. Fido Castro announces that these people are free to leave Cuba, should another country be willing to take them. Seeing a chance to score a major Cold War win, the US steps up. By April 6th, just one day later, there are 10,000 Cubans at the embassy, and Castro says they can leave on boats via the port of Mariel, around 25 miles from Havana. thus begins a huge boat lift that will deposit an estimated 125,000 so-called Malialitos in the US and other neighboring states. Yeah, and for those who need help picturing it, just imagine the opening of Scarface.

Yeah. And for those who need to picture the next few minutes of this show, imagine the middle and end of Scarface. Well, according to Mario Estevez-Gonzalez, the form of spook, not all of the Malialitos, just freedom-seeking citizens del Mundo. He testifies that of the 125K, 3,000 a Cuban agents, and 400 of those have been tasked specifically with bringing drugs

from Colombia through Cuba to the US. This, he alleges, has been masterminded going back over a decade to meetings between Cuban and Czechoslovak... Honestly, Czechoslovakian. People must have had to like prepare to say that word on news

for ages. Check, check. We can just say check. I just wanted to make sure that this was socialist Czechoslovakia. Oh my god. It's the motherland, dude. That's when my dad was born. Man, can you say it then, please? Check a Slovakian. Oh, Jesus Christ. Okay.

One word I can say. Cuban and Czech spies, including Rao Castro, about whether flooding America with drugs could be a useful ideological weapon against their greatest enemy. Czech intel operative had, one check defector said, train Cuban agents to produce and distribute drugs.

Yeah, and another big part of that I think has talked about a lot more is that Castro kind of had this smart idea where he opened up the prisons and the mental institutions and put them on the boat as well. And that's kind of, again, I hate referencing. I don't even think Scarface is that kind of movie. But yeah, Scarface, there you go. Yeah, you've just pissed off every single second division footballer in England by saying that.

But Cuban drug crime soars during this time. Of course, Scarface gets made. it's all going off in Florida. The Medellin cartel is raking in $100 to $200 million per day in profits alone. Leftist rebels like Columbia's M19 and the FARC and the totally batshit shining path in Peru. You can check our episode on them from last November. And making cocaine the cornerstone of their battles for Bolivarian jungle utopias. Oh, and Robert Vesco, Cuba's fugitive in chief, is allegedly helping launder all kinds of millions for

some of the richest gangsters on earth. In 1981, Miami cops discover a baby blue Mercedes-Benz 450, bullet-ridden and dumped in a canal in the Miami suburb of Coral Gables. Have you ever been to Coral Gables? It is, it's awesome, dude. It's super nice.

I had a college friend from there. He would pick me up from the airport in Miami, like in a black tinted out M3, blasting Trick Daddy while smoking a blunt. I mean, Miami, like, it wasn't a real place then. It's just, it's never really been a real place. It's just like a, I don't know how to describe it, man, but it's not, it's not real. Yeah, I mean, I kind of know what Miami's like from all the people I know who like Miami.

I spent two, I spent two. I like Miami for a week or two at a time, maybe for the winter. I mean, I had a very different time. I went to Miami for two days and like an elderly gay man took me around a lot of the Art Deco hotels and showed me how it was in the 60s for a story. And it was getting very into trying to give me drink to get me into these gay bars. Anyway, they, where are we? Yeah, Cole Gables, Miami, 1981, Mercedes-Benz, dumped in the canal.

Nice. The cops trace the vehicle back to a 35-year-old drug trafficker named Jaime Guizzo, Lara, Guizzo. Yeah? I don't know. Who it turns out DEA agents have been tracking for over five years because Guizzo isn't just any other drug smuggler. And the DEA claims he is the key at a wild, case that will finally put Fidel Castro in possession of a smoking gun when it comes to the international drug industry. In December 1981, Guillaume pops up again, this time in Mexico City,

where he's jailed on marijuana charges. Wait, so his car was shot up, but he's alive. His car was shot up, he was kidnapped, but somehow he survives. There's like almost no information about it besides online. I even went through the old newspapers, archives, couldn't find much. The following month, a federal grand jury in Miami indicts him on marijuana conspiracy charges. A couple weeks later, Guizhou attempts to slash his wrist in his jail cell but fails to kill himself, which is a pretty radical act for some guy's shipping weed. Only, that is not who he is. First off, he is big and he's bad.

He owns a 300 grand home in Miami at a time when 300 grand could buy you more than a studio under the JFK flight path. He'd been arrested in 1976 for murder in his native Baranquizia, Colombia, and Colombian army soldiers had seized one of his marijuana ships in 1977. Gijot had then absconded to Mexico where authorities there had arrested him for fraud in 1978. And in 1979, apparently he's out or he's inside, I don't know, Colombian troops seized 44 tons of marijuana from Gijol. Remember Fernando Ravello, the Cuban ambassador to Colombia who's running a side gig tooling up M19? later in 1979, he is hosting one of his notoriously wild parties at a penthouse suite at the Bogotar Hilton, because communism,

and the night champagne, caviar and cool girls have been organized by a Colombian lawyer named Juan Lorenzo Crump Perez, or brilliantly Johnny Crump. Crump is predictably also a drug trafficker series. It's like folks to shipping coke on the side in this era, like the way people trade crypto today. Crump gets Gijot into the party and they approach Revello the ambassador with a plan to use Cuba to refuel drug planes and boats headed into the US Here is Crump speaking to PBS

quote and I'm not going to do the accent We make an arrangement with Fernando Revello to send a boat loaded with drugs to Cuba waters And the boat was supposed to stay in Cuba waters For whatever one need One week, three, four Five days What? What is he talking about?

So the moment that Jaime has to send speedboat from Miami to pick the merchandise in his boat and send it back, the speedboat, to Miami. I probably should have done it in his accent then. Do the accent, dude. The listeners want to hear you to do accents more. They always tell me. We took the, I can't, I just sound like a Greek. I sound like Greek. Yeah, don't. Your accent's not good. I'm not going to do that. You could tell. Do an Asian accent. Uh, we took the plane from Panama to Havana. And when we landed in Havana, I never go through customs to anything. They never checked my passport. I just went from the plane. Now I sound like the guy in Burma, who I

used as a fixer years ago. I just went from the plane to a Cuban government car that was waiting for us in the airport. I mean, there's no way that you can go to any country with no passport with nothing like that. Landing from another country in an international airport and have a car waiting for you right there in the field, it has to be okay with that government, that country. That's the end of that quote, guys. Trump claims that he stays for free at the Havana Libre Hotel, one of the city's swankiest joints, and where Fido Castro and his closest allies had stayed after the revolution in 1959.

Each day, he says, he's picked up by a government car and driven to meet important Cuban officials. The highest ranking person he claims to have met is René Rodriguez-Cruz, a close friend of El Jaffe himself. I mean, Cuba is a police state, right? It's got one of the most sophisticated security apparatus in the world. Even if Crump is overselling his importance, he probably is. There is literally no chance the Cubans didn't know.

They had a pretty hefty drug trafficker staying in downtown Nirvana. Yeah, I mean, I got to say when we first started talking about this episode, like only a week ago, I was, you know, somewhat skeptical of this, but a lot of this stuff is pretty damning. And just to let everyone else know, Sean researched and wrote this in like five days, which is, you know, And it might be one of the best podcast episodes you'll hear this year. If not the best, though, I haven't heard the Taylor Swift interview yet. So, I'm just, you know, to be fair. But just impressive stuff, dude.

I have recorded that and I will be playing it when I walk the dog in a couple hours over and over again. Thank you. The DEA puts guizhou and crumb. I mean, yeah, like, it is, it's pretty nuts, actually. When I started researching this, I thought, eh, it's going to be a lot of Cold War, like, flim flam about this. But it's pretty nailed on, man. The DEA puts Gijot and Crump in a room with Rao Castro during this time, I mean, figuratively, of course, and says it was Castro's plan to use the pair to deliver 200 tons of weapons to M19 guerrillas in return for letting them use Cuba to ship their drugs. I mean, it all makes sense, right?

Crump says the Cubans know which drugs are his because they use the code name Viviana, is the name of his baby daughter, whose godfather is Ravelo, the ambassador. So, you know, it all falls into place pretty well. Gijot suffers his downfall soon after, of course, and in January 1982, DEA agents arrest crump on narcotics charges at a Miami hotel. If their information is accurate, writes the Miami Herald, the case could establish for the first time a Cuban link between drug smuggling into the United States and revolution in South America. Oddly, after the CIA interviews him in Mexico City about his connections in Cuba,

Cuban officials then petitioned for Mexico for Crump's release. And by the end of 1982, he walks free and flies to Havana. In April 1982, Crump is handed a 25-year suspended sentence with a six-year probation by the US, but then he cooperates in the case against four Cuban officials, including the chief of the Cuban Navy, and the US enters him into the Federal Witness Protection Program. The whole crazy affair is given Washington just the fodder it next. needs to launch a war of words against Fidel Castro, and in September 1982, then VP George H.W. Bush speaks to NBC nightly news. We're concerned about Cuba's role in drugs, he says.

I can't go into everything we might be trying to do about it, but I think there has been hard evidence that there is involvement of Cuba in the overall drug problem. This actually hits harder than you might imagine. By this point, a lot of Caribbean and Latin American nations are turning away from communism. And Castro's relationship with his comrades in Moscow is fraying somewhat. In October 1983, the US invades the island of Grenada and overthrows its Marxist hunter, a week-long conflict to which Castro had contributed men and material. Plus, given the Medellin cartels increasingly outrageous terror campaign in Colombia

and American public outcry over cocaine and crack, El Hefe doesn't want to give lost Yankees an excuse. to attack his own nation. But Crump and Gijio aren't the only drug and gun runners in bed with Cuba. An American named James Herring, who runs a procurement firm named, cryptically Everything Goes Inc, says that he's been running speedboats in and out of Cuba, beginning in 1982, and notices how Cuban intelligence agents handle narcotics a standard procedure. Herring swears he doesn't smuggle drugs himself, because of course he would swear that,

but he does tell a U.S. reporter that, quote, when I would go into Baradero with boat loads of equipment, see, Baradero again, we would be received by marked vessels that the Cuban Navy, so to speak, utilize their military gunboats. They would escort us into the gunboat dockage there at Vadero. From there, they would offload. We would stay as long as we felt necessary to refuel us, wine and dined us, and when we were ready to return to the keys,

they would take and escort us out. Remember Valadero? Come on, guys. This is good. Yeah, it was the beach town on the coast, dude, closest to Florida. Exactly, yeah. It's all fitting into place. Herring says that Robert Bresco, remember him too, is Fidel Castro's chief procurer, engaging in trafficking of all kinds as part of his fausty impact to keep away from the feds. Even Carlos Leda, Medell Cartel founder, he admits that he'd gone to Cuba at this time with the express permission of Fidel Castro.

without the permission of Fidel I could never have gone into Cuba later says. He gave permission to the authorities so I can go into Cuba and meet with Bob Vesco. In 1983 some of you might remember from our two-part and former SS officer to Narco

King Ping Klaus Barbie Castro actually invites Pablo and Bolivian coca king Robert Suarez Gomez to Havana ostensibly to discuss according to Info Bay quote the marked interest that Fidel and his entourage had in using drug trafficking as a weapon against Yankee imperialism and in supporting

Colombian guerrilla groups with funding from trafficking. Only this is a massive trap. Castro wants to arrest Escobar and Suarez, on one hand to help out his leftist buddies in the Nicaragun civil war who are struggling to beat drug money-fueled nationalists there, but also, presumably, to show the Americans he can be their ally in the war on drugs. Only this plan backed fires when two Cuban generals warn the pair and they escape before the arresting party arrives. Castro unsurprisingly has both these guys executed as a result. But in 1985, he continues his anti-cocaine charm offensive, saying in an interview that Cuba has a quote, unimpeachable record on drugs, adding that he doesn't know of a single case in which a Cuban official had been

involved in the drug business. I mean, I think despite all the gray areas and speculation in this show, we can safely say that this is a big fat fib. And here's why. In April 1986, the number four reactor at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine blows up, and it will cost the Soviet Union an estimated $700 billion. It's widely thought to be the most expensive disaster in human history, twice as costly as a Fukushima disaster in 2011, and one of the key factors in the USSR's downfall. Moscow freezes a ton of aid headed for. Moscow freezes a ton of aid headed for allies including Cuba, which sends the Castros into a tailspin. A socialist nation with no money for socialism is, after all, pretty screwed.

To plug the funding gap, Cuba christened something called the Departemento MC, a subdivision of the Interior Ministry under Minister Jose Abrantes, and headed up by Colonel Tony Delaguardia. Here's El Jaffe's former bodyguard, Juan Rinaldo Sanchez, writing in his biography the double life of Fidel Castro, which is a very interesting read. The Departamento MC had the precise aim of generating dollars with the aid at front companies based principally in Panama, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Hence the joke that the meaningless acronym MC, which had no particular meaning in Millie

corresponded to a stupid malevolent military alphabet naming system, actually stood for Monera convertible, convertible currency. Rinaldo goes on, quote, the MC department made use of anything that came to hand, and trading in everything, tobacco, lobsters and cigars smuggled into the United States, clothes and electrical goods exploit to Africa, artwork and antiques pedaled in Spain, not to mention the diamonds and ivory bought from Africa and sold in Latin America or elsewhere. Some of the business was legal, some not. But the existence of the department itself was in no way secret.

On the contrary, the official daily Granmar had one day explained his mission in these terms. Its purpose is to fight against the economic blockade or embargo of the United States that's been in operation since 1962, so as have the means to procure products such as medical equipment, medication, computers and so on. It was inevitable that in those years, and in that region, writes Ronaldo, the path of the bandits of Department MC would cross those of Colombian drug traffickers. also in search of easy money. It was therefore not altogether a coincidence that the Department MC soon acquired another nickname,

the Marijuana and Cocaine Department. Even before Department MC, Cuba had long been used in Panama to ship essential goods outside the purview of US sanctions. De La Guardidea and Department MC switched the routes up for more exotic purposes. Says PBS, quote, The function of the department was to create private companies in different parts of the world that officially didn't belong to Cuba

but actually were totally Cuban. Through these companies, they broke the blockade. They're involved in illegal businesses like false passports and drug deals and sales, etc. Toli de la Guadillas used Panama's relaxed business laws to establish scores of paper companies. These disguised the highly lucrative state-approved smuggling operation, which has been mounted

by department MC. I mean, this is all pretty similar to the way that North Korea, for example, his sanction-busting trade routes in the Pacific to ship meth, which is definitely another subject we should re-up on soon. Rinaldo claims that he listened in on a conversation between Fidel Castro and Abrantes, the Interior Minister, explicitly discussing the protection of a Latin American lancero, a boatman, who wants to use Cuba to ship cocaine into Florida. Quote, Tony Deluguadier, an old hand at special missions, as well as a hero for struggles for independence in the developing world,

looks after the logistics of the trip. There too, the commandante, Castro, had no objection. Castro's reasoning was as follows as Ronaldo. If the yanks were as stupid enough to use drugs that came from Colombia, not only was that not his problem, as long as his involvement was not discovered, that is, but in addition it served his revolutionary objectives in the sense that it corrupted and destabilized American society,

icing on the cake. It was a means of bringing in cash to finance absorption. And so, as cocaine trafficking increased in Latin America, the line between guerrilla war and trafficking drugs gradually blurred. What was true in Colombia was just as true in Cuba. In 1987, a top Interior Ministry Intel guide defects from his diplomatic post in Czechoslovakia and tells Western officials that Cuba is actively operating as a drug transshipment point from Colombia into the United States.

Colombian traffickers have a fleet of 13 ships and 21 aircraft, he says, that work inside Cuban territory. It all functions under the protection of elite commando unit deployed, he adds, only with the approval of El Hefe. This is all getting pretty squeaky bum for Fidel, and on February 5, 1988, it gets a whole lot worse. The United States indicts Manuel Noriega under the RICO Act and interviews Panamanian diplomat Jose Blan Donne, considered to be one of Noriega's closest confidants. And Blandon, I guess, trying to avoid spending the rest of his life in an American jail cell, spills a lot of beans. He tells the Senate subcommittee that in late June 1984,

he, Noriega and another Panamanian military officer had met with Fidel Castro in Cuba, with the purpose being to mediate in a dispute between Noriega and the Colombian cartels. It's a pretty crazy story. In 1984, Noriega is a very crazy story. Noriega is a Central American Scheherazard trying desperately to fend off US law enforcement. So when US officials tip him off about a cocaine processing plant in Panama, which he obviously knows about, Noriega is then forced to raid the facility, earning the ire of Colombian cartel guys,

who are paying him personally $5 million to use his country's territory. To protect himself, Noriega then reaches out to Fidel Castro. According to Blandon, Castro suggests the Noriega, that he refund the bribe, the confiscated cocaine, and a helicopter captured in the raid, plus release 23 people arrested, which sounds a lot less like a shrewd negotiation than just saying, go back on all that stuff you did man well. But Nariaga concedes the Colombians get what they want, and the cocaine keeps on rolling through Panama. I mean, it seems like a pretty small solution, right?

Just do what the Americans want in the initial thing, and then a couple months later, just, you know, just gave everything back. Go back the entire thing. Yeah, yeah, why not? They stop paying the same, right? Yeah, I mean, he's got a bit of cash, old man, well, for a while anyway. So let's get back up to 1988, right? Now Castro is desperate.

Noriega is pretty much toast, and Blandon has basically just lifted the lid on Cuba's interaction with Colombia's deadly cartels. If not quite pointed the finger at Castro as a drug trafficker himself. So Castro's looking for a way out. And in 1988, in June, he finds it. He arrests Arnado, Ochoa, Tony Deluguario and 12 others on corruption, drug and treason charges. Jose Brantz, the Interior Minister, is swept up in a separate case a few days later. The prosecution specifically mentions drug operations out of Varedero. The exact same place Harry Anslinger said was the base of Cuban drug shipments back in 1959,

and the same place James Herring had been running boats out of in the early 80s. Hell Hefe is pretty clear, his cleaning house. He's purging to Parmen MC and everybody who'd helped Cuba get his criminal cash over the past few years. We're finally back to the story from today's Cold Open, so you know what happens next. And on Thursday, July 13, Ochoa, De La Guardia, and two others are led to a war at a military facility near Tuanamo Bay. Castro demands the entire thing be filmed. Ronaldo claims he watched the VCR. I have often been asked how Choa faced death, he writes.

The answer is clear and unambiguous, with exceptional dignity. As he got out of the car, he walked straight. When one of his torturers proposed to put a band over his eyes, he shook his head in a sign of refusal. And when he was facing the firing squad, he looked death square in the face. Despite the absence of sound, the whole excerpt shows his courage. To his executioners, who cannot be seen in the footage, he said something that one could not hear, but which one could guess.

His chest pushed out, his chin raised. He probably shouted something like, go on, you don't frighten me, which sounds very weird in my London accent. An instant later, he crumpled beneath the bullets of several gunmen. You know, you can kill him, but you're only killing a man. You're not killing an idea. And that idea is that trafficking cocaine is a great way to make money for yourself or for your ideological struggles.

and that idea is still going really strong, so it didn't really work, you know? Yeah, let that be the moral of this entire episode, guys. So I just want to say, go on, you don't frighten me, mate, once more because I really wish you'd said it like that. Anyway, Bosch, the whole thing is over in a matter of minutes. Oh, yeah, we're talking about a guy getting shot dead, aren't we?

According to Ronaldo, Rao Castro, close to the condemned men, falls into a period of intense alcoholism, necking bottles of vodka to get through the day until Fidel meets him at a cabana and tells him, if what's worrying you is what happened to Abrantus will happen to you, let me tell you that Abrantz no is my hermano. You and I have been united since we were children for better or worse. Abrantz, by the way, he's been sentenced to 20 years in prison

and he dies just a couple years later. There's a fantastic long read about the Achua Affair. by Julia Preston at New York Review of Books. I put it on the reading list, including a little VPN. Rekhi in case needs to read it there. On October 29, 1989, as communism is falling across Europe,

Castro rails against the changing geopolitical tides, telling his people, quote, nobody can deceive or confuse the Cuban people because we have faith in our solid conviction in Marxism, Leninism. The red banners of the revolution will never be lowered and or substituted by the white or,

yellow banners of counter-revolution. And Cuba's revolution continues. Past East Germany, past Russia, past even Albania, to today. In 1995, Robert Vesco's name pops up in the media again, when Cuban officials announced they've placed him under arrest on suspicion of being a foreign agent. No, no shit. Here's a fantastic bit from Time magazine, quote, Vesco was little more than a cipher, a relic from an earlier generation,

recalled in vague outline from his criminal odyssey around the Caribbean and for a broad range of roles, millionaire, gambler, stock cheat, illegal campaign contributor, Watergate Shadow, drug dealer, scoundrel. He was, for archaeologists of roguery, the fossil evidence that money can buy power and immunity from the reach of the law. Now, suddenly and surprisingly, he was back in the news. But last week, Robert Vesco became not a player, but a pawn. Havana, which are provided in rich refuge for a decade,

seemed to decide the moment of the arrive to offer him up to the US, which had been chasing him unsuccessfully for 23 years. That's what we are, dude. You know, not like successful criminal masterminds, but who live lives of luxury and success and all that, but archaeologists of roguery. I kind of, I like that, man. I've never heard that before.

I did wonder when I was looking at that whether you'd pick it out, because, like, what phrase that is? Yeah, it's writing in the 90s, man. And I think you've got a bit of it. your next show as well. And yeah, newspaper magazine writing in the 90s is good. Vesco dies in Cuba in 2008, age 71, although some people still think that he faked his own death. Since then, there really hasn't been much about Cuba's cocaine connection. So I guess you could say that Fidel Castro's purge of Ochoa, della Guardia, and the other men of department MC, it worked.

Was Cuba's commandante a drug trafficker? Well, kind of. I can kind of believe that he facilitated take the transship and the Colombian cocaine into the US for decades, not only through Department of MC, but by using his diplomatic and military contacts across the region. And I actually did an interview with former Miami cartel, Moneyman Ken Ryjok, that were put on the Patreon alongside this show. Ken's a really interesting guy. He's written a book about money laundering back in the 80s

and all the crazy stuff that happened. And this is what he's had to say about Castro's involvement in the underworld. Well, you know, the Castro government was 101% corrupt. Those people had to be. They had to be to survive. And frankly, there was no gatekeeper.

So if somebody was a senior official and they could get away with it, I'm sure that they were already doing it in other fields and moving into narcotics facilitation was just like one more crime I'm going to commit because nobody's going to catch me. But as to how high up

it went, you know, perhaps we'll never know because criminals don't keep records on things like this, and especially if they end up, you know, facing a firing squad or being hung, there are not going to be any, you know, there aren't going to be any reports because that's an embarrassment to the government. So was Fidel Castro a major player? We'll never know. But we know that people just underneath him were making a whole lot of money by helping American drug smugglers move their product into a very hungry North America. So yeah, what do you think about that, Danny? And what do you think about leftist politics more generally? Are you a Mandarney or Cuomo guy or you got any faults on gun control, abortion?

Or maybe the Yankees making the World Series? Dude, all that is for my other podcast where it's just me screaming at a camera for 45. I don't have another podcast. I'd rather throw myself off. Gold from gold. But yeah, I hate them all, dude. Don't forget to sign up for the Patreon, guys. Patreon.com, that's an oral podcast.

I really wish the Yankees would just get a decent bullpen and stop being terrible. Max Fried, what's going on? But I bet on you to win the Siam and then you lose like five. Anyway, until next week, guys, thanks for tuning in. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at USAA.com. Slash bundle, restrictions apply.