Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 151: The Cuban Embargo

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Soy Cuba? I find it quite Based actually... follow Noah on the bird site: https://twitter.com/noahpasaran buy the shirt: https://www.grimgrimgrim.com/products/well-theres-your-problem-x-grimgrimgrim-diy-disastercore Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Hello and welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go I am Alice Goldwell Kelly. I'm the person who is speaking now my pronouns is she and her Yay Liam Viva Liam. Thank you. Hi Well done. I don't I don't know I don't know any Spanish. No sé, en español. Perdón. Hola, soy Liam Anderson, y mis pronuncias son él y él. Y tenemos un gués. Tenemos el.

El gués, si. Bueno, si. Si, señor. Si el drobo sensuario. Buenas tardes y bienvenidos a Bueno, ahí está su problema. Un podcast con diapositivas. Mi nombre es Noah y uso el pronombre él en español y he him en inglés. Ok, vaya.

I like the he him in English, but in a accent, you know, I approved of that. Precisely. I will be doing that many times in this podcast accidentally. ¿Dónde está la biblioteca? Yeah. That's a great question. Who can say the level of sort of cultural sensitivity that we are going to demonstrate this over the next five to six hours?

All I can say is you have an excuse because I am Puerto Rican. So like it's I'm technically allowed to, you know, I'm technically allowed to say it fantastic. I'm allowed to say Buenos Dias. I think they allow most people to say the phrase Buenos Dias. El Yankee Federalista no quiere decir Buenos Dias. Hola, como estas? No Jesus, man. Jesus Cristo.

We. We're off to a great start. It's going to be a great podcast. Yes, I took some Spanish in high school. You I thought you know. OK, why am I here? Why? If you look at this photo, do you look at this photo? Yes, I thought you, no, okay. Why am I here? Well, if you look at this photo, do you look at this photo?

Yeah, I can see the photo with all of the lack of freedom happening. Yes, yes. There's no freedom here. We're kind of all over it. Yeah, there's just so much of it. There's no consumer choice. There's, you know, this isn't maybe one of the worst things

I've ever seen morally. I mean, I do this for work all the time. I'm constantly seeing like NTSB photos of like kids who have been thrown from 30,000 feet or like people who have like died in like horrible situations. Oh, for Dolphin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. People who are just like reduced to like backbacon. But you show me this, you come to my workplace and you show me one brand of each consumer item. The most well actually anti capitalist, anti liberal thing you could show me. I do want to I do want to actually, you know, correct that because there's actually multiple

brands of the same consumer item, but they're all government owned. We are here to talk about the Cuban embargo and why you cannot have decent rum in the United States. Unless you buy Don't Go, they don't pay me to say that. It's just good. This is why you can't get the good scous. You can't get the good scous. You can't get the good scars. It's why you can't get the good scars. You can't get the good rum and it also causes famine. So that's nice. Cool. That's what we'll get into that and uplifting and uplifting five or six

hours of cultural sensitivity. Oh, yeah. This is going to be my version of, you know, when Liam gets like really upset about something, God damn it. When Liam gets like really upset about something. God damn it. It went when Liam gets like really like like like sort of like moral crusade moment. That's going to be me on this entire episode. Yeah, because of how incredibly I yourself are speaking of famine.

We have to do the goddamn news. Well, five minutes of intro. It was really dicey there, whether I would have the right drops queued up. I mostly just focused on the Rambo Five Buenos Dias and the clear and present dangerous sea senior. So the International Court of Justice has said to Israel, hey, cut that out.

Yeah, they've said, hey, cut it out. I'm in a kind of limited way. So South Africa brought a series of very easily proven charges of genocide and war crimes. In the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, which is the UN's highest court, it's not the same as the ICC, the International Criminal Court, although they're both in the Hague. And what the ICJ has done is they have announced a series of interim measures. Not everything that South Africa asked for, what the South Africans wanted was the ICJ to order Israel

to withdraw their troops and cease military operations, which they were, you know, all of this is unenforceable. Israel's never going to do any of it, but they wanted them to be told to stop. What they've been told instead is to stop committing genocide, which, you know, is an insulting kind of slap on the wrist thing, but that's international law for you. You can tell that this has some effect on Israel, sort of like prestige and standing and stuff based on the fact that every Israeli government spokesperson on Twitter is the angriest they've ever been, and they're going to try and destroy the UN relief and works agency and retribution. Oh yeah, they just came out with a bunch of bullshit like the day afterwards and everyone pulled funding. Yeah, but not everyone, just a bunch of, well, in the US, UK.

I mean, listen, Israel already fucking kills enough UNRWA staff and destroys enough of their facilities. Nothing new. Yeah, it's true. So what changes? It's like, you know, everyone's Hamas. So, you know, everyone's a target. The ICJ is Hamas.

The Hague is Hamas. The Netherlands is Hamas. The UN is definitely Hamas. The DSA is Hamas, the Netherlands is Hamas. The UN is definitely Hamas. The DSA or Hamas? Hamas is also ISIS. You've got to remember that. That's true. So by the trend to property, the UN is ISIS, which ISIS are doing properly.

UN is ISIS. Does ISIS have internal caucuses, do you think? Yeah, I mean, I sure. You have to believe the whole sentence. Sorry. Yeah. So just cut it actually, but you got door door to door canvassing for ISIS. Yeah.

So what this is to push it to the left. We're doing entry is from within. Yeah. What this is doing is this is setting off an investigation. The ICJ is now going to investigate whether or not Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. They will report back on that in two to three years minimum. Yeah, so it's going to take them two to three years of, I don't know how you spend that time. Like I know- Fisting your own ass.

Yeah, because I know what war crimes investigators are. And I know that like those investigations can take a long time when you don't have a she full of fucking tiktoks of the people doing the war crimes saying that's on the corpse. We are doing the war crimes. Right. We dare anyone to investigate us about it because there's nothing you can do. It's literally like a captain planet villain being like, no one will ever. Yeah, exactly. Aha. No one's going to stop us doing this genocide that we're really happy to be doing.

And here in a big factory marked genocide factory. You should have that factory as a lib, obviously, you know, confirmed liberal that I am. We also get Bell and Cat dollars. I don't know if you saw that. That's true. Yeah, congratulations. I didn't know that one. The cat has stopped talking about any of this, by the way.

But yeah, so it's not weird, right? But it's it's notable. What I was going to say is that this is good that this has happened happened even though it's meaningless, not only because it isn't a noisy Israelis and lens are air of much justified and needed legitimacy to all kind of resistance and protest against the genocide. Right. But also because if you want to have some kind of system of international law left debatable, but if you want to, this was the bare minimum, right? If the ICJ had just been like, now you're fine, go right ahead, then it would have killed the whole prospect of anything even pretending to be international humanitarian or stonedad. Right. Oh, that's, that's cheery.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, this is the cheery podcast. We're going to talk about, you know, things that are nice, things that are good, rum, probably. Yeah, which has no, you know, there's there's not going to be anything associated with my consumer goods. That's right. Right. And there's not going to be anything depressing in this episode. Don't worry. Yeah. In other news. Oothrider. Thanks for the great likes. In other news. Oh, right.

Uh, thanks for the Great Lakes. This election is so fucking useless and depressing. Yeah, it's making me president. I can't take office for over three more years, but it's fine. But so President Biden, right? Uh, guy that we love, friend of the show. Oh, absolutely. We have to be very ableist to him by noticing the fact that now it seems

that he don't talk good. We think he was not talking good at a visit to a brewery earlier this week. He should point out that this is we should point out that this is not us just ragging on him for for slipping up. But this is like a pattern of noticeable mental decline and we deserve better as a people than our rapist and Joe Biden. Two rapists, two rapists, really.

This is the most insane thing about this is that when multiple women accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, one of the people who said that she believed those women, because believing women was in vogue for those two weeks, was Kamala Harris. His vice president is on the record agreeing that she believes that he's a rapist. You are a part of all that is around you. It's true. Someone at the DNC headquarters right after that was like,

okay, we gotta shut down all the Me Too stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone stopped talking about that too. They switched back to off. Yeah, exactly. So twisting the Me Too dial back and forth and looking back at the audience. The thing is, right?

If Joe Biden is facilitating a genocide, as he is, in Gaza, about to help facilitate sort of another one on the US and Southern border as he is. And if he's, you know, a sort of like accused rapist and a sorter of women, which he is, then it makes me want to not be as fair to him when he says something wrong and it's funny. And it's as well the kind of the ableism thing here is that it's interesting because

Biden's part of his whole deal, right, is that he grew up with a stutter. He crushed that speech impediment by sheer force of will like Teddy Roosevelt in order to become a politician in the first place. Right. And, you know, occasionally he still fumbles stuff. That's fine. Like I'm not sure. This is not that we're not all facilitated in genocide. But it's two things, right? First of all, it's the fact that this appears to me, to my untutored eye, to be something worse than the guy fumbles some of his lines sometimes.

He's getting stranger and worse in a way that to me seems distinct from that. But also, I think if this guy has out of hubris made himself the sole bulwark between the US and another term of Donald Trump, and maybe no elections ever again, we all get killed, then I don't think you can meaningfully be ableist to him. And I don't respect him saying or his supporters saying that it is ableist to notice things about him. Right. Did Reagan ever get this bad?

Yes. Yes, he did. But I also, I do want to push back on the idea that this is necessarily mental decline because I live in Los Angeles. And sometimes when you do like a lot of Botox and facelifting, it becomes very difficult to move your mouth muscles. He genuinely should not have had the last facelift. Like the thing is that you don't mess with them. If you don't want to agree with that. Don't mess with the women of America unless you want the benefit is what he's supposed

to have said that time, which what? What does he think the benefit is? Well, actually, I think we know what he thinks the benefit is considering what he said earlier. But a valuable lesson. Don't mess with them in an American unless you want to get the benefit. So what he what he meant to say was that they're investing in infrastructure. This is his big pitch, right? Is to go to the fucking Minnesota and Wisconsin for some fucking reason and be like, I'm spending money on infrastructure. I built you this new bridge in Demsville, Blue State. And then go jump monkeys, right? Yeah, yeah. Please, please vote for me in two states that I'm absolutely going to win

anyway. But the point... Mason Tate-Oh, Wisconsin is dicey, actually. So that makes sense. Mason Tate-Well, the two points... The point he was making, right, was I've invested in the Great Lakes to make them cleaner. And that was also from the Great Lakes is used to make the beer here at Earth Rider Brewery. Thanks Great Lakes for Earth Rider Beer. What he said was in brew beer here, brew beer, as you break the brew beer here, we're finding ooo Earth Rider thanks for the Great Lakes. And I'm sorry, but that's funny. You can't tell me that that isn't funny. The beer brewed here, it is used to make the brew beer

do the fine. Oh, Earthrider, thanks for the great legs. Wade, what a great country we have. I won't be voting for this guy, so I don't care. I live in California, so stop harassing me. Stop harassing me. And I'm, thank God I've just been to Cuba so that I can, you know, flee. And I'm a political prisoner.

Just the arrogance, the absolute arrogance to make yourself the guy, the soul guy, who is like, and he says this, this is part of his marketing is I'm the only one who has beaten Trump in an election I'm the only one who can beat him in an election by the way bits of falling off of me and also I have just destroyed the entire Like caucus of like youth voters. Oh need that and all the Muslim voters too. It was weight Yeah, on the bright side either of these two very old men could just Kick the bucket at any moment and that's president Kamala. We know she knows her Marxism. Yeah It's a long car

Long game, but she's her and Starmer in it together to create this sort of 16th Away from the lathe please Kamala Harris doing the inside-outside strategy And then I get away from the lathe, please. Kamala Harris doing the inside-outside strategy. Speaking of reasons to flee the United States, in other news. I just cut you off with the beeps there. I'm so good at this. There's weird. There's border stuff happening. All of it is bad.

They're making this movie called Civil War, written and directed by Alex Garland. The it's it's going to be it's going to be interesting. A24's Chud versus Woke is happening in real life slightly soon. Ireland. It's going to be it's going to be interesting. A24's Chud versus Woke is happening in real life slightly soon. It should have been. It's a marketing campaign. Yeah, now that the strikes are over, you can promote your movies again. I get it. Yeah.

Yeah. So so what's actually happening is that Texas wants to brutalize migrants even more than anyone else by dumping like razor wire obstacles upon which like, absolutely grotesque to give you an idea of the kind of desperation involved. It doesn't stop people. They just get hung up on the razor wire. Um, yeah. The interest are. Yeah.

So the feds have like want them to dismantle some of these razor wire obstacles, something like a state park or whatever and the Attorney General and Governor of Texas running the Constitutional law playbook of the Confederacy to be like the federal law doesn't apply to us. We can do whatever we want The discredited idea that like the federal government a compact, a voluntary compact of the states. We fought a war over this. Yeah, you literally did.

Very decisively decided. Yeah, and now you have a bunch of other governors sort of performing support and offering to send their national guards and stuff. And Biden is doing as Biden loves to do and not being decisive. And instead. Oh, he's being decisive. Yeah, he's being decisive to make it worse. Just in a fuck way. It's to do the compromise border bill thing, yeah.

Which is probably one of the most racist things I've seen on the setting. It's great task. Easily like, yeah, it's worse. It's as bad as anything Trump did. Like, no question. Yeah, and if Trump were to be doing it, liberals would be like, how dare? And now instead like because it's Biden doing it because it's blue

Dude, you have to be like oh well You have to vote for him because the other guy is gonna do something. That's exactly the same. It's just gonna do this Yeah, it's a new solution color party It's an easy solution to kids in cages is to put the adults in there with them. Yeah I don't I don't think that this is likely to escalate to a 24 civil war. However, I will say two things about this, two caveats, right? One is that you put things into these kinds of configurations and they have a way of escalating unexpectedly sometimes.

And the other thing is, and this is for President Biden, because I know he's a fan and listening, it doesn't matter whether you want to have Civil War Two, if the other guy really wants to have Civil War Two. And right now, a bunch of them are pretending they want to have Civil War Two, and it's a pretty short leap with a lot of very radicalized people, and they're playing with fire. Oh yeah. It's a moment of some danger, I would say.

All I'm going to say is that if there is in fact civil war President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, my country California, I want to be free from the United States, please, in the United States, and I don't want the Mexican military to liberate anything because the Mexican Navy still has it out for all of us, I think. I'm personally happy to be liberated by the Mexican military and remind them that as a former member of the steering committee of the Democratic Socialism of America Los Angeles, I can be useful in implementing a Marxist-lededist program in Southern California. President Xi, please send Chengdu J24 joint strike fighter.

Yeah. Yeah. We graduated to the J24 halfway. Yeah. I don't know what's the fifth generation shit. Yeah. I mean, they're cool planes. They've got canard wings.

What are you going to do? I mean, there is a part of me that just sort of like gets the desire to just fucking massively overreact. I think that's in many ways the safest thing to do. Like, I think were I Biden in this situation and my brain worked, you know, I would sort of like immediately just massively overreact to this and stamp down now, you know, this is the kind of shit that should get you arrested as a governor. Right. And this is the sort of thing where you...

And strung up for trees and yes. You go into the secret Abraham Lincoln archives and pull the big lever that says restart reconstruction. You know? Yeah, genuinely. I mean, so day one, you should be you should be federalizing these states, national gods. Which you have the power to do. We do as recently as like the 50s. We did that. It's completely, completely possible. But we can't do anything that would make anything better in any way. So it has to be worse. So we have to like continue stepping towards this, like, I guess,

perceived inevitability of the big woke versus chud showdown. Um, and my concern was just going to keep caving. Well, my concern with this as with everything else is that you kind of, these things aren't predictable and you may find yourself at a kind of flashpoint where things trip over into woke versus chud before anyone thinks. But what can you do besides I really, really hope that Joe Biden like soon, like immediately, thank God that the entire global economy is not based off of American currency reserves or anything like that, which we'll talk about. But it's fine. Woke controls all the ports.

Yeah, that's that's true, actually. You know, as with last time, all you have to do is like count the miles of railroad track. Count the population. It's a kind of rain. So this is real like if it actually comes down to it, I feel pretty confident in saying that despite whatever kind of democratic subversion happens, my money is big on woke in woke versus Chad. I think I think I'm a GM GM will be supplying woke. Yeah, because it's his creation.

So yeah, that and that and, you know, apparently, Putin is funding woke now because they're all calling for ceasefire. I've heard this. So the funding. I'm not saying nobody, you know, no one's funding. Chad is actually a grass. My pillow guy. My pillow guy is fucking broke. OK, I'm I'm excited to get flung into the air by a landmine somewhere in Arizona as part of like the the 35th but he got their nationality Gavin Newsom. Yeah, genuinely.

I'm too stupid to learn Ukrainian and I was too scared to go be Peshmerga but like I'll absolutely join Wokes foreign Legion and get killed in like a bitch in Arkansas. The Woke foreign Legion is a really good bet. Like going, going around and like saying your pronouns and your war crimes. Yeah, well, it's like the like the French foreign legion, except not only do you have to choose a new name, you also have to choose neo pronouns. And you have to when you're when you're like when you're doing like French foreign legion style war crimes, you have to acknowledge the land. you're like when you're doing like French foreign legion style war crimes You have to acknowledge the land

Boy well, that's the grim future of the woke versus chud war. That was the goddamn news Speaking of woke. Out of this. You've heard of this. It's the Democratic Socialists of America. Oh, wow. You heard of this. Yeah. The third of us. More more woke Estes of the world. Vanguard of the woke. I the most successful Marxist-Leninist

formation in the United States. I kid, of course. the most successful Marxist-Leninist formation in the United States. I kid, of course. So what you're looking at is you're looking at two pictures. You're looking at pictures of a delegation that was undertaken by the Democratic Socialist of America last year in October. On the left, you can see a photo of us with,

some of us with a bunch of medical supplies that we brought to Cuba but you look very happy, you know. Yeah, I do look Justin, can you circle me on the? This is you right? In the in the floral. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There we go. We're yeah They let twinks into the DSA now. So that's nice And yeah, they let Twinks into the DSA now. So that's nice. So those are 500 pounds of medical supplies in a variety of bags, which is great. On the right, you can see me right after we deliver those medical supplies and got basically

got a tour of the hospital. And we're going to less happy. Yeah. Everyone in fact in that photo seems like alarmed and depressed. Well, it's a hospital. For the left is. I'm happy to be in the hospital, right? Right, exactly. So to the left is before and the right is after. I think the photographer,

good friend Lorna who is in the green on the left, she captured the exact moment where we were told the fact that it's gonna come up later. And I will tell you what that is. But what we're gonna talk about is the reason that my expression changed from one to the second photo. Next slide, please. All right.

The first thing we have to ask, Justin, do you wanna do that? First we must ask, what is Cuba? Yes, correct. Yes. Is it this thing? It's not that. It is that. Oh, my dad is going to eat this shit up. It's using socialism in this thing.

Yes, please. Justin, your dad is so cool. I'm Liam, bud. Oh, sorry. Jesus Christ. I have half of a keto and suddenly I'm mixing up the names of those. Your dad is so cool. Justin, your dad's also probably cool. I don't know. No. No. Okay. Okay. Sorry. My dad's coolness apparently. I'm just here, you know, I did you do. Do you do some mountaineering shit or something? My guy. Yeah, my dad, my dad does like fucking ultra marathons and skiing and shit.

It's wild. I didn't get like fucking any of those like heritable traits, it seems. I'm sitting here. I'm sitting here working, eating Haribo. They're like vegan kind of vegetarian. Back to Dad talk. Anyway, for those of you for the OZ1 audio, who didn't get the visual joke, this is Kaba, not Cuba. That's right. Well done. Okay. So we're going to go to the next slide then and we will talk about what is Cuba? So Cuba. It's a very big island in the Caribbean Sea, but that's not important right now.

That's right. So write that shit down. I think that actually is important right now. That's what we're on a podcast for. Shit. Where'd Would it go Alice? Yeah, it is the largest island in the Caribbean by a big margin. It is part of the sort of Antillian island chains. There's two plate systems that collided to form it. Look at it. It's beautiful. Yeah, nice. Very pleasing.

It's it's very like it's it's like if you made Chile's borders aesthetic in a lot of ways I've been rotated 90 degrees So the it's part of you know, the the general caribbean region along with uh, you know, jamaica hispaniola, which contains hadian south limingo the occupied colony of portorico And it thus is active geologically. There are fault systems, but it also has a good deal of mineral wealth. Cuba has the third largest cobalt reserves in the world.

Oh, yeah. And it also has some oil. We'll get there. It is in the path of hurricanes as many of these islands are. And so it gets like, you know, tropical rains and monsoons and all that. And it is going to be very heavily affected by climate change, which they're aware of. It has about 11 million people living on it. And it's a lovely place. So what was on what what what did what did Cuba start?

How did it get this way is what we're getting. How did it get this way? Yeah. So're getting. How did it get this way? Yeah. So how did it get to how does it fall to the depths of one brand of consumer item? That's right. So to answer this question, we must first go back to the times of zero consumer item.

Oh, no, these guys, these everything was bespoke. So it was like all different brands. Oh, in full finish, you call it a little bit of lime. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can see at least three brands there. You have tie-inos occidentales, you have tie-inos clásicos, and you have tie-inos orientales. So you have West tie-inos. Diet tie-inos. Now, I mean, literally it's now all general mills brands. It's literally West tie-inos, classic tieos, and Eastern Tainos. So Cuba was largely inhabited in pre-Columbian times by Tainos. They had large agrarian civilizations based around root crops like cassava and fishing, very prolific fishers. They had like four classes in their

society that were casiques, who are like the chieftains. A noble class called Nitainos, priestly class called Boiques. They had a sort of like matrilineal succession, very high development ball games. What you see in the lower left is... Yeah, baseball, baseball totally unchanged modern rules That's exactly right. Just like a pre-Columbian pitch clock Archaeological archaeological record is not clear on whether they had designated hitters You have this beautiful village and just as a perfect baseball diamond Yeah, we were a little worried about the steroid use that's okay native hitters. You have this beautiful village and this is a perfect baseball diamond. Yeah.

Yeah. We were a little worried about the steroid use, but that's okay. It's a little known fact, but Fenway was actually moved brick by brick from Cuba to Boston. The Taíno name for Puerto Rico, Borín can actually translate to seventh inning stretch. So that's the only baseball I know. So, yeah, the lower left are a series of sort of round houses called Boeus, which is like the construction of their villages. So what happened to these people? Well, genocide, Italian Americans. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the most horrible

things that one of the most horrible things that can happen to your pre-columbian civilization happened, which is Columbus. Columbus. Columbus, yes. It's got, I assume, an art museum. Yeah, exactly. It's got one of its ranked the, like, fifth most water horses in the United States, things of this nature. It's got one very nice art that goes skyscraper.

I presume. No kind of rapid transit whatsoever. Yeah. Largest city in the United States without M-Track, I think. Really? Seriously? Yeah. Yeah, there's no M-Track trained at Columbus. Oh, that's by the fact that, you know, Columbus to or Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati is the most obvious route out there.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've never been to I've never been to Columbus as a proud Chicagoan. So I can only assume that that's actually what Columbus looks like. But if I use Cincinnati, then fuck you, Ohio. No, that that'll be for that'll be for when we do a Roman Empire episode. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. All right, so if you can, it should advance it if you hit the. Yeah, yeah.

Columbus. Yeah, there we go. So you're you're pretty. Yeah, you're pretty Colombian civilization becomes post-Colombian. Columbus actually did land on in Cuba and basically immediately the Spanish began murdering the shit out of people. The first Spanish settlement was founded in Baracoa, so which is in like the eastern part of the island in 1511. And then by like the next year, the Spanish were engaged in fighting an indigenous rebellion.

Yeah. I mean, the stuff that like Columbus writes about the shit that he did to these people. Well, also like, yeah, Baratolomé de las Casas, if I remember correctly, like goes through Cuba and it's just like, this is horrible, this is nightmarish. So there's a rebellion led by this Casique Hattway who is burned alive with two other chiefs when the Spanish finished putting down that rebellion. And then Havana is founded in 1514, La Habana. This guy starts a long tradition of where even the ruling class in the back home is like, oh,

geez, this is kind of fucked up. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. You know, it is, it along with Puerto Rico are basically like the first fronts of Spanish expansion into the Americas. Puerto Rico, actually, in terms of the native population of Puerto Rico, there were just fewer of them. So they were wiped out within 50 years. I think in Cuba it took longer, but that's basically, you know, we're talking about mass genocide. And then a second genocide hits the island of Cuba.

This one genocide we had isn't exploitative enough. It's not commercially viable. No, we've got to get gruesome. We worked all those people to death. So what is so on the right is Charles the Fifth, by the way. So that's I believe. Oh, that Hapsburg jaw, baby. I think that's a young Charles the Fifth of America correctly,

but I may have used a different caption. Yeah, when you look twinkie. He looks like those what is the two French brothers who published all those popular science books and then had too much plastic surgery and died of COVID, I believe. Wow. So like this is supposed to be flattering. That's supposed to be a flattering portrait. So the Habsburgs.

So the Spanish Empire largely underdevelops the economy of Cuba because it is an extractive colonial economy based around based around sugar and and sort of agricultural production. But at the time, I mean, you know, like tobacco, coffee and all that, but like mainly sugar like silver and gold later on, but not here. You know, right. So and of course, the Spanish Empire at various times was like, oh, you're not allowed to have slaves imported. Yeah.

It's like, stop it, guys. Guys, we sent one Franciscan out here to be like, you should stop doing this. The old ICJ approach. Yes. Basically. Yeah. And, you know, this is based based around we believe in a kind of like aspirational sense of like Franciscan values. It's actually ableist to critique Charles the fifth

and the half. That's true. So I'm trying to gracias. You know, I guess it's more like, sorry, Cuba. So the Spanish are, as I'm sure you, the listener know, are able to extract insane amounts of wealth from the Americas, both from like the silver mines in Boclesí, where they work like millions of people to death, but also from the agricultural production of their territories. And Cuba is underdeveloped in comparison to other Caribbean colonies like the colony of Santa Bang about which a little bit later. But, you know, it's still able to extract a lot of sugar.

What you're seeing on the left is you're seeing like an early sort of sugar milling or sugar crushing machine where those little things in the middle turn. Sugar is sugar is a fucking horrible crop to harvest. Oh, yeah. Very, very, very bad. Especially in Saint-Domingue, you know, they created maybe one of the worst human meat grinders in history to run that colony. I guess we'll talk about that later. We will. So you're telling me that my consumer goods have some brutality attached to it? Just a little. My little a little sprinkle of a scale.

You this process is mechanized now. Yeah. And we're going to assume the comic persona of a like 18th century Spaniard. Oh, I see. I see. I would say it's mechanized now, but in many cases, it's not necessarily better. So so yeah. So basically, like the sugar cane is fed into those little grinder wheels and, you know, the it's pulled from there. But we're going to go to the next slide to sort of get digress a little bit into how do you make sugar?

How does sugar end up from the cane fields of wherever the sugar came from to my mojito that I'm currently doing? Well, you can ignore all of this and simply harvest it via the humble beat. A super. Yes. Yes, that is an option that grows in lots of different climates. But that's why sugar is so cheap right now. Yeah.

It was invented by the Prussians, the concept of making beet sugar. But so once again, the Germans are to blame for something horrible that happens. But yeah, so just inventing our sad stuff, you know, some of it takes, some of it doesn't. Yeah. I'm going to be real, like sugar cane sugar cane tastes way better. But many languages in today's podcast. Yeah, precisely. So this is a graphic from the Sugar Association. So thank you sugar association. Sugar. But the sugar cane is harvested on the right. You can see a sugar cane field up top and then below.

So like tree, the apple, I hacked through the machete. Yeah. And these are both in Cuba and on below you can see. I didn't take these, but below you can see some gentlemen hacking at those with machetes. So you take it, you crush it, you soak it, and you squeeze it. Because you're trying to separate the juice from the actual plant material. You throw the plant material away and use it for other things.

You boil the juice until it thickens and crystallizes. You spin it in a centrifuge to remove the liquid. And then you transport it to a refinery. And it gets run through a number of filters to make it as white as people want. And it gets crystallized, dried, and packaged. And then it gets shipped off. Go to the next slide.

Yes, I'm sure no exploitation happens at any point. Right. What about that? So the thing is, at the time that Cuba is settled, this is a much less like this is a much weirder process. So basically like you have to pour the sugar into these cone shaped bolts. That phallic object on the left up top is a sort of cone shaped a sugar loaf. And that is that's what you used to like get sugar from. There were like little pincers that you'd ship little bits off of. Below that is a,

that is unprocessed sugar in a sort of, in a cone. That's what it looks like. That's Mexican unprocessed sugar. In the middle and on the right, you can see the operation of a sugar processing facility. So on the bottom, you can see the open kettle where they would boil it. And then the warehouse where you would stock the cones. On the right, you can see like the sort of thing

that you put the cone, I don't know what to call that. The stove basically put the sugar into these molds. So nowadays we have a slightly more industrially industrially sound method of doing it. You don't just have like a 30 pound cone of sugar in your kitchen. A fucking sore torture device to to cut bits off of it. Yeah, and that fucking kills like 30 people to produce. And now it only kills maybe half?

Oh yeah, it mangles. Less than half, like one. I mean, these sugar mills mangle the people that work on them and the people who own the SCN thus don't care because they're slaves. So you go to the next slide. There is now an industrial process on the right. You can see a real tropical. That's from I'm no 1800 because tropical is a dog shit game series.

It's it's it's aesthetically pleasing sometimes, but also functionally very annoying. Yes, I like it. Yeah, it also It's fine. I mean, I think the number one was probably like where my sweet spot for it and then everything after that has been like Okay, I did like when they added sort of the progress of time Yeah, like the world were one but you can see like the big kettle actually Ironically, this is a completely this is from 1900s. It's not a real building, but you see the big kettle where they're boiling the sugar. And then on the left, you can see that the process, those are the rollers. Like it goes in, it gets shredded.

Those are the rollers, the bagasse, which is the like the plant material gets separated. And, you know, tag yourself. I'm a mixed juice tank. I was going with clear juice. I'm mixed juice tank. I was going with clear juice. I'm bulk storage. I'm like. So next slide, please. Oh, one thing that I would want to mention, all of that requires power to function.

So that's keep that in mind. Powering just so many slaves. We're not necessarily. Once it's industrialized, slavery gets less economical. Powering just so many slaves. We're not necessarily... Speaking of power and slaves. Yeah, we're about to have... Yeah, we're about to have a big sort of like industrial dispute happen. Yeah, speaking of power and slaves, the guy on the right is Toussaint Noviature. Which, yeah, absolute badass of history who led a slave revolt on the island of Saint-O-Mang, which led to the creation of the modern state of Haiti. Yeah, absolute badass of history who led a slave revolt on the island of Santa Mung,

which led to the creation of the modern state of Haiti. And- And it cuts out Dessaline here, either, you know? Yeah. Dessaline didn't worry about that guy. Didn't behead all of those white people for no reason, right? I'm gonna shout- I don't have that much space on the slide.

I'm gonna shout the guy out, right? He did white genocide. He made it real. Like. OK, but but but he did also kind of betray the revolution. Listen, I mean, you you take the good with the bad, right? Sometimes you do some white genocide. Sometimes you betray the revolution. You know, the revolution is bad.

It's it's it's a historical tragedy. It's impossible to say. It's impossible to say if it's bad or good. I think it's great, actually, to be clear. Haitian Revolution, unalloyed good. Yeah, of course. The cause of humanity is advanced by it. And it's been betrayed by fucking everyone in the world.

Fresh. Fresh. Yeah. I don't know what else. Because they've been making them pay for it ever since. But the Haiti is really where the sugar plantation system reaches its natural conclusion, right? Because there's some significance to the idea of banning the international slave trade on a sugar producing island like this. Because when you

don't, you wind up with a situation like Haiti, where rather than taking even the most basic care of slaves, they would simply work people to death and then import more people. And the whole slave population turned over every two years or so, and there were millions and millions of people dying every year. It was crazy. It was absurd what was going on down there. And that's a very good lesson to learn. But various countries around Latin America will not learn that lesson. Absolutely not. 70 years from then. So in what will become a sort of recurring historical pattern, the sugar producers of San DDomingue, who are almost entirely white,

will, you know, some, you know, some sort of creole in there, but will flee to Cuba. Yeah, not just to Cuba, but the Haitian Revolution is a great way of making New Orleans more diverse, right? That's true. A lot of New Orleans creoles were Jean de Coulelibre in Haiti, who fled the Haitian Revolution because they were found that they were on the wrong side of the white genocide. Pretty much. And so supposedly, Stephen Gerard absconded with a bunch of stolen wealth from Toussaint

Lovachir himself and then brought it up to Philly and founded Gerard College, notable Whites-only school up here. Hey, so when are we getting Franklin 13, Roz? Yeah, Roz, that's the subject of... When are we getting Franklin 12, Roz? Oh, God. When are we getting Franklin N, where N is the one that is next. So they take a lot of the like capital, like industrial capital, with financial and also in some cases the actual machines to Cuba.

And so suddenly Cuba becomes extremely productive in terms of sugar and also becomes extremely unproductive and has remained like economically handicapped ever since. Yeah. Yes. Because you're just sort of undercapitalized so you can't buy the machinery required to mechanize sugar production. But also you're not going to return to a horrible slave plantation system because you did just fight a war to end that. Well thank god the problem of being under mechanized to be able to produce things is never going

to come up again in this just... Just to fully, like, hundreds of years long punishment for daring to insist that the rights of the Enlightenment apply to black people is all of that. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. And essentially, as far as international law considers it, they're still being punished for property crimes. Yeah.

Well, thank God that's not going to again recur in the rest of this. In the rest of this property being themselves. And the enforcers of that are the United States of America who multiple times occupied Haiti in order to either install somebody that we liked or depose somebody we didn't. So again, not something that will crop up in the rest of the presentation. Don't look at the slides that come after this.

So Cuba starts booming as Haiti is plundered. And the Spanish also contribute to this by allowing Cuba to, there was a sort of mercantilist system in which you as a colony are allowed to trade with your colonial overlord only, right? And smugglers go in between, so there's like a black market, but whatever, who cares? So then Cuba is able to trade fleer-freely starting in 1818, which very much benefits the Cuban planter class, so they've been, they advocate for it, they get it. Now, I'm making money hand over fist. There's agitation, independentist agitation led by a sort of creole elites in the west side of the island

And of course sort of like the general enslaved black proletariat keeps rising up But Spain Tamps down nationalism for about 50 years and what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna very I'm gonna have to gloss over a lot of stuff Because otherwise we'd be here for like four hours Because like us as Cuba has three independence wars. Sometimes it takes a while for these things to take, you know, they have the 10 years war, which is kicked off by the guy in the top right, who was a slave owner, freeing all of his slaves

and proclaiming Cuban independence. So he was the first president of Cuba in arms. That guy is Carlos Manuel de Estes. And then there's a like the the first Revolutionary War creates a couple of revolutionary heroes as a result of it and creates the Cuban independence movement. We'll go over them at the end. And there's a second independence war, which results in the abolition of slavery in 1886. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's the second longest time to abolish slavery beaten only by Brazil. Brazil. Brazil. Yeah. Brazil. Yeah. Brazil.

Brazil. Brazil. Yeah. Brazil. Brazil. Brazil. Brazil. Brazil. Brazil. Brazil. Yes, as Malvinas, so Brazilians. Fuck about a fucked up country. A lot more people are deserved to be in the Lulogs. I can tell you that much.

Also, if you are Brazilian and you want to come on the podcast for the episode, Brazil, please, I will mispronounce every single thing in Portuguese. Abolished by the monarchy. Yeah, Pedro II, I think. It was his daughter, his daughter Isabel did the the the laiauria, I remember correctly. It was under his administration, but she was regent at the time. But and then the Pope gave them a golden rose, which is like an Oscar, but with the policies. Yeah, I love the golden rose thing. So and then there's the third independence war, which is what segues into the Spanish American war.

But over the course of this time, you get actually, you know, this very strong Cuban independence movement with strong ties in the rest of Latin America and especially in the United States. And the guy in the middle, the bottom middle is Jose Marathe, who is like the George Washington of Cuba. In a lot of ways, he's a poet, a lawyer, a revolutionary. He's the horrible mustache. And today, the day that we record this January 28th is his birthday.

Oh, which is why it was funny that it worked out that we recorded it today. So he was tortured by the Spanish for advocating for Cuban independence. He was the leader of the Pactiro de Volucionario Juliano, which also helped agitate for independence in Puerto Rico. So thank you for that. We're still not free. What are you going to do? Getting a really, really visions of a really messy Victoria to.

I played that Victoria three game and it was good. But so he is like traveling around the United States, trying to raise money to do the revolution. He is he is he actually dies in battle in 1895. The second guy next to him on the right is Antonio Maseo, who is the second in command of the Cuban Revolutionary Forces called Mambises. A Mambi is a guerrilla that is fighting the Spanish in the highlands. And so he helps popularize the machete as the weapon of the Cuban revolution. He is also a Freemason and like an actual like real believer in the enlightenment. Incredible political strategist and military planner. He also dies in 18 he dies. He's a beautiful segue to be like, didn't help much.

No, did it. Yeah, he's he's he's killed by the Spanish in battle. He also has a town named after him in Kentucky, which I found out while researching this episode. It's called Massé in Kentucky. These are and then finally, there's Maximogonis, who is kind of like the Sherman of this whole saga. He is the Generalissimo of the army.

He is the highest in command. He basically started this sabotage campaign. He blows up passenger trains. He torches sugar plantations, including American owned ones. He finances an unsuccessful revolt in Puerto Rico. This guy survives due to the power of his mustache and beard combo. He dies in 1905 on his estate. But basically, like, you know, there's, I wanted to go over these folks because they're

very important to sort of the history of Cuba and this long nationalistic struggle to build a independent Cuba that is free from Spanish control. And if we go to the next slide, so even after slavery ends, and this is all going on, the economy is still largely based around agricultural export and sugar extraction. I half read the slide, so I got to this phrase, even after slavery ends, the economy is based, which it's actually very cringe. Like if you story and debate about this. If you look at sort of like the American South and the antebellum South following reconstruction

and how a lot of the, you know, a lot of black Americans were sort of sharecroppers following the demise of slavery. That is kind of what happens here. Chinese contract workers are brought in to Cuba and are treated like this. We're so familiar just to be like, hey, you know, waves and waves of we need cheap labor. We can exploit, where can we find them

and treat them very, very similar. And then talk for it. Yeah. Can we figure out a way to pay these guys negative wages? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. You can see the, I think those are the, this is a sugar melt. You can see the former slave huts on the left. And then like the rest of the industrial facilities, actually Cuba is one of the first countries to get the railroad in 1837 because it is used to transport goods or export. One of the classic uses of a railroad, you know, thankfully,

if we go to the next slide, 19th century 911 happens. Oh, I forgot about this. I forgot about this. I forgot about this. I understand. You're supposed to do that. I'll provide the war. The Spanish-American war, one of the most

confected wars in American military history, which is saying something. And, yeah, the USS Maine explodes. Oh, now I remember. Yeah. Now. The main attraction. God say the powder magazine of the USS Maine blows up in her in the

Port of Havana, probably on account of how it's the 19th century. Everyone is drunk off their ass. The, you know, everyone smokes. The powder magazine is full of loose gunpowder. It's surprising it didn't explode earlier. Yeah, exactly. And this is the kind of thing that like your your Victoria three play through has a lot of diplomatic crises like this, which would

otherwise be resolved sort of not very interestingly, like maybe the Spanish have to pay a fine or something. But like, there's been revolutionaries who are like, Hey, US, why don't you annex us? And also a bunch of slave owners prior to the Revolt to the Civil War, who were like, What if we annex Cuba so we have an extra slave state? Yeah, the Golden Circle, as you say. The Golden Circle. Yeah.

You have this new sort of like arc of slavery that goes all the way around the Caribbean and sort of like the northern part of South America. But yeah. Down with the Confederacy Union forever. That's right. Although I weirdly Grant sort of thought about like different sort of non-slave ways

of implementing that as well. Yeah, well, he was an alcoholic. So he was like a greater American coprosperity sphere. Anyway, my point is, Will they want they about Cuba for a long time? Yeah. And William Randolph Hearst wants to sell newspapers, right? Because he wants to beat Pulitzer.

And so, uh, you have private equity firm buys his newspapers and this newsroom's laid off. More, the death of Proud Media. Precisely. And so the US's main and its explosion are used to justify and to harry politicians who are already being lobbied into doing it, into making war against Spain in order to grab particularly Cuba, but also just kind of whatever else is going. You know, the Spanish. Whatever you got. Yes, there's a lot of shit. And so, you know, and there are a bunch of.

I just had a succession crisis. I mean, you know, and there's spaniards. Yeah, I mean, I mean, what the US gets out of it in the end is, I mean, we'll talk about Cuba, but Incidentally, also Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Well, I'm very aware of that one. Ask me, ask me my grandmother does not have running water and electricity half the week. The United States Occupation of Puerto Rico as a forward naval base, a cooling base. At the same time, they also like so in just as a funny historical note,

the Spanish are like, oh, fuck, the moment that the that the Revolution, the Spanish American War happens. And they like contact Ramon Blanco, who's like the guy in charge of the Spanish forces in Cuba, messages for Maximo Wilma, and is like, Hey, what's up? Is in Cuba? They did. It's like, it's like, what if we kicked out the despicable Yankee together? And wouldn't that be nice? And Maximo was just like, fuck you, you cow. And so obviously the Cuban revolution continues. And the Spanish are kicked out of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cuban independence. Making the career. You can tell by by the way in which I said that word, the confidence in which I have in Cuban independence at this

point. In-independish. Yeah. Yeah, I'm getting that meme that's like, oh, I wouldn't say freed, more like under new management. But yeah, exactly. Like again, again with the Victoria III thing of the concept of a protectorate, right? It's not formally so in Cuba, but like this is the case where the US is like, okay, this is we're gonna exercise

control of this as being within our sphere of influence. Well, and also like, you know, well, we'll go to the next slide. And also just directly occupy. Yeah, so the, you know, precisely, you know, this basically, you know, this basically, you know, right? Yeah the the occupation the military or the Spanish-American war results in the career of Teddy Roosevelt the Also results in American military occupation the Taylor Amendment explicitly banned the United States from directly annexing Cuba, but they directly annexed everything else that they got in the war

including the Philippines and Puerto Rico and So the they were like okay, we're gonna occupy you until you come up with a new constitution And they did come up with a new constitution. It was amended with the Platte amendment You can see that amendment right there in the middle. The the amendment basically makes Cuba a satellite of the United States.

They can't enter with treaties or they can't enter treaties with foreign powers that would quote imperil the independence of Cuba at the discretion of the United States to decide. They can't sell off their territory to anyone other than the United States. Cuba can't take on foreign debt without interest being covered by revenue. US can intervene in Cuba at any time when they think it's necessary to protect the Democratic Republic or whatever. If we could go back to the I don't know if it's too far, but if we could go back to the map of Cuba real quick, if it's too far, don't want to. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. If you look at that little island, you know how there's like like Turquoise patch and there's that island right under it? Yeah. Yeah, so that's called Issa de la Huinduid now, the island of the youth. But at the time,

it wasn't called that. And I forget what it was called. But they were like, yeah, you know, your claim to this is not recognized, so this is just up for debate now. And also they gave, if we go back to the military, there we go. They also like give the US land for polling stations. Yeah, military base, naval base. United States Naval Base Guantanamo Bay.

Alice, you want to tell us about Guantanamo Bay? Yeah, it's where Jack Nicholson eats his breakfast 400 meters from 300 Cubans. And it's where the United States conducted some of the most atrocious torches in 21st century history to date. And it's still there, just kind of sticking around as a weird, sort of extrajudicial disability that the Navy kind of uses still.

But that. Precisely. So on the left, you have the first. It does some naval stuff, too, but it's not really important, to be honest. Like militarily, like this is shit that's important when you need to coal ships. Now that you don't need to do that, it doesn't really. It's kind of like, well, we just have it because it's nice to have, you know? Yeah.

I mean, pretty much. And, you know, like, give up on that lease, you know? I mean, that's that's also like why we have one of the reasons that we initially got Puerto Rico and then it turned out. It is a lease, by the way, like the U.S. government pays. We pay rent and the cube is on cash. Yeah, and Castro doesn't. Yeah, he has a while he had before he died.

He had a whole drawer in his desk. It was just all the checks that the U.S. signs that he doesn't pay. The Puerto Rico also naval base. Fun fact was where the British elite was going to be headquartered. If you all felt the Nazis, so welcome or not letting that happen. But also sorry that you missed out on Puerto Rico. Fidel Castro, right? We'll talk about him in a minute, but I will say this guy in terms of strength of will. If you just mailed me a check every I don't know six months or whatever for rent

Eventually I would cash it out of boredom. I couldn't have them right up on my desk Yeah, I want to in box Mm-hmm, I want to know if there was a circumstance in which Fidel would cash the check like I mean initially, but we'll get there initially before they really like funds you know right exactly during one of the idiotic budget standoffs just cash them all at once and hope you're saying is that Cuba is charging an economic super weapon against the U.S. that it can cast at a precipitous moment?

Next time we start approaching the debt limit. We'll get into this, but I think that actually is illegal due to the embargo, but we'll get to that. So the guy on the left is John R. Brooke, who is the first military governor. And then when the U.S. withdraws, the Cuba Alexa president, named Tomás Estrada Palma, who is living in the US at the time and maybe did some election manipulation. Cool. In that's crazy. That's crazy.

And documents his reign, or his time in office is often referred to as a regime. So, you know, regime always a good sign. I love to call things regimes. So when his regime collapses, we have to do that's right. We occupy Cuba again. Just like, well,

it's just like this. Just to be like, if you're aware of the concept of the Monroe Doctrine, it means that the United States basically had like free license to just occupy every single fucking country they wanted. Cuba abhors a vacuum, right? And if there's no, if there's no government, then we have to do it otherwise. The Spanish will show up again. Question mark.

Los espanoles. All right. Next slide. God damn it. So first use of that one. So on this slide you will see just the development of Havana during that period of time from the early 1900s to the 30s. It's pretty beautiful. Yeah, oh yeah, no, it's Havana is gorgeous. You know, on the top right is the Peraldo.

It's raising my hand to indicate that I have a question. did it stop being a lot of Anna and just how I know? Okay So Spanish has a weak be the distinction if you notice when I speak in Spanish it is There is some sort of distinguishment distinguishing feature between my bees my, but because I speak English all the time, even though Spanish was my first language. So there's a weak PV distinction. So when it goes to English, it just becomes Havana because nobody knows what to do with the first portion of it. Yeah. So it's just Havana.

The show Tom Payne is going to love this segment. Yeah, exactly. Hi, Tom. Actually, the Havana. But the Tom Payne is going to love this segment. Yeah, exactly. Actually, the Havana, much like the Ukraine. Pretty much. But you wouldn't say like. No, I mean, you wouldn't say like the Havana. So in English, which is what that translates to. So they just dropped it and it's Havana. But in Spanish, it is very much La Havana.

People from Havana are called Habaneros, which is where the name of the pepper comes from. So on the top right, you have the Prado, bottom right, you have the docks, the Huey San Francisco. The United States keeps meddling with Cuba the entire time. The Liberal Party calls on American troops to brutally suppress the partido independiente de color, which is a bunch of black Cubans agitating for rights. Because at this time, there's like way like segregation. I don't know how

to say this other than it's exactly as bad as the United States. What segregation? It's exactly as bad as the United States. What a second question. Yeah. We say it again though. It's exactly as bad as the United States, if not worse. So, and we'll get to that a little bit, but like, you know, the various, they call it in American troops to suppress like protests. Ultral victory, baby. Yeah.

Exactly. But the whole time Cuba's very dependent on the US market because it's right there. The flight from Miami to Havana took like 45 minutes. Yeah. My sea plane in shit, you know? No, we flew on a regular plane. No, you didn't shut up Noah.

Like that. Yes, yes, yes. Like right now. Right now. Then you took the train to Havana. Oh, well, you could and we'll get to thatavana. Well, you could and we'll get to that. But also, like, well, we'll get to that. Well, it's a thing about the plane, but there was something funny about the plane.

So. So there's like a you may have heard of the Great Depression. No, sure. Yeah. So when people had to like line up and also oaks were invented. Yeah. And more. So you have a music episode. Correct. So there was a right after the depression happened in 29. They passed something called the name alert, smooth, Holly, Tara.

Fun. Oh, yes. Correct. Smooth. We need a measurement. Yeah, the smooth. It's a different smooth. It's two smooths around here. It's a different smooth. Smooth. It's like one of those like tumbler words for like a part of a cat.

It's like his smooth. His strongly smooth. Stop it. Don't ever fucking do that again. None of us. Stop it. I wish I could. That's so much. Yeah.

But so part of it includes tariffs on sugar importation. So Cuba exports a lot of its sugar to the United States. This is very bad for Cuba. Economic crisis happens. Yeah, Cuba, the US is just like, listen, we need money. It now costs you money to ship sugar to us. Yeah. So if you go to the next thing.

I don't know if tariffs are so cool, dude. Sure is. So here's some guys. Yeah, so if you go to the next thing Sure is so here's some guys You can't have that anymore Well, this is 1933 that that dude is clearly aware that's that's in the era of the sort of office space, Michael Bolton, why should I change it? He's the one who sucks years of having a hit with a stash. Right. Well, that guy is a...

That guy is social democrat. So social fascism is real. I was about to say, yeah, he's a Hitler bracket's tropical. Tropical. I think I've heard that theory, yeah. I think it means heard that theory. Yeah, I think it means Senor Hilda leader of Argentina. Now, so if you are Argentinian, come on for the Argentine episode.

We just do a bonus episode. There's a different Latin American country every month. You do a bonus episode with like Sabine Mengele von Eichmann, which is like President Biden. My my beautiful country. of on Ikeman where she's like, President Biden, Mike Pais, Argentina, Nipais, or Nipetab.

Yeah, so I may answer Jurgens with an unexplainable background. Yes, yes, yes. Precisely. So in 1933, there is a sort of like revolt slash coup. Mi colonia longs for dignidad. So there's a revolt slash who me colonia long sardinidad. So there's a revolt slash who called the sergeants revolt.

That basically is like, you know, what mug thinks about when they think about the mug army where it's like you have the sergeants. Sorry, this is a very niche joke that is made for the. No, the Marxist unit group. Okay, so the root beer. This is a niche. This is a niche. No, we don't want to be a people. No, the Marxist Unibay group. Yeah, OK. The call is. No, OK. So the root beer people. This is a niche. This is a niche joke. No, no, no, no, a combination of like the student youth groups and the army. That interesting, interesting combination of vibes there.

You seldom see that. That would not be a fun coalition. It wasn't a good idea in a couple of ways, but we'll get there. So the the pentarchy of 1933 comes about, which I'm not going to go into it very much because like it lasted a year and did some social... But I see a name I recognize. Yeah, do you want to read the name out? Fuhenshaw Batista.

Thank you. Yep. But that's why I put a pronunciation guide next to all of these names. I did not look at it. I know you didn't. But that's right. So he was involved as a representative of the armed forces. A bunch of social democratic reforms happened and then the US is like whoa buddy.

No more of that. You can't do that. Social democracy is for us. We like the sergeants part of this. We're not loving the left-wing students group part of this. Yeah, it's like the social democracy is for us. Precisely. So basically, they get Baptista to coo them.

Next slide. So he runs a military junta until 1940. That's one of the classic junta uniforms with the jackboots and gloves. Man, let ass like five foot, like, tiny ass, dude. That belt working its ass off to keep the gut in check. Big hat. Yeah. One of the biggest hats. Yeah.

One of the biggest hats you can imagine. So he's got a military Hwinta going until 1940. That's Meyer Lansky. I know we're going to talk about that, but is that Meyer Lansky? That is Meyer Lansky. Yep. Cool. 1940 they have my landscape. I know we're going to talk about that. But is that my Erlansky? Yep. So the communists at the time of the 1940 elections, there's a new constitution and the constitution is actually pretty good. And the constitution like has gives like workers' rights and shit. It's nice. So the communists endorse Batista because their sort of thought is that Batista is going to let them run the labor unions. And he runs on

something called the Democratic Socialist Coalition. Loco. Oh boy. Did I see. Which is why I put our logo there. But so he wins at he becomes president and he serves four years. And then he is no longer president. Cool. The normal succession of power time. Yeah, you can see by the bottom right photo that this... Yeah, this is the democratic succession of power and action, you know?

Yeah, that's correct. So then in 1952 he does a coup, which basically... You're fair enough. It's the Alto Goldpe, you know? Yeah, well, it's not an autogolpe because he's not in power then. Oh, okay. He waits until he's out of power and then just regular-ass golpes the next day? Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, he could have done an autogolpe, or autogolpe, and he didn't. But he's a very weird dude on a number of levels, but...

I feel like Latin America is a place for dictators to get properly rid it. You know, I always appreciate that. I think a lot about about Herman Bush, the disco Elysium-ass president, I think Ecuador, who like, like beat up an off like a 90 year old dude in his office for writing an article making fun of him. Not going to use a beat up right now. Beat off because I was very Bolivia, excuse me, 36th President of Bolivia. Well, I don't want to say critical support. But he was listening. He was a weird fucking. How man Bush, look him up.

How man spelled like German. Well, sure, of course. I got that from the fact that it was Bolivia prior to Iwo Bonati. Again, Disco Elysium. He sort of tried to institute this ideology that he had called military socialism, sabotage his own implementation of it, got so mad he killed himself. Wait, are you telling me that the country that Klaus Barbie fled to had a German dictator dude? Yeah, also that would be me implementing an ideology, to be honest. I would fuck it Barbie fled to had a German dictator. Yeah, also that would be me implementing an ideology, to be honest. I would fuck it up.

Just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, I did Marxism, let it do some wrong. So, so anyway, so that the gogpeh happens. Sorry, the regular gogpeh this though happens and he suspends the Constitution. The US is like, good, this is fine. And he does a bunch of torture and corruption. And in the top right, you can see he is having dinner with Meyer Lansky and his wife.

And... And Lansky's wife, tall forehead, by the way. Yeah, that's... It was a style at the time. I don't know. Oh, when will it come back? You know? I'm wondering because I

Minoxidil is not working that well for me, but So he does a bunch of torture and at the same time organized crime it is allowed to completely flourish in Havana This is how the Americans back again, you know, so traffic ante junior. I Said that like it was Spanish, but it is Italian so I should be saying Santa traffic ante back again, you know, Santo Traficante Junior. I said that like it was Spanish, but it is Italian. So I should be saying Santo Traficante. So Havana is like Vegas before Vegas really exists. Like there is prostitution, there is gambling, there is all the drugs you can imagine.

The mafia has their infamous Havana conference there at the Odea Nacional, which you'll see some pictures of later. And the thing about this is this is all fine, but all of this is only bringing like 10- This is all fine. DSA taking a strong pro-mod position. Sorry, to be clear, it's not fine. It's fine from their perspective.

Also, none of my, legally, none of my legally none of my none of my positions represent the positions of the DSA at large. So except for some which I'll note when I say that they do. So like, you know, he does the crackdown on this density tries to make this like a whole tourist thing. But it brings in like one tenth of the income that you got from sugar production. They are still getting up. Can't beat them got from sugar production. They are still getting.

Caps can't beat them. Literally, yes. They're still getting most of their, you know, most of their money from the production of sugar and tobacco and rum and sugar derivatives, basically, in the case of rum. So if you are rich, you are fine. If you are you're doing great, you're doing better than the other word. You can buy a very cool watch from Cuevae Sobrinos, you know.

Yeah. Actually, if you're rich and white, you're doing better than the other word. Yeah, you can buy a very cool watch from Cueva Esobrinos, you know? Yeah. Actually, if you're rich and white, you're doing great. And if you are poor, you are getting fucked. He has the secret police called the Buro para Represión de las Actividades Comunistas, which is the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities. And I think it's like 20,000 people are like tortured and executed. In the bottom right, you see a firing squad executing a Cuban Revolutionary. Not a good guy, real weird dude, little manlet. And, you know, God awful cunt. So a guy doing as he was told is the impression I get most.

Yeah, like sort of basically brunch manager. Right. Yes. Cuba is, it's okay. It feels like, you know, getting the same vibes as like, you know, Dubai or like the bigger cities in Saudi Arabia, you know, a lot of the skyscrapers and then the, and all the economic prosperity and the, you know, exciting, happy lives people are leading there that they show on Instagram

Oh, this is superficial to how the economy actually functions 1950 you know speaking of skyscrapers. Yeah If you go to the next slide you can see here are some skyscrapers that are going down. They're terrible. Look at this thing. This looks great. I love it. Really, really sharp divide. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I love a good big white modernist building adjacent to the seashore. It's great. I know it's a great day. I think that's not the hotel. I don't know if you would. But one of those hotels was designed by the same guy who did. The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles.

Like again, really tied into the United States is like what you need to imagine is that this is essentially an appendage of the United States. And so like American architects are going down here, Hemingway is going down here and hanging out. Like all these Americans are visiting Havana. And so just so what you're looking at in the top left is the Vedalo, which you know is the name of that neighborhood. That's also where we stayed on the delegation, but a little bit north. The Oten Nacional is down there. That's, you can see it with those two little, this guy. Yeah, it's gorgeous. It's so cool. And that, you know, it's an incredibly fancy hotel. You get the views of the seashore.

That street going just on the right, like all the way, this little highway thing is called the Manicón, which is the street that it's like the if you are a Chicago and it's Lakeshore Drive. This is very much a James Bond next location. Yeah. Alice, is it ever a James Bond next location or did you send you up? Yeah, it's in. So keepers and die're sending it up. Yeah, it's in Cuba's and Die Another Day. Day, yeah. Wait, didn't they also do whichever James Bond movie I know they had a message in?

Who is Cuba? Oh, yes. No Time to Die. I think. Yeah, because No Time to Die. Yeah, it is in Cuba. Yeah, you're right. They've been to Cuba twice.

Yeah, it was filmed during the thaw. So that makes sense. Yeah, you're right. They've been to Cuba twice. Yeah, it was filmed during the thaw. So that makes sense. Yeah, there's been. There's a lot. I don't have any drops from this other than a Cuban guy saying there's a strange clinic from dying of the day. Which OK, it's in Godfather Part Two, right? Is it part three?

I forget. I haven't seen a single Godfather movie. So I'm sorry. I'm just trying not to get 1950s woman dysphoria from the photo on the right. I was going to say both of these women sort of being being attended to are objectively insanely evil. Oh, yeah.

However, the aesthetic, though, that country little hat. I know, I know. And I'm trying to find a way of threading that little hat because. See, Reina work to say. Yeah, those are rich white people on the right getting pedicures, which you can do if you are rich, right, Cuban. And the middle left or like at the bottom, that is a still from the film, so Cuba, which you should absolutely watch. I am Cuba

Showing a rooftop party to be quite based actually. I'm seeing that Liam is raising his hand. Yeah, you hit the low I hit the hand sorry. I didn't even know you could do this Wow, yeah, sorry everybody. Okay, so next slide Wow. Yeah. Sorry, everybody. OK. So next slide. You just took. Yeah, that's so much. So I did just take poison damage, correct. Look at that big neon sign there. Make a lot. Yeah.

And a Westinghouse Electric right there as well. Is this one of the original baseball stadiums? It's a casino. But because it says casino. But so one thing I do want to draw attention to is the race of all of these people versus the race of the people in the last slide. For people who are listening at home, all of these people are Afro Cubans. All of them are black. All of the rich people

that we saw earlier were white. Again, Moise Grigado. Also, the some of these houses have not advanced at all beyond the slave quarters of plantations. These are shanty towns, slums of which there were many. Hoover bulls. Yeah, exactly, what are EES? Batista bulls. Batista EES.

So the whole thing is that there is this enormous divide. It divide occasioned by the United States, as we'll talk about in a second in a lot of ways. So next slide. So you're gonna see some aerial photography here. I took the one on the right and I forget which comrade of mine took the one on the left. Yeah, from the seat. The Brazilian made see but so the the the left photo is a shot of a Vanna from the air And the right photo is a shot of the sort of like Gamble as you are going into the international airport Which I wish I'd take more photos up because it's like Soviet era and very weird You'd love it Alice, but I would love to go to Cuba at some point. That's the thing

Yeah, precisely you should I mean it's we'll get to why it's tough, but you actually can go very easily. Yes, I can. You apart apart from the fact of me having to travel internationally from Britain. Yes. Well, yeah, that's true. But it's actually the part where you get into Cuba will be fine. It's just going to we'll get into that. So in the fifties, the, the mode of production is still like

large, going from the UK to a country with which is a lot less transphobic. Well, a country that has trans rights in the Constitution. Yes. Seeson, yeah. And where gender affirming surgery is free, as are like hormones and all of that. And there is literally a department of the government specifically built around like, hey, you all need to be less homophobic. We'll get to that later. But like, that was an interesting part of the trip. So in the 50s, the land is still organized in these largest states called latifunios, something like 70% of the arable land in Cuba is owned by foreign interests.

American capital on manufacturing and utility, the utility sectors. So on a per capita basis, the value of American enterprises in Cuba was like three times higher than anywhere else in Latin America. Americans own 90% of the telecom and electric sector, 50% of the railways, 40% of raw sugar production. And now that did decline from when Americans used to own like 80% of raw sugar production, but it's still significant. Cuban branches of US banks account for a quarter of all deposits. And this is the Rand Corporation's numbers in 1964. So, you know, quoting the Commerce Department in 56. So, you know, those are like rosy numbers at best. There's a book value of $157 million of direct investment in oil, $111 million in manufacturing,

$313 million in public services, which includes like utilities, $341 million in mining and agricultural sectors, 59% of Cuba's exports go to the United States, 78% of its imports come from the United States. So the extractive relationship has not stopped, essentially. Precisely. You have switched out one pig feeding at the trough with another. So while I was sort of doing some investigation

of the numbers, I came across a quote, and I wish I had attributed it because I can't find where I attributed it. But that when the US is at war, the mines work. And when the US is at peace, there is stagnation because Cuba is a sort of reserve, both of labor and of natural resources. You, when you are in much the same way,

if you think about like Puerto Rico, the reason Puerto Ricans are granted citizenship in 1917 is to be drafted in World War I. So this is an extractive relationship that the US is mediating. And if we go to the next slide. I was just gonna say before we move on, I was looking through Havana on Google Street View and came across a giant building that just said, Banco de Nova Scotia on it. Okay, so you know, this, I guess the other half of this relationship was Canada, America light.

That's still the case. Actually, in a weird, I mean, we'll get to it, but like Canada actually helps Cuba, like access foreign capital or has helped Cuba access foreign capital by like co-investing on cobalt mine extraction and that sort of thing like Canadian companies have interests in Cuba. It's because of because of how Fidel fathered the current prime minister. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Fidel was like farewell to Nova Scotia.

So, all right, so next slide. Rod, do you want to take this one? Yeah, sure. So the Cuban Railway system we'll talk about very briefly here. So okay, Cuba has railroads very early on. Shown here is the Havana Special, which I'll get to that in one second. Cuban railroads develop very early. They develop in a different way than a lot of other railroads in the Caribbean, in Central America, in South America.

They don't run into the big problems of break of gauge, which is when there's two different track gauges. So you come to the station, everybodymer's got to switch to another train. And undercapitalization, which is when, you know, maybe you're building the railroad to a specific mine that specific mine peters out, you have no money to improve service after that. So, you know, the railroad just goes bust. I mean, a lot of places in South America, especially in Central America, the railroads were built so thoroughly around extraction and extraction only that when a mine petered out or some other industrial operation, the country just had no railroads.

Cuba sort of avoids this early on because they're able to really tightly integrate the whole system with the United States railroad system You know Cuba is very close to the United States So you can just load railroad cars onto barges onto ferries Bring them over to Cuba and then you know you can ship them anywhere in the country and anywhere in Cuba could ship railroad cars to anywhere in the United States or Canada or even Mexico, right? Since you had the system of car floats and railroad ferries you didn't have the normal port problems were like Okay, I bring the train up to the dock the stevedores unload the boxcars and put the goods into

The ship, but you know but maybe some of that walks away. As a result of this very efficient railroad system, it worked a lot better than anywhere else. Cuba winds up with the most railroad miles per capita of any country in the world by 1958. Some people actively encouraged this, notably Henry Flagler, who ran the Florida East Coast Railroad. Yes.

He inaugurates this train called the Havana Special. It runs from New York City to Havana by way of the ferry, but most notably, he also wanted to intercept brand new Panama Canal traffic, right? And his idea is, all right, I got a railroad that goes down to Miami. That's not close enough for me. What we're going to do is build a railroad 108 miles over open sea to Key West. What the goddamn fuck. Yes. What is a hurricane?

They aren't real. Oh, well, you know, I want to write an episode. Climate change was never going to happen. So, you know, it's a perfect investment. I want to write an episode about this sometime fairly soon the overseas railway. It does get wiped out in a hurricane in 1933 I believe But yeah, so you would board you would board the Havana special in New York City I believe in the evening it would go all the way down to Key West

You would get off ferry like six o'clock that afternoon, you know, the following day, and then the ferry went a hundred miles to Havana. You know, so very, very convenient. It was all one ticket. It was all an integrated operation. Yeah. The result of this is, Kiva has this extremely highly developed railroad network, which is in contrast to pretty much the rest of the Caribbean at the time.

Puerto Rico was shutting down its railroads right now. There were some in the Dominican Republic. Haiti was still being punished, so they didn't have any railroads. Haiti was still being punished so they didn't have any railroads. A couple of these islands had pretty extensive railroad systems for a while. Cube is the only one that really maintains them. Yeah, I mean, I was talking to my mom and she was talking about how there used to be a train that you would take from various, across the coast of Puerto Rico, through various beaches, and she remembered the ads for it, and it just doesn't exist anymore.

And I'm like, oh, great. Another way that the United States has fucked us. Nice. I have a little piece of trivia by the way. All the way around the island. There's a sort of company branded train for a company that was forced out of Cuba and sent into sugar the Hershey Railway. Ah, Central Pennsylvania's finest.

We'll talk about that a little bit later when we talk about the Armored Trailway. Yeah. Give us back York Peppermint Patties, you Nazi fuck. Precisely. Cuba still has the fourth largest railroad network in North America. And it's not even any contests between like the fifth most, which I don't even know what it is because all the rest are so close to zero miles. It barely matters Great Yeah, no, I mean and you know just another example of like I Cuba was like developed to some degree But it's developed in a very strange way. Okay next slide. Yeah, yo you seen this guy

I recognize this man. Yes. Yo, you seen this guy? You seen our boy? I recognize this man. Yes. Yeah. So we start getting into the slightly controversial portion of this. Yeah, the part where we say that the Cuban Revolution was good. Yeah, the part where that is my opinion. It's also my opinion. So I'm not going to argue with you.

That's right. It's historically progressive. Genuinely, I think. Also, I think, although I have a few caveats. Yeah, I think that's that's where I am with Roz. Some missteps were made, which we'll talk about. I'm still Liam, bud. I was like, she's fucking Christ.

I I am like losing my mind today with Liam. Yeah, I'm sorry, Liam. I adore you. Yeah, I so yeah, I agree with Liam. Some missteps were made. So my dad says you're going to break a few eggs. It's fine. Precisely. Yeah. God, your dad is so cool. You can't run a historically progressive moment without a few lulugs and who goes in those lulugs? Listen, sometimes you make some bad stuff. Yeah, well, who goes in those? Well, we'll get there. But so on July 26, 1953, a lawyer and a baseball enthusiast. Lawyer baseball enthusiast. Shagger. It did not have a beard at the time if I remember correctly.

And if this photo is any evidence named Fidel Castro. So it's during during my language switching very fast there and is often neglected brother Raul. Oh, that's Raul. Yeah, that's Raul. Did you not know that was Raul? No, I didn't know who the fuck that was seen there being a twink. Well, let's not go too far. Yeah. Yeah. OK, he's an otter. So, uh, Fidel and Raul stage an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. After they're like change.org petitioned unseat, but the

state doesn't get enough signatures or shares on social media. It's I think sometimes you can engage in like electoral politics and local politics and find it very frustrating and one alternative to regrouping and doing more like council meetings is immediately moving to Giri Javofa. It's a natural escalation. As Liam was saying, this is one of the caveats, which is that a lot of people die. They did do a petition, did not get enough signatures. A bunch of them got killed and everybody else got captured. Fidel got 15 years in prison along with Raul. They basically, him and Raul got released in 1955 and created the, if you look at the top left, the Movimiento 26 de Julio, which is the 26th of July movement.

Again, I would not name my movement after the time I got my ass beat. Like, yeah, it's like the New York, it's like the NYPD counterterrorism unit having 9-11 on their patches, you know, it's like, I mean, you know, it's like the NYPD counts a terrorism unit having 911 on their patches, you know, it's like I mean, you know It's a cool flag though. True like pretty sick. We won't get fooled again flag Let's just do our best, you know, yeah, so okay, so The movement kind of fuses with various other Revolutionary movements and I've had you got to see a bad ass in us Okay, so the movement fuses with various other revolutionary movements. Rafael Garcia Barcinas,

his movement, the Movimiento Nacional de Revolucionario, the National Revolutionary Movement. Frank Baís, about whom a little bit more later, had the movement called the Action Nacional Revolucionaria, the National Revolutionary Action. So it's a big tent org that has a variety of internal caucuses. Oh boy. I'm sorry, Liam. A variety of internal you know, like, panirosas, as you know, majorias socialista, cabarilla comunista, Grupo Unidad Merxista. Yeah, but all those break like Lennox, though, man. Yeah, all those, you know, socialists in office. So they're fighting to overthrow Batista

through both like, you know, like demonstrations and military action. So they kind of get kicked out of Cuba. If you go to the next slide, I want to get it done. This feels compromisingly erotic. So, okay, so it's funny you say that because while we were in the hospital, which we're going to talk about later, while we're in the hospital, which we're going to talk about later. Well, we're in the hospital, like the place you go in to the hospital, uh, hospital, uh, Cali Xo Garcia, which is the main one in, uh, Havana, uh, the university hospital. Uh, as you go in, there's this big, like quote from Che on the,

like on the right hand side of where you come in on a vehicle. And the thing about it was, I don't remember what that quote was because the picture was shirtless che, like doing farm work. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Christ. Yeah. So you can see here, Fidel on the left, a dangerously sexy twink on the right. In that photo, he is my age and he looks better than me. Both of these men will have sex with you. That's a problem. Well, they're dead. They're both dead. So ideally not. I might not stop them.

Ideally not, but I might not stop them. So, yeah, so the dangerously sexy twink on the right is everybody's favorite t-shirt photo. Che Guevara. I Che Guevara is partially Irish, as I found out, but of Argentinian extraction. So he's in Mexico because he got kicked out of Guatemala. After the. I don't know. It's just.

Shay is actually short for Seamus. Seamus, Gavara, hopefully. Yeah, not a lot of people know that. We never hear about Seamus, Gavara standing in solidarity with him, with the people of Ulster. So I mean, I don't know how you get like as a Puerto Rican, I'm really like throwing stones in my glass house, but I don't know how you get chair from it next to it's an Argentinian thing, because this just means like, hey, and it's like, it's like Argentinian tech, I guess, you know.

So it's like, everybody is like calling him like guy who talks Argentinian style. I mean, couldn't be me, but actually don't talk Argentinian style. I would who talks Argentinian style. I mean, couldn't be me, but. Yeah, cause you don't talk Argentinian style. I would never talk Argentinian style because I don't have a German accent. So. So. So.

So. So. So. Thank you, Liam. I try to be. So when. So, when Che is an Irish guy with a really thick German accent. Has to love Victoria Semper.

Is that people of Ulster stand in solidarity for Secure Revolution. So the CIA organized a coup against the democratically elected Guatemalan president, Jacobo Adibans, after he committed the cardinal sin of a Latin American leftist president and did land reform against United Fruit Company. That'll do it. That'll do it. One of the classics of the genre there.

United Fruit now, Chiquita Banana, if you ever want to boycott something. You're big on your banana history. It's caused way more human suffering than you think about. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You should feel that sugar. The phrase banana republic is is that because it described the kind of repressive dictatorship that the U.S. enforced in these in these places. Precisely. So the like half or a large portion of the the 26th of July movement.

Their leadership is in Mexico now in Mexico City. So they hang out there for a little bit. I ever dropped from Rambo five for that. Why? Because because I do a James Bond podcast and he goes to fucking. I need to go to Mexico. There you go. A woman.

So. Bots are just diseased monsters. I literally I literally like this is the this is the stuff that I like I listen to this podcast and kill James Bond while I am playing Paradox Grand Strategy games. So like my brain. Yeah. The amount of my brain. Get your foreign policy advice here.

You know. Yeah. The amount of my brain is like. Doing a world. Be on set in the TNO timeline. Yeah. Oh God. I don't know how to say it in German.

I don't want to try. Um, so they they put together. They OK. So you're familiar with the silver corp thing that happened in Venezuela. Yeah, of course What do they call it like fucking operation? Yeah, so it was this is the inverse of that where they get 82 guys and stick about a yacht and Are like fellas back Cuba party boat time on the ground now

Yeah, next slide. Yeah, shittiest boat in the fucking world. So that is the gun. I'm not in the museum of the Revolution in Havana right now, isn't it? Which I wish I could have gone to. But yeah, so that's the boat. They stick 82 guys on the boat. I mean, that's crowded.

That's too many guys. I was about to say. I agree. That is a short trip. And OK, that's crowded. That's too many guys. I was about to say. I agree. I'm sure that is a short trip. And OK, so like, you know, they're basically you get in the fellas together and you're doing the revolution, right? And so they land and pretty much immediately they get bombed by helicopters and they lose 62 guys. Oh, hold on a little bit later. It's just a video game shit.

You know, you get in the thing, you got to establish like threat very quickly. So you got to kill Liam says is as Liam likes to say, it's weight savings. Now you're down to 20 of your best guys or best guys avoiding helicopter bombs. Which does not kill me only serves to make me stronger. Exactly. So this is the does not kill me only serves to make me stronger. Exactly. So this is the does not kill me. Helicopter bombs serve to make me stronger over the government of Cuba. I just have a helicopter bomb me with smaller bombs and progressively increase the size until I'm immune.

It's a tiny little matchbox sized bomb dunking off the side of my head. If you try hard and believe in yourself, you could like duck and weave. So you're looking at some beautiful mountains. You're looking at the Sierra Maestra. And so they land. It's a weird route because they basically

go from Mexico to like the bottom right, the I guess the southeast portion of Cuba, like in the little hook and then land there and then flee into the mountains. And like they're in the Cuban Appalachians. Kind of, yeah. So like they are in the camp. They're like fucked. So they're down to like 20 guys and they start building a guerrilla campaign collaborating with the rest of the movement. So like Frank Baez who is doing urban demonstrations at the time and along the way like people are generally like yeah I'm getting fucked over

into this government like I'm happy to join you and they start redistributing land to captured farmer or sorry to farmers whose land they have like taken from the Americans or whoever they own or whoever owns them. Have you a little slice of Hershey plantation, you know? Yeah, exactly. God, I can't speak today. So they they certainly would do it all the time. You know, what are you gonna do? I I just want to do it. Thank you. I try. Perse is what it is. Do it, find out. Thank you, I try.

Persevere, like Fidel Castro and the Sierra Maestra. Podcasto Muerte, venceremos! So, they start building. Hasta la safety third, siempre. So they start building their sort of, their base in the Sierra Maestra and expand. So next slide. Oh, wow.

That's a quick expansion. Yeah, so we don't need to end the World War II here. This is not like Hearts of Iron podcast, so I'm not going to get into the actual... The important thing is that they win by doing a series of really cheese encirclements and eliminating infantry divisions. They win by opening the console and deleting their opponents units. They definitely found some exploits to make this work. I will say that. To be honest, kind of like the kind of they did kind of go into the console and delete their

opponents units because they had a bunch of people defect from Fulmian Tsilatisa's army. and delete their opponents units because they had a bunch of people defect from from the United States Army. So and they like capture tanks. And so like times are way easier to operate back then. If you capture the time, you could just get on it and fuck around as an American military. I think that's a Sherman. Is that a Sherman? Liam, is that a Sherman?

Well, it looks like one to me, but don't. Those look like one to me. Although it looks a little narrow. Liam is that a Sherman? To me but Looks a little narrow. Okay, listen to lions led by donkeys for more Say joke Sabian nose tanks someone's gonna say actually that's not a tank. That's mobile artiller. I don't It's actually a technical but So I just want to those of you keeping score at home like I am or an hour and 50 minutes in or on slide 30. So yeah, fine.

Some of these are just joke slides. So so the rebels sees equipment from about these that including that tank, which is using the battle. I sent that later, which we'll get to. And the U.S. sees the writing of the wall and starts starts sanctioning Batista because he's murdering more people than Eisenhower is comfortable with. Yeah, weird Eisenhower conscience moments. Something happened to his brain after he won the Second World War, you know, the whole military industrial complex and all this.

I mean, Yeah, you can't give him too much credit because of what he does later. But like, Or earlier, there's a bunch of other shit, including, including art bands, but like, uh, yeah, the, the occasionally he has strange moments, which is more than Joe Biden ever had, you know? Well, I, to be fair, Eisenhower never got to say something as cool as ooh, earth, right? So next slide, please. Um, so the mind So the momentum builds, yeah, this is where we get to talk about the train.

The momentum builds until, Raz, can you give me on the 28th of December? On the 28th of December, 1958. Thank you. Chegama makes his way from the port city of Caibarien Thank you. Che Guevara makes his way from the port city of Caibarien through the town of Camajuaní towards Santa Clara. I'm just showing off at this point where he intercepts an armored train. Train bendado. Hell yes.

Yes. The train bendado. We talked about this briefly on the armored train episode. I have a few more interesting details about it though. Yes. I'm excited for the interesting details. So actually, so the bottom right is a photo I took of the depot where that train was reinforced and kept in Havana.

So that's the depot where it was, according to Sarah from Minitur. And that's where like one of the workers basically, like working on it, fed the revolution information about the specs on the train that enabled them to derail it. So they basically- You don't need to know a lot of information about a train to derail it.

Well, I mean, you know, like it's- Sort of. Yeah, well, well, well, well, well, I had well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, God damn it, you put the 3D printer to the right move. Raced a bunch of rails and derailed the train, which could have been a lot easier if you had simply 3D printed a train derail. It's just me right for not reading ahead. No, you're good. You know, that's why I own a 3D printer, but that's a joke.

You know what to do. Legally. Legally, that's a joke. So, okay, so let's hop to the train slide and then we'll hop back. So here's something to point out before we move on to the next slide. Now one of the things I mentioned earlier, the Cuban Railway Network is very integrated with the American Railway Network. Now what we're looking at here, this is a very strange boxcar.

Now it's strange only if you'd know a lot about boxcars, otherwise it looks normal. This is owned by the Nashville Chattanooga and St. Louis Railroad. I kind of wonder why we have a Dixieland boxcar. Yeah. I am the... It says here, to and from Dixieland on the side, right? It's got three yellow stripes on the side. It also has a weird feature here. The end of the box car is a good identifying marker. This is a Hutchinson end, which is a very old type of box car end,

usually on wooden cars. This is weird, because it's a steel car with a Hutchinson end. Also, it's 36 feet long. It's very strange. It's a very strange car. There should be a 40 foot long car that has a different end on it. So anyway, these are the cars that made up the trend, Buntado. I can just say how much I love working with you. Can I just say how much I love working with you? Yeah, I don't know what a question is, but I've spelled out.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what you can sort of see is what's on display in Santa Clara here. You can see the full extent of the modifications that Batista did to these cars, which were hauling men in material, right, was painting over through the heart of Dixieland and, you know, writing logistic on there. Yeah, so if you go to the actual museum, this is what's on display. Although, if you look at the pictures, there was an actual armored portion of the train, which appears to be one of the Hershey electric railway cars with some plates welded over it. And if this is as early a car as I think it is, this may be made of wood. But let's go about this.

Not a very smart guy in a lot of ways. Listen, say what you like about Mao and Maoism, but he understood the guerilla war against certain kinds of enemies. And when you talk about imperialism being a paper tiger, right, this being manifested in the form of a 19th century wooden train car from a candy company that you bolted some steel into. Right. Jesus fucking Christ. Oh my God. So like that. And then added 20 boxcars too.

The boxcars being, I mean, people shot straight through the boxcars is the thing. The boxcars were full of ammo too. Yeah. Oh, delicate. They were explosive. I think I want to say a lot of the a lot of the folks who are in the boxcar is just like came out and surrendered instantly. Yes. And then like, you know, just shook hands with the the the rebels and like, OK, yeah, we're on your side now.

This sucks. If I if I'm hopelessly outgunned in a situation where my enemy is also right, you better believe that's an easy decision for me to surrender instantly. Yeah, this is the Cuban revolution is an exercise in if you can't beat them, join them. Yeah. And, and, and like this was, I mean, this battle, like they basically rolled in with a tank and then blew up an armored train and then like, okay. And then on like, okay, we're fucked. And then but these stuff leaves the country on January 1 1959. And

that's it is over for him. It is never been done. It is now. It is a good bye look. Actually, it is Eisenhower over. Thank you. So if we go to the next slide, we will see really unexplored. That's a TNLS photo right there. you will see two woke politicians exchanging pronouns. And so what you see here is you see Fidel meeting with Richard Milhouse Nixon. The ass on Fidel apartment on the house.

I was going to say, yeah. He's got a real dump truck going on right there. I'm just going to say this. I'm Puerto Rican. So like, I like, it's just it runs the family, if you will. So like, that's just that's just have you ever seen J.Lo? I mean, like, come on. So, so basically, what what Phidet tries to do is like, he's he's not an idiot. He's like, OK, well, we sell most of our shit to the United States. We get a lot of shit from the United States. They're the top dog. I'm going to be nice to them.

So he does a Goodwill tour of the United States in April 1959, where, side note, he gets really into ice cream. That happens to every communist who visits the US. Fucking Anastas Mikoyan becomes a... Wait, who will come up later with ice cream? What the fuck? It happens to every communist who visits the years. Fucking Anastas Mikoyan becomes a success. Who will come up later with ice cream? What the fuck? Ice cream's good, Alice.

Yes. So Fidel actually gets so obsessed with ice cream that he's like, humans need to have ice cream. Big cow. Big cow. Yes. Right, so he starts trying to develop like a cow that will be like well suited

for the Highland environment of Cuba. And they end up with Uber Blanca, who is like a stachanova cow. Massive statue. They're all they also build. Has stuffed like good body is in a museum. Like, comrade. Comrades were going to develop a cow. They have like genetic samples of her to clone her.

That's true. I love the Cuban revolution so much. I agree. And he also builds like a really cool modernist ice cream parlor called Coppelia in in Havana. But that's beside the point. So for that, this is doing a good will tour. He's like, I love baseball and, you know, apple pie and shit.

And he's trying to be like, hey, you know, we may be on different teams, you can work with his yet been like the logo of Coppelio is quite horny. Like that's a personal like Fidel intervention. It's it's it's like it's like a ballet dances to likes with remarkably thick thighs. Oh, yeah, because Coppola is a ballet, I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. Sorry, I just googled it and yeah, it is extremely horny. Oh, you know what? I saw the sign. I don't know why I had to Google it.

Anyway, so next slide, please. So one of my favorite tweets, bottom left. So One of my favorite tweets bottom left So he he does the wrong he does a wrong move which is to advocate for land reform Yeah, so remember I just happening it keeps happening so in May 1959 He passes the first agricultural reform law Which implements an upper limit of 1,000 acres for land ownership and bans foreigners from owning land, which is good based.

The Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, is formed to sort of draft this law and does a census of land in Cuba. And it would theoretically allow the Cuban government to seize almost 40 million acres of land, but they only seize about 30 million over the course of four years, because they're like, if we do this too quickly, like, you know, they will murder us.

That's still three quarters of the goal fairly quickly. Right, exactly. So at the time, and so like, this is a period of increasing tension between the Cubans and the United States. A second ship explosion has impacted the podcast. The French ship La Coupe blows up in the Havana Harbor. I'm sorry about my pronunciation. I don't care about French. Remember La Coupe to hell with Cuba. It doesn't roll off the tongue as well.

And it kind of it's nearly there. It's I bet it would work. Sure. I don't care what the French have to think. Got to get our workshop. It you know, so. Souffle la Coupe. I don't know. So. Our languages tonight.

Well, that's your polyglot. Yeah. Precisely. So the so there's an arms embargo already in place from the Batista administration, where the America's like you cannot buy guns from us. So they're like, Okay, well, thank God, we're still in sort of like a multipolar world, we're going to go to the other superpower and buy the best guns ever made. Licing my lighting my home down to big Mickey's Kalashnikov. Our factory warehouse. Yes, Liam, we are doing big Kalashnikov and we are doing it. Actually, while I was in Cuba, I saw like people with AK-74s and

and with like the the sort of when we went by a military installation, I saw like AK-74s and I saw in P5s or like and I was like wow this is a crazy There's a weird assortment of shit here. Yeah some of them had like fowls as well in the Cuban middle class. Oh, yeah wild It is wild. So the Americans react from but It's real I'm so mad at you that you made me play that. But they did have a quote from a Viscoucampos like right off the bat. So I was OK with that. But just the rest of it sucked. Anyway, so they read it right now. I want you to know the series has gone down

Hellsons tail. But yeah, exactly. They reduce the importation. The Americans reduce the importation of sugar. So then the Cubans go to the Soviets that are like, OK, we have all the sugar and the Soviets are like, sure, I'll take that. And then the Cubans go to the Soviets that are like, okay, we have all the sugar. And the Soviets are like, sure, I'll take that. And then the Americans go, we're not gonna give you any oil. So in November of 1960, the Cubans make a deal with the aforementioned Anastas Mikoyan ice cream lover

for five million tons of Cuban sugar to be shipped to the Soviet Union. It's the international alliance of treats. Exactly. And the Soviet anything that tastes as sweet as socialist brotherhood. Possibly socialist ice cream ice cream. Yeah. So the Soviets do. Dammit. That. Listen, Mac. Don't mess with the Cuban.

You mess with the Cuban women. You get the benefit, you know. Yeah. So. Right. Do you say I should do the next National Convention in Nevada? Oh, that's one of my favorite treats. I would re-up my dues at that point. You should be re-upping your dews and you should be re-upping your solidarity dews. And also anyone listening to this should re-up that solidarity dews. That is my favorite tweet is the Get Fiscal One where it's like, yes, I should do the

next National Convention in Havana. Wonderful, romantic setting. What's that? Maria has invited you into the hills? For a glass of wine? You can look it up. It's great. So we were all talking about this while we were in Cuba. So the Soviets give the Cubans in exchange for this sugar,

grain, oil and credit, which they desperately need. Now, now you're in the camp. You're in the can you accidentally have created. Oh, fuck. OK. Not yet, but close because in the camp. You're in the camp and you accidentally have created. Not yet. Oh, fuck. OK. Not yet, but close. Because then the thing. Let me know when we're in the camp,

because I have two Soviet things about Cuba that I want to talk about. I have two slides where you could say we're in the camp, but the second one is funnier. So you'll know it when it happens. But so the thing is, the Soviets are shipping crude, right? So that has to be refined. And Cuba has refineries.

They are owned by Royal Dutch Shell, Texaco and Standard Oil. And they hate this situation. We're not refining this fucking communist shit. Yeah, it's Russian crude, the desinformatia, you know, that's coming from this Russian crude and the Mueller report and things like that. That from this Russian crude and the Mueller report. Things like that. That's Putin's crude. Yeah.

So that they nationalize those refineries. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the oil companies don't like it when you do that. That is the second thing you shouldn't do. Also, they abolish the the Cuban's abolish income tax while they're at this. So score and they take control of the TV and radio stations and build up the army and the CDR, which is the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution and all that sort of stuff. Next slide, please. Wow, he did all this and lowered taxes. Incredible. We can't even do it. Yeah, exactly.

and lower taxes. Incredible. We can't even do it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, how I said this guy was cool five minutes ago. Yeah, so you have to retract that. Turns out when you do cool things for your citizens, the United States hates that shit. So six months after the Revolution, I think like basically contemporaneously with the rising tensions, but also like right after if you did, it it was like we should pose no threat to you. Eisenhower is having the CIA arm get

ready to get rid of him. The British jealous of how much he's lowered tax. He's like, wait, you guys don't have a military industrial complex. Fuck you all. The the the reviled Angloids cancel a sale of whatever the fuck a hawker hunter fighter aircraft is. It is a beautiful British jet fighter that we exported to a lot of places around the world and which did some interesting like counterinsurgency stuff. Thank you. I have the notes. I'm not interested in being terrible. I have in the notes Alice for question marks help.

And so the whole gnats like apparatus has gathered to figure out how to do a regime change. And so they sever relations in 61 and then move on to an embargo. So next slide. So what you're looking at is a memo written in 1960 from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Malletort Mallory Lester Mallory to Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs

to Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, name alert, Roy Rubott. Rubott. Yeah. That's a f**k even, okay, sure. Rubott is like half of the people who compete on RuPaul's Drag Race. Thank you. I was also, I was searching for a RuPaul joke there. Thank you for getting that for me. I love how the thrust of this memo is point by point here's all the ways in which we're fucked. But it's like they love Castro, everybody loves Castro. And trying to throw a muckoo. Yeah, trying to do a coup would probably not work and would

make people like Castro more. Oh my god, we had to be friends. Yeah, you see what you see where it basically says that like, if you do really overt, uh, government action by the US against Cuba, it only causes more support. I do. I see the bit. The final point here, the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. And do you notice how points five and six are kind of in contradiction?

I do. Okay, please keep that in your brain. And it's like, you know, the biggest scare, which is socialists are going to raise your taxes is completely irrelevant. They're going to lower your taxes. They're going to get rid of the concept. Yeah, it's because they already, it's because they take it out of your salary

before it even gets to you. But that's what social security is. So what are you gonna do? So you can see here. Social security taxes. Sorry? Nothing, hey, what's up? I just used to do like tax evasion.

Liam, you were saying how much you love paying social security taxes. I do pay social security, don't worry how much you love paying social security taxes. I do pay social security. Don't worry about it. So I pay taxes. Everything gets more difficult when you own a business. Correct. So a small business like the Cuban government.

So they go on to say that the main thing here is that they need if you look flexible authority in sugar legislation and that they need to seek this urgently because they see if you're familiar with the economic concept of Dutch disease. If that's the right one. Is it just the Dutch? It's when you are. Your entire economy is like specialized into this one thing. No, it's when you can't stop doing blackface.

into this one thing. No, it's when you can't stop doing blackface. Yeah. From outside the earth. Your entire economy is based around shoe polish. It's why MBS is trying desperately to make the line of things so that you can be an app developer in Saudi Arabia instead of like a guy who gets rich off of Petrodollars. Oh yeah, it could be like America where the entire economy is based around apps. I'm a co-worker who lived in Israel telling me how nice it was. And I'm just like, that is a

place I have zero interest in going to. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'll listen to you. But I know. So Cuba pre-revolutionary, brackets pre-revolutionary had both the Dutch disease sugar problem. And also, as Liam just said, Dutch disease brackets can't stop doing blackface and racism. Yeah. So, so you see that like, they got that flexible authorization on sugar, they got the authorization to lower the sugar quota, which is what we talked about earlier. If you go to the next slide,

are we are we in the camp? Yeah. Yeah, we're in the camp. Oh, I forgot that it shows up on black. Hey, would you mind fixing my horrible mistakes? But so, yeah. Thank you, I love you. You have to you have to get your ship from somewhere and somewhere is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I'm not going to blast the theme song because it's too well.

Come on, please. Please, song album. Yeah, come on, please blast the theme song. Album, album, album, album, but now my brain's melting as well. The drop, yeah. If I play the fucking intro music for the second time. Nikita Khrushchev fan cam. Yeah.

Yeah. It's cool. Scrolling up, scrolling up, scrolling up. Oh, I did see it. I did see it. Shea fan count. I use. We do it for that. We do it for the hogs. We do. We do.

That's why we're. Damn. She's. Oh, fucking. What the fuck? We are. Are you serious? Oh, yeah. What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? Are you serious? Are you serious?

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What on me. What was that? Jesus Christ. That was the sneeze. That was like your kidney coming out. Exorcism. Warrant.

You got to get in the tendency. You got to get in the camp. You got to get in the club with the Soviet Union. You can sneeze that loud. The Soviet Union wants three things from you. The third one is on the next slide after this, but yeah, once it wants to build a huge brutalist embassy in the shape of a sword plunged into the middle of her. I'm so cool.

Yes, which is sick. Good. Yes, I want this. It wants in person. It's exactly as cool as you think it is. It wants submarine bases. Yes, I want that as well. And this means that Cuba exists in the mind of a generation of Soviets who did their national service

in the Navy as the place that you had shoreleaves saw black people for the first time ever and possibly had like intriguing mind opening sexual experience that you then took back to your depressive shitty country and just masturbated about for the rest of your life. It is so easy to find like Soviet like retro Soviet Cuba themed porn right the whole country got a complex about Cuban women off of this shit. Like I'm not even real with you Alice. We were at the civil defense department and there was

like a sublieutenant whose name was like Ivan and looked extremely Slavic and that was my first thought. Preferred Dom Lusanis.'s but yeah. Sort of underground Soviet submarine based goon cave. Yeah, supposed to. Dommarines. There are a bunch of Russo Cubans running around who were born in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Speaking of warm Soviet-Cuban relations. This is like the thing. Speaking of warm Soviet-Cuban relations. This is like the thing.

Like if you are in the Soviet military, right, most of the places you will get sent, you can go to Afghanistan and get shot at. You can go to Siberia and shot a snow. Or you can go to fucking Cuba where everybody... Have a good time. Yeah, on vacation, sort of beach episode of being in national service, where everyone keeps giving you like socialist fraternal kisses. Yeah, you show up, Maria invites you out to the hills.

I do also want to say like, speaking of warm Cuban and Soviet relationships, like, initially the Soviets are like, yeah, these people are fucking clowns and like, they're never going to win. They're never going to succeed. And they don't want to support the revolution at all until it wins. And then they realize that they're sort of hating

from outside the club in Latin America. And that if Cuba goes down because of American intervention, it's going to look bad for the Soviets. So they're like, fuck, OK. Like they literally are like, oh, OK, this is a corruption of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which it's like, no. Have you even read Marxist-Leninist ideology

technically even the way you slam a card or a spatch? Yeah. Also, one thing I wanted to say about the Submarine really quickly is that that's why Soikuba is shotba is shot the way it is shot if you watch it It looks that way because they used Soviet naval infrared film that they had from the submarines being there. So nice That's all very cool. You should watch it. It's so good It's got like so many unbroken like one take shots that are that's really impossible I take some like still photography on I have a little cache of Soviet infrared film actually

Yeah, so you're just like fucking what was this? Yeah, thank you yeah, they have a really great shot of like a Student protester has been shot and killed by the Batista regime And so use coffin is being pulled through the crowd and then the camera goes up the side of a building In through a cigar factory that's on the top floor of that building as a man in that factory pulls out a Cuban flag and then drapes it off the side of the building and lets it go. And we follow that flag again at the third floor going out over the crowd.

That's all in one take. Like they had to like strap a guy to a crane. It was incredible. Watch the movie. So the third thing. They had 10,000 other shots that didn't make it in, I assume. I hope so. So I serious film or just some guys

able to fix it in post over this. For young man. Oh, and also they have like in that in that rooftop party scene that was in the earlier slide, they have like guys who are doing like Americans and obviously the whitest person you can find is going to be like the Russian Guys who are there so they have like I am big capitalist guy from New York City I love to be hiring prostitutes or whatever Third thing is a sugar, which is the Christian.

I was happy to like give you shit as long as they you are exporting sugar and tobacco and all sorts of shit to be rest of you export. Boss. Yes. And not to be like Maoist about this, but like the old export boss. Cultural Soviet imperialism is is sort of evident here in some ways. So that's just that's a cross, by the way, that's that's our catchphrase. But anyway, so that's where we're at.

The Cuba is like, OK, well, fuck the US. We're going to export to the Soviet Union. They're going to give us shit. We're going to be really happy and nothing is going to go wrong. Next. We're going to get Russian Dutch disease. Shout out. All right. Don't mess with the unless you want to get. So you have more of our picture.

Oh, right. Thank you for the great. Please don't ask what happened to Rose Kennedy. Our other Catholic president. So I trained of Irishman is. This fucking guy. Mm. Let me clear. The trite of Irishman is the bane of the Cuban people. So on the left, William Randolph Hurst's.

Yeah, John F. Kennedy. We're going to start with John F. Kennedy is the first tranked up Irishman to really like come along and fuck everything up. And so there he is. By the way, when I say tranked up, that's a matter of historical record that that man was on more painkillers than like, oh, I know. He was running a clinic. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, see, I just like if you, you know, running a clinic. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like if you took Kennedy and got rid of the fun vices. Yeah.

That's true. Or the charisma or the hair. What's really funny is that, uh, way older, but both the both the U. S. And the Soviet Union are very worried about Cuba. Um, and part of the reason why the Cuban Missile Crisis develops the way that it does is obviously I think most people, especially most people on the left are aware of the fact that the CIA conducted like years or decades of like terrorism and assassination and sabotage, both within Cuba and without Cuba, aimed at Cuba. And JFK sort of like inherited this from Eisenhower and like double and triple down. I thought it was a great idea, right? Yeah. But and also we weren't going too far enough. Yeah. But also the USSR was scared that the Cubans were

going to turn malice. And so the whole time they're sort of Fiddles of eyeing China and being like, listen, no, we're your guys. We're your guys on this. Should have been worried about Peru. Yeah. Gonzalo thought. I mean, on the right, by the way, speaking of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is going to be the slide. Dead dogs. So on the right, that is a photo that I want to say my

comrade Nina took that is of the Memorial for the Cuban Missile Crisis or like the Open Air Museum. Rather, did they let them keep one? Those are like the rockets. They just have like, I mean, they don't have a warhead in them, but like they have that's a plane on the left. There's a couple of ICBMs and they're just sitting out there. This is on the way to the environmental ministry, by the way. I will say so.

That's fun. They let him keep one. Yeah, I will say that as far as these things go, Fidel did later say that like had the Soviets given him launch authority, and he was telling him this at the time too. He would have just launched on the US first and let Cuba be... Yeah, he was going Maoist. Yeah, and let Cuba be a sort of like, you know, just take the hit for removing the hated Americans from the face of the earth.

Which... He was striking at settler colonial America. He had read J Sakai as settlers and was determined to sort of like, put an end to the greater Satan. The J stands for Jose. Jose Sakai. So yeah, the Cuban Missile Crisis happens.

The Bay of Pigs- Well, so I'm gonna get a, I'm gonna get a refresh my mojito while you, because you're going to do this way better than me. Okay, okay. The Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm really not. So the Americans are trying to station nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy in order to like have more convincing first strike capability against Soviets,

which leads Chris Jeff to put nuclear weapons on Cuba. Since both of these are sort of like geographically in the backyard for short and medium range ballistic missiles. range ballistic missiles. And, you know, since even even more than submarines, this is a situation where like you have zero warning before the White House is simply vaporized. Kennedy does not appreciate this. And in particular, the US military really do not appreciate this. Okay, we can do that. You can't do that. Only we can do that. I love the Georgia's staff almost so since a lovely coup over it. Yes, genuinely, because they they want to go in and disarm the

the sort of the missile sites in Cuba ahead of time. What would we have lost if they launched Miami? I mean, all Cubans already possibly Washington possibly so much the better for it. It fucking sucks I reminded of a Mao quote here where a guy from the Italian Communist Party said I remember this Are you aware that in a nuclear war? You know every Italian would be killed every Italian communist and Mao says what makes you think Italians are so important to the revolution. Mamma mia, that's a spicy meatball. Yeah, so this is ultimately resolved by means of...

All Italian culture is derived from Chinese culture anyway. Spaghetti, paper, a strung powder, a stricter blockade on Soviet ships that are going to be bringing the weapons and the technicians. By the way, there are at this point on Kuba, like Soviet guys driving the like TELs, the like launches around. And people are noticing the fact that there are these massive missile launches getting stuck and lost and like snapping the edges off of buildings and like tiny villages where they're driving them around. Like the big ones with like a million wheels. There's just a cool. Yeah, genuinely.

Going out to like Cienfuegos or whatever. Yeah, exactly. In the woods, there's just an active nuclear weapon. Trying to slide there. Trying to go through a McDonald's drive-through, you know. So yeah, the way this ultimately resolves is there is a negotiated settlement with the US pulls its missiles out and the Soviets do too. And Castro doesn't get to launch on Kennedy, but he does get to kill him.

Listen to our episode on the JFK assassination to find out why that's a joke on my part, but I'm not sure anyone else in this podcast will agree with me that it was. Well, also, like to be clear, it is because Fidel, like my dad, is a staunch advocate for Texas-style barbecue, whereas JFK openly praised North Carolina-style barbecue. And that's why he was a yes. I mean, if you want to link his death to Cuba, the most plausible version of it is the Bay of Pigs, where he like the CIA armed and trained a the ass and went, OK, guys, go and overthrow Castro. They landed and then immediately fucked it and weren't able to demonstrate the sort of perseverance that Fidel had by fleeing into the mountains. But instead went and cried to the Americans for air support, which they didn't get and were all massacred or thrown back into the ocean, which.

They have pigs. What do you do with pigs? You barbecue them. What do you put on barbecue? Barbecue sauce. It's all connected. Oh my God. And North Carolina barbecue, according to my dad, is primarily pork and mustard-based. Yeah, and North Carolina has a big bay on which you might barbecue the pigs. Okay, my hyoid bone is intact.

I am not having dark thoughts because I take medication. Looking glass here, people. I was googling the Falklands and real estate in the Falklands, but not because I want to move there really that much. So. So this embargo on Cuba that like the stricter embargo that like prevented any Soviet weapons from getting in that persists beyond the missile crisis in a less sort of overtly patrolled form. Next slide please. So what you see here is you see the Hotel Nacional. These are photos that I took when

we went into the lobby just to check it out. The big, big wooden beams here. These are nice. Oh, dude, it's so sick. And then also like on the on the top floor, there is a capo Blanca, a roll capo Blanca themed bar that has like live music. So you can just go up and you can listen to it. It would be so funny for us to do our first live show outside the US in Cuba. Yeah, my dad would be really funny. My dad wants to see us do it. I can tell you that right now. You maybe, well, we'll get into maybe you could, but yeah, that's possible. I think, I think, you know, National Convention in Havana. But so that, that's the hotel where Meyer Lansky

and that's the hotel where Meyer Lansky would stay. That's the hotel that Santo Traficante ran his empire out of. And it's the hotel where the Havana Conference was. Yeah, every single person who has been anywhere near this hotel all assassinated JFK individually. It is also state-owned. You know, we have these, like, fraught, these fraught positions of international conflict. The nice hotel always stays. It's like this and like the hotel in Kabul.

Yeah, the international. There's a bunch of really interesting long reads about that. Well, the thing is, like the Cubans, the Cubans are still happy to do tourism shit. And so, like, I mean, after the revolution and now. So these hotels are just nationalized and and the casinos are like shut down, but you know, they're converted to hotels where possible. And this hotel is nationalized, so we could not stay there. And what we're going to go into is we're going to talk about the mechanic of the embargo. Because after 1962, the US Congress passed the Cuban asset control regulations.

So, and basically what that means is that the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control gets jurisdiction to enforce and amend that at the direction of the president and apply whatever new restrictions the president deems necessary and allows the Office of Foreign Asset Control to start implementing penalties for US nationals who are dealing in any real capacity in Cuba. The embargo works like this. If you are a subject to US jurisdiction, so if you're a US national,

you can't deal in any property in which Cuba or a Cuban national has an interest. You can't make payments, transfers, withdrawals with any such entities without a Treasury Department license, and it can apply to individuals doing travel related expenditures. Flying for a license for podcast live show. Yeah, right. Oh, I'm on the State Department dweeebs get their hands on this one. OK, so Nora Jones recently did or recently was going to do like a live show in Cuba, a four day like series of shows in Cuba. And then like that was canceled because of interference from the Treasury.

I think I don't know. It was weird. But we'll get into how she's able to do that in a second. But travel related expenditures are also included in this sometimes, so it can make it like near impossible to go to Cuba. We'll get into how I was able to do that and how GSA was able to do that later. But Kennedy did actually make it illegal for you to go to Cuba for a while. And there was activism among sort of left-wing Cuban Americans in the Brigada Antonio Maseo and various other orgs about like being allowed to return to Cuba. There was a group of 55 who wanted to return and

you know did activism around that. So the the thing about that is that that means that you as an American cannot exchange money in order to stay at this hotel, right? Because it is owned by the Cuban government. Even though it's very nice and also much cheaper than the hotel that we stayed at, which is still pretty cheap. money in order to stay at this hotel, right? Because it is owned by the Cuban government, even though it's very nice and also much cheaper than the hotel that we stayed at, which is still pretty cheap, even for the hotel that it was.

What if you exchange the currency for a different currency? Well, you have to do that entirely in cash, because the- Jesus Christ. So like, that's the thing. Like, Cuba is essentially statutory prohibited from dealing in any sort of like US credit. Right. Like no, you can't be ex we'll get into this a little bit later, but like they cannot buy agricultural goods with credit the way that every single other country except for like Iran and North

Korea, etc. can. They have to buy it in cash, which does not have to be just US dollars, but it includes like pounds and euros and all that. And so a large portion of like the human tourist economy is based around extracting foreign currencies and exchanging them for worthless pesos, which are very cool. And I got a bunch of because they look nice. So we'll get into that in a second, but later in the slide. But there's also restrictions on purchasing Cuban goods if the initial raw product was made in Cuba and then processed elsewhere. So if the like Cubans ship sugar to Mexico and it's refined in Mexico and then that sugar is sold as a product. It can't be sold in the United States. Or for example, if they sell molasses to be distilled as rum elsewhere, it can't then be sold to Puerto Rico or some shit like that, which is a part of the United States nominally. That also applies in reverse.

So if a product is more than 10% US made, it can't be sent to Cuba. And that's why the plane thing was funny, because on the plane, they announced that it was 100% Brazilian made. Embraer, once again, the proletarian airliner. Yeah, thank you. Well, I mean, we flew America. Merci il numero uno, campeo domuno. We flew American, sorry. Or Yeah, we flew American sorry

Or at least I flew American some people flew yet, but like so the sun doesn't kubana de aviation still raster a bunch of the big Soviet widebodies. Yeah, they have a bunch of illusion a big Soviet widebody Actually, if you go to the if you go to the hotel or not the hotel, the airport, you can see all the the Kuala Plains and they're like running like illusions with like the weird orange and arrangement in the back. Oh, yeah, it's it's pretty sick. But so like the during COVID and we were told this by, you know, government officials.

So, you know, great assault. But like during COVID, the Chinese chairman Xi was going to send COVID aid to Cuba, which had an enormous shortage of oxygen. Cuba's always having shortages due to the embargo, but like especially during COVID, there was a shortage of oxygen. And so the Chinese loaded up like 10, 747s full of just COVID supplies. And then the US government was like, you cannot land those planes in Cuba. Should have had embryos, you know?

Well, right. But like, you're not allowed to do that. Fuck you. And so those sat grounded invasion. I mean, you know, you could just fly him over there and then, you know, we haven't left the one up there yet. I like the internet humanitarian law stuff you fuck around with this and there's weird consequences in places you know. Well and people died like that's the thing people died because they didn't have they weren't able to access. And we'll get into more people dying for various other things. But like the embargo is a disaster of political engineering, right? It is a disaster of trying to engineer a particular situation in the governing of an island,

of trying to engineer a particular process, of trying to have control over Latin America, and also fundamentally a disaster of resource allocation and economic function. So the Cuban government has a lot of difficulty importing basic goods. And while we were in Cuba, there was a tanker offshore for three days that we could see from the hotel. And we were like, what the fuck is up with this tanker? And they're like, yeah, so that's waiting for a transaction to clear.

And that's got oil on it. And it's stuck there until that transaction clears. And when it does, we'll be able to, you know, but that transaction has to be made in cash or like for like and resources. And various other countries are subject to these restrictions and we'll get into why. But like for example, Iran or North Korea or various other countries, they have a neighbor,

right? They have like a various neighbors who are not within the US sphere of influence and who share a land border. So they are able to get things from Turkey, where Iran can like use golden oil to like buy things or China, which will just fund North Korea. Cuba has nothing. There is nothing around for many, many miles, and it's so expensive to get things shipped in from China, where that is one of the places that you can get things shipped in from. Next slide. As a bit of a palette cleanser, that's also what leads to like the 50s car situation. This is a photo I took of some cars outside our hotel. Sorry, this one's cool. Sorry. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, no, it's six fuck. Got the got the white walls, yet cars that are two colors. Amazing. Yeah, you can do that. It's just the colors black now. You get the floating roof thing that car manufacturers insist on giving us. Yeah, precisely. So I know I'm saying precisely so much.

Limiting factor. I yeah. All of the internal parts of basically I believe my mom said so blame my mom if this is wrong. Don't blame her. Never blame your mom for anything. I love my mom so much. My parents are great. Hi parents who will inevitably listen to this podcast. Hi, dad. Hi, mom.

The they're called on main that has been almonds. So they've got like a streamlined because they've got that streamlined shape to them. The entire interior has been replaced with East German or Czech or Korean or Japanese Chinese parts. So they have some of the stuff isn't made of car parts. Some of this is made out of like weird thrown together stuff, too. Like some of the repairs that you see done on these.

I think is one of the. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just got to do it. You can keep these things running with like string and like baggies and shit. Yeah. And also like these are back when cars were like easy to repair because they made sense. Yeah. But they're also designed to last for one year at most. So that's like you know.

But that's the thing I want to highlight that like the the overall story here is of a nation and a people who are just incredibly fucking resourceful and who have made who have been able to do so much with so little and I've been able to like carve out a life for themselves in spite of unending horrors inflicted upon them by, you know, the the dedication and the spirit and etc. that I saw there. And we'll get into that when we get into the hospital. So I know everyone's looking at the cars here. I'm looking at this apartment building on the Piloti. You got the fun colored blocks. You got the good window air, non-window air conditioners.

You got the mini split system. Yeah, that's actually a very tall building, too. It's it's just, you know, prefab housing, Soviet style all over Havana. We don't have the technology to do this in the United States. Well, OK, so you want to talk about differences aid, you know? Yeah, we want to talk about differences. Well, good bunch of episode, baby. I didn't see. I did not see homelessness. I live in Los Angeles. Okay. I did not see homelessness in Havana because even though the houses can be shitty because

they're not well maintained because you don't have the resources, you know, literally, you have a paint shortage. They make an effort to ensure that you are housed. And my friend, Tal, who also listens to this podcast, hi, Tal, was in Cuba recently. And his guide was like, the dirty secret is that some people have alcoholism and we take them to the state rehab, and they run through the program, but then they go back to their families and they relapse and they're back out on the street. And she said this, like, it was like, Oh, well, in America, that wouldn't happen. And And she said this like it was like, oh, well, in America, that wouldn't happen. And Paul, who also listened to that, I was like, haha, yeah. Because like, you know, there's still like at least like a base level acknowledgement of like people need a place to live. But anyway, next slide, please.

Hey, this is what I was talking about with the cool fouls. And yeah, so that's a that's an incredible mix. So you've got like a k pattern rifle in m16 with like the old handguard not the old old handguard but like the the sort of uh middle one and and the foul that's amazing incredible so we're talking about we're talking about getting uh uh you know so we're talking about sort of like 1960s and 1970s women. I have 1970s women dysphoria and then I need an assault rifle. I have this area. I just needed a assault rifle. In the notes left Sandinista in Nicaragua, placed there specifically to make Alice say,

I think I hope COVID. Tango COVID. Yo, can I get that COVID? So Cuba has a second layer of economic sanctions imposed. So the first layer are sort of under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which was World War One, German Empire, the naked like sphere of influence stuff. Yeah. Exactly. So the second round is under something called the state sponsors of Terrorist, which is the second naked spear of influence. Because because glorious episodes in Cuban military history,

sending fighters to Angola to fight against the apartheid South Africans. And also to help the MPLA, the left wing and now ruling party of Angola fight Unita, which was backed by the sort of by NATO and that whole exception. And then so the Sandinistas as well on the left. Very critical support. And the top right denim though. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, that that woman's like she's serving cut. And the top right denim though. Oh, yeah. No, I mean that that woman's like she's serving cut and the Sorry, that's I'm gay. I'm allowed to say that

My mom's gonna ask me what that means and Liam's mom serving cunt is where and somebody's like so got a really like cool little outfit And they're like owning it and they look really like cool and and like hot and it derives from drag balls. You should watch Paris is burning. Also highly and small. I hope you're hope you're doing well. So top right is a FARC which is even more. Yeah, the support is getting more and more critical as the number of dead dogs is rising. Also, it's the number of like cocaine trafficking.

Listen, isn't it legal to both liberate your country from capitalism and help the gringos have a little party? And the answer is yes, extremely. It is so illegal for you to do that. It is also illegal to kill babies and children. So that's another thing. You can't make an international cocaine trafficking empire without breaking a few eggs, right?

So at the time, FARC was not that way. So it changed a little bit. So yeah, so Bottom Right is Angola. It's serving as the kind of like revolutionary McKinsey. You know, I think we can optimize your processes here. Somebody should hire me to do that. But bottom right is Cuban fighters in Angola. Cuba has always viewed itself in a sort of internationalist lens,

hence tensions of the Soviet Union and would basically like provide financial aid and soldiers or in search of movements that aligned with Cuba's values. They did really well in times, particularly in Angola. Right. Exactly, because they're experienced like sort of jungle guerrilla fighters. So, you know, and, you know, I think largely this is a legacy of real good in a lot of ways, but it is also put Cuba, the state sponsors of terror list. So what does that mean? Okay, so you can't get weapons

at all. You can't get any dual use exports. So anything that could be used for a military use. Yeah, the ITAR stuff is fucking intense, by the way. There's a lot of just regular ass stuff that it turns out you can't export from the US. It's on arms control lists. Yeah. I mean, the thing about dual use where one of the uses is military is that's

basically everything. Yeah. Yeah. You can't have a truck because technicals. Um, yeah. You can't have a truck. You can't have like, I don't know, maybe you can have like a bail of cardboard for recycling.

I can. Oh, wait. You know what? I'd throw that at someone. Yeah. Yeah. You know, military usage, you know, it can have like a bail of cardboard for recycling. I can wait. You know, it's not that it's someone. Yeah. You know, military usage. You know, it has military usage. Ammonia fertilizer. No, like you need any of that for your large scale industrial agriculture. Yeah. Yes.

Prohibition on economic assistance by the United States, who cares? Fuck the gringos, fuck the Yankees, et cetera. Sure, I wasn't getting that. But prohibition on getting world bank loans or any international financial institutional help because it requires the US to oppose that in any sense. So not good. Again, fuck the Yankee, fuck the gringo. Ban on financial transactions without license, so from the Treasury. You are not allowed to have visa waivers of any kinds, and you get a revocation of diplomatic immunity.

So for like your leaders, which allows people to bring suits against various governments on that list. So it is hugely impactful to Cuba. This is also true of various other countries. I think right now. You hear me out. Take all of those off of Cuba. Put them all on Israel. Thanks for coming. I agree 100%. But also like currently I think it's Cuba, Iran, and North Korea are on that list. Syria, oh Yemen just got added to that list because of their principled actions to stop the genocide in Gaza. So again, fuck Joe Biden. Oh, man, the comments in this are going to be great.

But I simply don't care. I know. But so it's immensely destabilizing. I think also Syria was on there for a little bit. It may not be anymore. But it's thankfully they have their friends in the Soviet Union. destabilizing. I think also, CiriO is on there for a little bit. It may not be anymore. But it's thankfully they have their friends in the Soviet Union. Next slide please. Slide. And I have the notes. Oh no, my economy. I just thought that it's how I'm like, oh no, my economy.

I'm suffering from brainwashed madness after like five hours of PowerPoint. So I did actually genuinely spent three hours and work as a resource in Soviet Republic and the steam workshop making the shot. So I hope you all appreciate it. I did. I really do. I'm just I'm just I'm on my first play through in realistic mode where I haven't had to cheat in money. Oh, wow. I only took about a billion hours of gameplay to get good at the game. I'm fucking up on like the easiest possible mode.

Like this is all for show because all of these people are. Look, listen, you have to assign them jobs from the housing and it's so uninsuitive. Right. Yeah. I don't always have to do that. The trick what you want to do to start out with is everyone works in a sweatshop. Build the clothing factory. First, all the good men died in the first one. in a sweatshop, build the clothing factory first. Oh, good man, died in the sweatshop.

That's like real life. And then once you're making money from that, you build the fabric sweatshop, where they make the fabric that goes into the clothing sweatshop. Oh, fuck. Okay, but that's gonna produce extra fabric, so you export that and the clothing.

Both those are pretty high value goods that run, they're made from like crops and like chemicals. You still gonna have to import chemicals which is expensive. The first thing I did was build a coal power plant and a university so that I could get prefab housing for this shot because a lot of what's in this shot is prefab housing and then I built 30 different tourist locations and this is a East Cuba map. So thank you to the moderate who made that, and also all of these beautiful Latin American buildings. So, dev for workers and resources of the Republic, please add more options for Cuba and slash.

They have talks about it. That's one of the things that they want to do is like DLC is like. Yeah, they do like a tropical map. Yeah. Well, yeah, they're going to have one that's Cuba and they're going to have one that's Iran. I'm so happy with that. I please I need that. I cover every single part of the sanctions list.

I want my North Korean map. Yeah, actually, I need North Korean. I want like a Chinese map and Afghanistan map. Actually, someone just uploaded an Afghanistan map. OK, so the idea is you only have one small custom station. That's it. Yeah. And almost no resources. Okay, well, because speaking of having

speaking of having one custom station and not that many resources, Fidel has a problem, which is that Cuba is an economy based around sugar exports and tourism. And the thing that that creates is a whole class of peasant farmers. And Fidel went around the United States and he's like, damn, what if we have that shit? And it commences what's called an import subsidized industrialization plan where you are trying to build domestic industry. You go to the Soviets and you're like, make us more like you. Yeah, you go to the Soviets and you're like, give me the shit that I need to make a car

to make like car factory. The Soviets like easy. We will teach you how to make these snow factories that we have. Yeah. So it's it's largely dependent on... Step one, achieve blood alcohol content of 0.999. This will be easy for you because you make incredible rum. It's called Kavina Club. Very smooth. Costs $2 USD for a double.

It's unfortunate this happened so early because now you can look on YouTube and an Indian man will teach you how to do it. Looking up the layout of balance, my country's economy tutorial. Yeah. Number one, pass all those checks from the United States to give you the good currency. So it's dependent on the Soviet Union, as you might imagine, and the rest of the economic block being able to provide industrial capital, which doesn't really work in some ways. So Cuba gets billions of dollars in subsidies from the Soviets to build like concrete prefab housing. Some of that is similar to what you will see here.

And also, Cuba engages in things like large scale literacy campaigns. So Cuba actually has one of the highest literacy rates in the entire world because it takes like it does strong education and it does all sorts of like it did La campania alfabeti the fucking Christ I can't say alfabeti session tough word The literacy campaign to like teach people out in the camp on whatnot And as well as industrial development. So they're building factories and shit. As well as a biotech sector that even now is incredibly

incredible. You're going to learn to read, and you're going to work on cloning this cow. And you're going to build a universe. You're going to have these universities. You're going to nationalize them, and you're going to turn out 86 doctors per 100,000 people. We're going to skip the food factory and go straight to ice cream factory.

Yeah, I mean, literally, the ice cream factory is a really good example of doing this because the Cuban government invested in dairy farms in, you know, the one big. Oh, yeah. Fridge. That's an IWW slogan. I want the IWW one big cow patch very badly. Yeah, I think that would be really good. Um, refrigerated trucks, all that, and then like the parlors themselves. So they built an extremely educated middle class, a doctor core, which they have one of the highest doctor to

person ratios of any country and they send doctors abroad. I know doctors are person is like a thing, but it implies that they are distinct classes, which I appreciate. Doctors are a different species of animal. I believe this to be true. You kind of open the biseranges there. Instead of organs. So income inequality goes down. And a thing that's really important to point out is that it goes down really strongly in favor of black Cubans. Black Cubans benefit really heavily from this revolution because they there's an active attempt to eliminate racism and to eliminate like sort of the economic situation that puts black Cubans in this position.

And at the same time, they're still doing exports, right? And we'll get to that in a second. But they start providing foreign aid and military support to other countries, like Angola and Nicaragua, which you talked about, Cuba joins Comic Con, which is the non-convention. The one that happens in San Diego. Rather the council for fucking whatever, it's the Soviet economic sphere. And his class is a developing country within it. So that means that they

get oil at a preferential rate. And they don't need all the oil they get. So what do they do? They refine it and then they sell it elsewhere. Because they got it at such a good rate, they're able to generate a profit on that. Oh, I still know those refineries they nationalized earlier too. Exactly. And they're still getting sugar and rum and, you know, tobacco and minerals and all that and exporting them. And I have here, unfortunately, this is the Maoist sector of the episode. So next slide, please. Okay.

Incredible, incredible dudes here. I was about to say. All the outfits I would wear. We got the new Soviet men and women here. Yeah. Yeah. So Cuba still like tourism is very strong. And like if you look at where this is, this is not far from where that photo is. This is in that photo. This is like in the middle.

I saw I see the big has a powerful stash on this man. Yeah. Incredible. You know, you got a light on the guy in white pants. Oh, yeah. You go to Cuba, you have rum, you have cigar, you have a good time. You go back to... You see what I mean about Cuba existing in the sort of Soviet imagination. Sure. So it's good for a lot of people. It's good for Soviet Indians, tourists. It's especially good for black Cubans. It's not so good for gay Cubans at the time. Because if you are gay or you are a sort of like this hippie or any other sort of weird

culture, no rights, no rights. You literally get put in a like work camp situation. Now, that's do not love a work camp situation. Now, to be clear, they send you to the gay steel milk. I mean, kind of they send you to the gay sugar plantation. And that's so good. I do want to I do want to be like even handed here to be like, yeah, that fucking sucks. But also like, I think it's 30,000 people total were subjected to that. And it wasn't like a sort of like, you know,

gulag situation, like you were allowed to leave and visit your family after a certain amount of time. But like, it's not great. And Cuba recognizes this as a sort of historic error. Fidel said as much. The Constitution currently guarantees gay marriage, gay rights to adoption, trans rights, etc. As a result of the work of Mariela Castro, who is Fidel's niece and Raul's daughter who we met while we were there. Really, really cool stuff. And she read a book that I am reading at the moment about how she managed to sort of like build this campaign for trans rights that led to that being included in the Constitution. Things have changed, but at the time Fidel kind of thinks that you can move straight to the communist phase because he's like,

we're ready, We're there. It's based on vibes, you know, things that go well. We got all these guys with big moustaches walking around. Right. So the next slide, please. Bigger the moustache, the more communist it is. That's right. I agree. So, okay. So the Soviets are like, we're going to motivate workers through monetary means. And Cuba is like, we're going to motivate the guy who wins first prize and this gets a vacation to Cuba.

And Cuba is like, we're going to motivate workers with revolutionary fervor. So in 1968, the government takes steps to nationalize the remaining private businesses in Cuba, which there are a few and reorganize some sectors of the economy into like brigades. Um, and I have here in the notes a inside joke that I have with Alice, I'm not gonna read out on the pot, Alice. Do it.

Thank you, yes, very good. Yep, comrades, your efforts are an inspiration. The export related nature of Cuba's economy. You received the Order of Lenin for this, Cap. Yeah, posadism. The export related nature of Cuba's economy is important here when they start encouraging people, especially youths, to go out to the countryside, the campo, to do agricultural work. And they decide that they're going to do what's called a safra de los 10 millones. So the

safra is like the big harvest, and 10iones means 10 million because they're going to make 10 million tons of sugar in 1970. I love the great taste of malism, you know. Yes. Right. And again, again, like, you know, this is not necessarily unachievable, but it's a huge goal. And so they are like, we're going to bring everybody out to the camp or you're going to harvest sugar. And so students for a democratic society, SDS sends what's called the venceremos brigade of youths out to the countryside to help with this. So that's the left poster here. Todos a saludar a las brigadas vencedoras.

Everyone will salute the victorious brigades. And the middle one says, where will we be on the 2nd of January? In the Cain fields. And the one on the right says everyone in the revolutionary offensive with Fide. SDS is also like buried via a series of sort of descending things, the precursor or DSA. So there was like a, I wanna say a Maoist or a Trotsky at Split or something and then we got the normal people. But they turn into, I wanna say, yeah, there was like, they turn into the preside, yeah, yeah,

Liam probably knows that I don't know that this and I do cause I just read the charts that tell me which caucuses descend from where. So they're gonna do this big saffron and they're gonna export all this sugar. And also like Cuba is such a big sugar producer that the embargo on Cuba did actually cause a rise in sugar prices globally.

So this is not necessarily out of the realm of imagination. So they make... This does kind of sound like it sucks. It's like, all right, our big socialist project is, you're gonna become a farm hand. Yeah. It does. And what's the job after the revolution?

I'm gonna be real. It's a farm hand. No, no, no, give me coal miner. I want a coal miner. No, you don't. It does suck. I'm not like... I'm not gonna lie, this does kind of suck, especially

because it doesn't work. It makes 8.5 million tons of sugar, which is good. I mean, that's way more tons of sugar than I can organize a nation to produce. But the all-time record is 7.2, right? So it does that, but it also causes a 20% decrease in economic activity in non agricultural sectors. Oh, that's bad.

Yeah, it's so like this is what if instead of Dutch disease, we have ourselves Dutch disease too. Yeah, sugar. And so they're like, OK, so a bunch of people get fired. I think a guy commits suicide over this just out of shame. Um, it's sort of like a Japanese video game executive route out. And the state kind of moves to something closer to the Soviet Union's Kosigen reforms, which like decentralization and who gives a shit.

But it's all fine because this will keep working forever because the Soviet Union is an adherent of Marxist-Leninists, the immortal science of Marxist Leninist ideology. And it's all going to be fine. And, you know, it's all going to next slide. This pizza. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, shit. Fuck it all. Oh, no.

It's all tumbling down. Yeah. So on the 26th of December 1991 the Soviet Union is dissolved in one of the greatest world historical crimes ever committed. Putting us on the bad timeline and forever. I still believe the bad timeline was when we didn't get the German Revolution, but like this is a sort of close-run thing to, yeah. I'm gonna ask you this. The timeline can get worse. No, I'm serious.

Would you want to live in a world where the Germans get to be extremely smug about having done the revolution live in a world where the Germans get to be extremely smug? It's bad to say fair. OK, also there are on the international stage saying that only they know how to do a genocide properly. Oh, Jesus Christ. Well, and I mean, you know, I guess. Also, Roz, just FYI, I got an error that it can't save the local backup of my audio, but I have the local backup of my audio.

Yeah, on account of the local backup, your audio is now 15,000 gigabytes because we've been doing this for nine years. Well, I've got three gigabytes free on one drive. I've got 584 free on another 81 on the next. Anyway, so we're on the bad timeline. And so the problem with this is that the entire economy is kind of dependent on aid for the Soviet Union. You have to invent one of the all time euphemisms.

Right. Yes. So next next slide. The period of the special, the special period. It's not just that it's el period especial en tiempos de paz, which is a special period in peace time. It's like, hey, you're so lucky. We could there could be nukes flying around like these basically doing war communism, right? So like the Cubans had been prepared for something like this to happen because they had seen that the Soviets are pulling back.

While we met with Maria, she alluded to the fact that they were basically faking military drills to keep Reagan thinking that the Soviets were going to intervene and do a bunch of Cuban guys running back and forth on the beach, shouting in Russian. Yes. So Cuba hyper specializes in the export of various goods still, and it uses that money to buy like other things that everybody can have a middle-class life on. But now all their buyers are dirt fucking poor because the entire Eastern Bloc was privatized thanks to, you know, the shock doctrine brigade. And they have no subsidies. And all of the country, the people that they can normally trade with are now

conducting business in USD, because there's not a fucking ruble that's worth anything anymore, which Cuba can't really deal in because it alone is under special restrictions. And to top it all off, there's no fucking oil. Oh, you need that to run the stuff. To run the combine harvesters and the tractors and all that other shit. And then, Roz, there's other things that use oil for an agriculture. Oh, I mean fertilizer for one thing. Sure. Yeah.

Yep. Liam, there's oil things that you use for military purposes. Fuel, let's see. Drive the tanks around. Drives the tanks, yeah. Fuel, let's see. Right. Drives of tanks. Drives of tanks. Yeah. Yeah. Lubricants.

Have gas. Lubricants is a good one. Maintenance. Yeah. So all that goes away. And you have least lubricated military in the Western Hemisphere. Yeah.

Wow. It's just like when I was in college. And anyway, she used sealed bearings. Yeah. Well, and, and so like, you are in this situation where you still have a little bit of oil, very tiny amount, but you have to ration it. And, you know, famine hits the country to a degree that you basically have only seen in one. Well, I mean, until recently, thanks to the, you know, the aggression of the Zionist state, you had pretty much really only seen in like the dust bowl or some shit like that. Like, North

Korea also gets hit really hard by a famine at the same period for the same reasons. But you, so there are riots, there's famine, there's starvation. People try and leave on little barges. The oft quoted statement is that people are eating cats, and I don't want to repeat that. Like it's completely true or it's... But that's the kind of level of desperation that we're at here. And the sort of the offer from the United States here is all you got to do is overthrow your government.

Right. Yeah, that's what they always do. It doesn't seem to really work. Yeah, it might be. It probably doesn't help the fact that you see in Eastern Europe at this point what it looks like when the US government overthrows your government or helps to, which is you get shock doctrine. Yeah, which is that Bulgaria goes from being 12th in the world and every leading indicator to being like 80 something Yeah, yeah, and and so you get riots on the Malikon. They go back to horse drawn carts Which I think I have a picture of somewhere do some more repression, you know less rights people get very into bikes So that's bottom left. Yeah, they're sorry bottom right. Well, that's that's that's bottom left. They're sorry, bottom right. Well, that's eco-friendly though.

It is. We're doing an eco-social and green new deal. Bottom left is a raft going to Florida. Top left is a camel. Yes. Come here. So I have some photos of this on the next slide, but I figured Ross would be really interested in this.

Do you want to? So, this is interesting. So, a camel here, and this is not the only place this sort of bus existed because these Soviets actually built them brand new in a few areas. But a camel is essentially you have a semi truck. And instead of a trailer on it that carries freight, you have a trailer on it that carries people. You know, it's got windows, it's got everything. And this was one of these,

they're a little bit cheaper to build than a real bus. I mean, you can see here, this is some kind of Tetra, I would assume, articulated bus here with guys hanging off the side. Public transit in Havana was very, very crowded up to and including the late 80s and early 90s. And one of the things about the Soviet Union collapsing is that very late in the 80s, they actually sent over a delegation of Soviet engineers to build Havana a good Soviet Metro, right?

Oh, they were going to build a proper good Soviet Metro system for Havana, you know, with the three lines in the Soviet triangle and everything and the Soviet Union collapsed and they couldn't even bring them back. So upset about that because Havana is... You have the Metro exile. Yeah, you genuinely... You've been exiled too. That's the worst thing that happened as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm going to be real, like, like Havana could so use a metro right now. They're having the same sort of fuel shortages and people are like,

does in the steep waiting for the bus and the bus is incredibly crowded. It's not quite the top right photo, which is the other. But like it's another thing is like as opposed to a lot of communist countries, which sort of had a deep focus on electrification early, like you go to the like Russia, you go to Ukraine or you go to all these Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan even, you know, it's like, we installed trolley bus systems, we run on, we have trans, we have metros, we have, well, the trolley bus system in Kabul is long gone. But this does not happen in Cuba in the same way, and never electrifies. It's still dependent on fossil fuels in a way that these other post-Soviet

countries are not. Well, and also, why would you be when you get oil at such a preferential rate and like you then sell it, you're in a surplus, right? It's never going to come down. So why would you have cheap electricity in the same way? Because it's like no hydropower. You're going to have to like, you're not getting cheap electricity any which way, because there's just not like the sort of you are getting it through nuclear. You are getting it through nuclear. I think Cuba has a couple of nuclear weapons. That's the only way you could do it then. Yeah. Precisely. Yeah. And so why am I saying precisely?

Some beautiful RMBK reactors. beautiful RMBK reactors. Well, so like, you know, the effect of this is to starve people for basically no reason other than peak from the United States. 80% of Cuba's trade was lost, right? And Clinton intentionally made it worse to see if he could make Cuba collapse. Overthrow your government. Overthrow your government. And why don't people overthrow their government when we sort of like starve them and stuff? A question which is still salient today.

And the answer, it turns out, is mostly that they're kind of starving too much. And also maybe they don't want to because they see you starving them and go, maybe my government are not the biggest assholes here. Yeah, I'm just gonna go back to points. I'm gonna go back to points five and six from the memo for Mr. Rebottom, which is that militant opposition to Castro from without Cuba would only serve his and the communist cause. And then six, the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.

Ah, well, thank God we're not going to make any weird mistakes on that level. I mean, you just, these sanctions ideas all seem to rely on the idea that people are as stupid as Americans in other countries. Yeah, exactly. And they're genuinely much smarter than I know some of them would be real. We'll get into it later. But I asked like the laser. Oh, God, that's like 20 more. These are quick. Okay, so we're gonna do it next time. Yeah. Next slide. This is the camel buses. And on the right are other cars that we oops, that I photograph while you're in Cuba. I want to point out something.

Yeah, it says two hops. This is a drama. Dairy bus. Many of them are legally not a car, which I bet exists for the fact that it's not a car and so therefore you can't. Yeah, this one is weird for, you know, car imports. There's a lot of like... Yeah, it's as funny as this thing has a lower section. This is probably more ADA accessible than a lot of older buses in the United States.

But also, like, yeah, the top right cars, like, there's a lot of like Chinese made cars and shit. It's wild. You do not see like the kind of cars that you see in the United States. You see a bunch of really weird and cool models. Next slide, please. They just refit a bunch of their long distance passenger trains with Chinese made passenger cars.

That's so fucking cool. The bus we were on was Chinese made and it was awesome. So the thing that gets them out of this is that a certain Hugo Chavez and Chavez more, whatever NPC members is a Chavez, then she's great. The he does a revolution and he's like, we love Cuba and then gives Cuba oil. And then the guy on the right, who is seen emerging from a sort of bond villain, the points at which the critical support wraps back around to its more critical than support and you just dislike the guy. Yeah, that's how I feel.

Active Geneseed air, you know? Well, the Russian Federation in this period gives them a lot of, like, initially, under Yeltsin, they're like, we're not going to to we're not going to honor any of our existing contracts with you. Fuck you. And hence the oil, but Putin reestablishes some diplomatic relations and send some aid and whatnot. So part of his like broader peripheral like fucking around thing, which yeah. Yeah.

Again, which is why things like so so much of Putin's ideology is just insane imperialist like Soviet boomer nostalgist sort of course Cuba, because again, the like weird happy memories thing. So and so that actually does help significantly. Actually him coming out from his sub marine bay skunk cave. I wish you wouldn't say like that. Skunk cave. What are you gonna do? So there's a generally positive view of the Russian Federation there.

So next slide, please. So the economy reorients and has to move to tourism. On the right, you'll see some fucking twang. I have. Sorry, that's being generous. Listen, I all I'm saying is I have a drop that you're going to have to bleep in a second, Devon, because yeah, because I say you open this you open the slide. And okay. F**k it.

Oh, yes, ma'am. So that's also, I have that photo on my hinge. Anyway, so that's me. That's the outfit that I met the president of Cuba, Miguel Dias Canadi Ben Mules, and because I switched days and I didn't have my outfit that I wanted to meet the president in, which is a full suit. Anyway, it doesn't matter on the left top left. You will see me mean to which is the Human tourism ministry. They're very even do Soviet acronyms Yeah, they're really into that. It's not quite an acronym because it's like just the beginning syllable That's the way the Soviets do stuff too or did stuff. Oh, I don't I

Don't know about that. Yeah, the reason why in 1984 it's like mini true, mini love is deliberately because the Soviet, yeah, it's because the Soviet, well, the Russian way of doing an acronym is syllables rather than letters typically. Wow, I'm learning things. And I hope you listen or learning things too.

So they also have like mini decks, which is the ministerio de racion. The only one I know is is is Minint the interior ministry. Yeah. So they do the cops. They moved to. We didn't see any cops. It's great. So they they moved to tourism. No, I mean, genuinely, like we didn't see any cops.

I saw cops once. No cops in Havana. It felt so safe because they had the CDR, which is like a neighborhood, if they didn't neighborhood watch was the KGB. So I can expand on that, but I'm not going to. So they legalize the dollar, which previously been banned

and also contact with foreigners have been banned, but they're like, oh, fuck, we need tourist money. So they open up what they're what they call dollar stores. And that's when the dual economy starts happening. So the dollar stores operate based on the German. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, I was about to recognize that. I go to the inter shop. Yes.

Yeah. Listener, if you listen to the East Berlin Wall episode of Well, There's Your Problem, you will hear a description of this and that's basically how it works. In my voice, in fact. That's right. So there's the, and also Roz and Liam's. You will also hear me put an umlaut on a Platinbau for some fucking reason.

I'm still embarrassed about it. Well, stop doing that. So the dollar store is, the dollar store is operating based on the dollar, the peso store is operating based on the dollar. The peso store is operating based on the peso. And as a Cuban citizen, you're entitled to like a basket of commodities that fix prices in the peso, right? The dollar store is where all the scarce goods go.

So you have an issue there that like people who are trading in dollars because they operate in the tourism industry or in like pounds or other weird, unuseful fake currencies. They have this cash that they can put back into the store. This gets eventually reorganized as the two currency system where there was like the Kuk, which is the convertible Basel and the regular Basel, which is abolished very recently.

But it also causes Cuba to seek out foreign direct investment and public private partnerships So it does help the situation a little bit. But the thing that actually fixes things is next slide. Wow Let me be clear. Um Why are they standing like that? That's a great question I'm so on the right is Raul cast. And then on the left is Barack Obama, noted betrayer of the revolution. So next slide.

Community organizer, former Marxists to get laid in college. Yeah, ironically, Barack Obama and I are going to have had the same job title in about two weeks because of my new job. Yes, this is my problem as I only became Marxist after college. I was the same. It was like the last year of college, so it helped a little bit. But now let me be clear, history will vindicate me.

So here's Barack Obama swearing undying, undying loyalty to the principles of socialism with Cuban characteristics or Fidelismo. He initiates the Cuban thought in 2014. Yeah, this is the thing. As president, you get like one or two freebies where you can just do one thing that's kind of good. It's weird. Presidents like to do this, even the like really atrocious ones. It's like George W. Bush in the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Or it's just like, hey.

Or like Nixon in the EPA. Yeah, exactly. You can do two good things if you want. China. Yeah. So he normalizes relations between Cuba and the United States. So the embassy in Havana gets moved back into. I would have had a photo of the embassy in Havana for you.

But when I went up to take a photo of the embassy in Havana, the guard yelled at me and it was like, I don't know, it was like 11 at night and I'd had two doubles of rum. It was very good. And I said I yelled back, I paid taxes for this shit. So I better be able to take a fucking photo. And then I moved on anyway, because he was still yelling at me and he had guns. So what are you going to do? Grab a service weapon, you fucking pussy. Yeah, my taxes pay for that.

I would have if I weren't on the I'm kidding, I wouldn't have. Do not bleep that. Yeah, we're going to have to believe that. We're going to do not bleep that. That's please never believe. Yeah, grab grab as bleep as an Yeah, we're going to have to bleep that. Do not bleep that. Yeah, please. Never bleep that. Grab his bleep. As an organizer, you know.

Yes. Yes, yes. So we move back into the Embassy of Havana, where you can get the Tichler Syndrome. And I also want to point out that I'm the only person that's ever really had Havana Syndrome because my tummy hurt when I got back. Oh. I'm the only person that's ever really had a fan syndrome because my tummy hurt when I got back. I'm a survivor. It's real bad. But so this is actually largely mediated by the pope. OK, again, you just fuck around with these things. It's fine.

Woke Pope. I'm a big fan of Woke Pope, to be honest. One poke, one poke, two popes. One other question leaders are doing half as much as the pope is. Come on. One to poke, Chad Pope, work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, we had Nazi pope, then woke. I was calling that a chump. Pope. Yeah.

Because one pope is the John Paul one, John Paul two. John Paul two, I think qualifies as woke up. I really don't. A lot of child sexual abuse. This user is getting yelled at and polish in the comments. No. Look, it's a big institution. It takes a long time to steer.

Yeah. Sorry, what does the Vatican Steering steer. Yeah. What is the sorry? What is the Vatican Steering Committee look like? Is it a left? I mean, Vatican Groundwork. We believe the word is it's called the College of Cardinals. Vatican Groundwork killed Vatican Mog. Hi again, Amy from Mog. Again, the priests changing changing her brake lights.

Yeah, so OK, so Obama takes Cuba off the state sponsors of Terrorist. So finally, they can use, like, they can do shit, right? And so like, hotels start to be built, the Rolling Stones come through. You know, Obama makes a visit to the island. You know, Cuba, genuinely, like, when we were talking to just random Cubans that were like, yeah, I love Obama so much.

And I'm just like, yeah. Um, we. Well, you know, you got to you got to acknowledge what little good happened. Critical support to comrade Obama. Um, we were we were in a market in Havana and there was one store that was just like Communist memorabilia. And so the DSA delegation was cleaning this woman out. I mean like, I mean, genuinely, like, we talked to her and we were like, oh, like how much do you generally make on this? And she's like, I mean, it varies from day to day. But today is a really good day.

Alice, the package that I'm sending you contains one thing from that store. Thank you. So the, the, and she was like, yeah, Obama really changed things and made things a lot better. There was a spy swap. So the Cuban five who were infiltrating right wing Cuban terror groups in Miami and were eventually captured were repatriated. Carnival opened cruise lines to Havana. Things look really good. So next slide, please.

So you start legalizing sort of this public private ownership thing. This is a photo I took. I know. I know. I know. Yep. So this is a photo I took In Havana if you look on the left those fancy new towers, Ross if you could circle that great

They got diagonal windows. That means they're cool Yeah, so that's the grandast in La Havana Which is where we were staying because it's the only one of the only hotels you're legally allowed to stay in now And I will say an incredible fucking hotel which is where we were staying because it's the only one of the only hotels you're legally allowed to stay in now. And I will say incredible fucking hotel, very cheap, nice pool. So this was built, you know, there were if you look in the bottom right, you will see like he is and Hyundai's and like modern cars. So like stuff starts coming back to Cuba and you know this thing right here. Oh my god. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah. What's bad about that? It's got the weird. It's got it's got like weird every third floor is a corridor. I was going to talk about that later. But on the

other side of that you can see that being right next to the The sea has caused it because it does not paint and it doesn't have any sort of sealant has caused it decay in large portions So like you know, it's it's there's portions of it that are falling apart And that is because of the embargo, but like it was gonna get better for a little bit And things look like they're turning around because you can deal in dollars now and you can bring tourists now and it's easier to go to Cuba. Next slide, please. This motherfucker ruins Donnie from Queens. Donnie from Queens, whose own businesses improperly violated the embargo to give money to the Cuban government at the time when that was illegal called this one of the worst deals and terrible and misguided. I see Marco Rubio's ass behind him though. Marco Rubio, one of the worst

little cunts to ever do it. And this guy, right? I always forget all what these guys look like. Yeah, little Marco. Little Marco, his parents, they were very wealthy, very wealthy Cubans. They had slaves. Do we eat? Do we eat? And folks, do we know that he had slaves? I mean, he calls them mates, but I think the rest of us

can call them slaves. We were getting paid very little. Very little. So his family comes here. And what do we do? We let them in. We let them in. We let them in. And suddenly, is a senator from Florida fake state

give it back to the Spanish? Thank you. So Donald Trump is a horrible kind. Sure, of course. And he, as we all know, and he puts Cuba back on the very funny, though, puts Cuba back on the state sponsors of terror list in 2017 and reverses a lot of those gains. So he makes it very difficult to go to Cuba. The way that we were able to is through the support for the Cuban people piece of which basically is like go to Cuba and spend

money and talk to them about capitalism which. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So you did a socialist fact finding trip to Cuba as under the auspices of a capitalist Actually, it's not actually talk to them about capitalism. It's literally just like you're supposed to go and talk to like average Cubans And we did cool I mean like we got the visas there the fucking you know, I got my visa done I got pulled aside at the airport in Cuba, but they were fine and they let me through. So, um, uh, fuck this guy. Anyway, um, this would be fine if it weren't for the fact that we had El Covid, El Covid.

Yes, it's new. Yeah. Um, in Cuba, um, they have three vaccines for that, by the way, and all of them you can give to children. Um, and it caused huge economic problems, as it did everywhere else. Because like the aforementioned oxygen shortage, people died. And imports and exports, and you had to do the lockdowns and all that shit. And the Cubans were actually on top of that. They did biotech and they did all sorts of stuff to make sure that like, oh, okay, well, you know, this is, you know, this is, we're managing this. And then the 2021 protests occurred because primarily of these, I remember first those

of like five guys in the street with SOS Cuba. Yeah. So I remember the like breathless foreign policy articles that's like the Cuban teens are sharing unauthorized USB drives of a hip hop. Is this gonna destroy the regime? And now listen, you know me, I love any regime. I will always support any regime against the hated teens. And so my assumption was, no,

this will not collapse the regime. And I did not know to date, maybe it will collapse the regime. I don't know, maybe. Maybe it will collapse the regime. I don't know. Maybe You know the 2019 constitutional reform was No, the teens are all addicted to tic-tac, which is Chinese and therefore pro-cube and Also like the CIA did participate in this adaptation. It's nice to go back to the classics once in a while, you know, like you go back to the recipe I gotta run the bathroom very quickly and then we'll polish off the rest of the stuff. Please God. I mean there's once I get

slide 54 ending on great 71 I want to be clear I was and I have the slideshow in one monitor and the NFC championship. The other I give this. Interception. I give. Yes, let's go. Why it's I give I give this my whole attention because I feel guilty and I don't consider it a real job.

And I am terrified constantly that people will stop listening to podcasts overnight and I will go back to the time when I had zero money. So what I do is I work on this very intently and I stay up until like five in the morning working on these things. And you know, it's fine. You know, there are lots worse jobs out here, but I want you all to know that when I make the content, the content is suffused with a suppurating psychic anxiety about that. I am willing to torture myself over it. Just enjoy it on that basis. Please enjoy this comedy podcast knowing that I am out here clawing my fingernails through

the top of my thigh thinking about how my job is fake. You know? Here's an amusing story about Cuba while I did a minimal amount of research for this podcast. One of the things I did is I went to seat61.com, which is a website maintained by the man in seat61 about international train travel. It's very good. If you want to go take a train in a weird place, that's where you go.

I liked reading it. Yeah. Yeah. So I looked up Cuba and one of the things is if you want to take the Hershey Electric Railway, which still runs seven trains a day, you have to take a ferry from Havana, the center city of Havana. The ferry goes across the bay, right? And this is about, okay, so I'm measuring it on the map right now. It's about half a mile, but it has airport style security.

Why is that? Okay, somebody called him so she wrote. Well, so it goes half a mile across the bay, but sometime in the recent past, some folks decided to hijack it and sail it to Florida. What? I hate that so much. Have you been to Florida? It sucks.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, now they have security. I try to figure out the specific incident On the news earlier. I'm not sure if it's the same one. It does seem like those guys All got shot which fine, whatever Sorry, I'm gonna I just said oh I mean of all the ways to get shot by your government, I feel like hijacking a mode of transport is one of the least surprising. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they ran out of gas like 30 miles offshore.

Like they they tried to cause a Gilligan's Island situation. First take this ferry to Cuba. Yeah. Also, like, I'm going to be real. I'm going to be real, like the plain hijackings. I think they balance it out like karmically. You know what I mean? Here's the thing, a fairy hijacking is just funny. Great. It's not going to have the.

I would have said, all right, I don't do it again. But yeah, I would have loved speed to cruise control if it were about fairy. On the other hand, what's the what's the actually existing socialism that still exists? Cuba. So maybe I'm too lenient. And may I say again, critical support. So to return to our previously scheduled, I guess next slide please. We're done talking about Orange Man bad. Orange Man real bad. So on the left, we'll see some fucking dumb ass twink that they let into the. Yeah, I have a drum ass one. I have a drum ass one.

Very handsome twink at that. Yeah, me. We're gonna have to bleep that. Wait, yo, yeah. This is the thing is, right? She said it, not me. I did. This is gonna be like a five and a half hour episode

that's gonna require a lot of editing. Sorry. Yeah. I do apologize for that. No. So OK, so the 2019 Constitutional Reform adds some recognition for private property. So we are doing some. I don't I don't I don't like the government should take your two brush. So we are doing some. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Oh. I don't like. The government should take your tooth brush.

You shouldn't have your own toothbrush. But Alice also. There's a sideshell bab mumble there. But also Alice family code legalization of gay marriage trans rights. Trans rights. Yeah. I'm pro trans rights. I'm just very anti-private property.

Okay, fair. You so I'm not saying that's very anti trans rights. Very, very pro trans rights when I'm very anti trans rights. So contain multiple tids. Second, you're gonna hate depends what tweets I've seen most recently. I see some of you fuckers post I become very anti trans rights. You're going to hate the next thing, which is that it also recognized some foreign direct investment. So it's a marketization of what was previously kind of like more of a command

economy. And so Maria now talks about a moment where they kind of got rid of the ration books that you've read us and guaranteed minimum goods. And then popular talks about a moment where they kind of got rid of the ration books that I read at us and guaranteed minimum goods. And then popular demand caused them to reinstate it because it's like I would love my guaranteed basket of goods. So the recognition of some private property brackets betraying the revolution is intended largely to bring in like the desperately needed foreign investment that you need for capital. I genuinely did not have a really good photo for the sections.

Please enjoy me on the left explaining to the like deputy secretary or whatever of the Cuban National Assembly that DSA is a big tent org without a line and we all have 10 million opinions. And how do you solve issues? And he goes, bueno, la primera cosa es que tenemos centralismo democrático. And then top right is another view of the National Assembly

Room. And then bottom right is the hall when you walk in. This is the National Assembly of Cuba. Next slide, please. Oh, you mentioned some bits on this most about rights, by the way, also. Because I did want to mention. Do we want to go back? Yeah. Oh, you mentioned some bits on this notice about rights, by the way, also, because... Oh, yes. I did want to mention...

Do we want to go back? Yeah, I was alluding occasionally to the no rights situation attendant to these forms of communism and how maybe sometimes you should have some rights, not only trans rights, but also for cis people. And they have rights. Well, the... Oh, yes., I sorry, I forgot about that. Yeah, they also reinstate the prime minister and they add legal representation when you're accused of a crime and presumption of innocence and habeas

corpus and presidential term limits and the rework of legislative government. So like it's a good constitution. It's really good. It also relies heavily on like consensus making because there's only one like actually legal party in Cuba. So a lot of it is like consensus about what candidate that party puts up. So it's like if the whole thing was primaries. So it's like if you live in any city in New York, yeah, yeah, it's like living in any city in the United States. Well, hold on, you could also vote for Andrew Cuomo on a working families party ticket.

Hold on, you could also vote for Andrew Cuomo on a Working Families Party ticket. God awful concept. I would like to see the freak that voted for Andrew Cuomo on the Working Families. So okay, so we're on the slide where a second chief of Irishman. I'm not a Irish man. Don't, don't Viva la, la, la, la, la, unless you want the more. Viva la revolution. So a second tranked up Irish American is at the podcast. So Biden not only kept most like Biden kept most of these restrictions in place, which he has the unilateral executive authority to remove because of the 2021 protests and

because he's an old racist dude with nothing better to do next. And because Democrats keep tricking themselves into thinking they can win Florida. Well, we'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get that one for us. Sink it. Sink it. Don't even bother. Yeah, it's going to sink itself.

So this is a photo I took of Havana from the Grand Austin. What is the current state? It's bad. If you look at some of these buildings, you can see it just general like decay and mold and some other stuff. Roz can probably kind of explain a little bit more about those. Right. So I've been looking at, again, all I can do is look at, you know,

Google Maps and the main thing I can say looking at, again, all I can do is look at Google Maps and the main thing I can say is, you know, Cuba has an excess of doctors, but what they really need is roofers. Yeah. Yeah. You know, because a lot of these buildings are not in great shape. I mean, not just aesthetic. I mean, some of the problems are mostly aesthetic, but a lot of them it's kind of like, okay, you got these old stucco buildings, they gotasonry, you know, structures, they got all this stuff, you know, they're relatively high maintenance,

especially the older ones. And, you know, you can't get the materials to really fix them. Theoretically, you could locally produce them, but it's apparently not happening. Well, a lot of buildings, a lot of these buildings also all they really need to be is washed. Yeah. I also kind of internationalism where Cuba sends a sort of brigade of revolutionary roofers to assist you in your moment of crisis. Well, and also like, you know, they're still operating off of like imperial era plumbing. So a lot of, a lot of like establishments you go into

when you go to the bathroom, there's a little bin next to the toilet. And that's where you put all of the toilet paper. This is not uncommon in Latin America. This is, you know, there's more modern plumbing on the more modern buildings, but this is not uncommon anywhere in Latin America. Older Soviet cities also have that problem.

Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of sewer systems that were not built for toilet paper, that is not relatively modern, but it is. I mean, you know, sort of that expectation is surprisingly confined to like what we call the West. Plumbing doesn't work as good everywhere as it does today. Right. Plumbing doesn't work as good everywhere as it does. Bidet supremacy. You got to institute the kind of South Asian thing of just washing your asshole, you know? No, the bidets are very nice. Bidets are very nice and should be standard. You don't even have to get a bidet. You can just get a like a lot of you just got a jug, you know, of water.

And you just, yeah. No, I want the nice sprayed directly on my asshole. OK, so also if you look here, you will see sort of like newer buildings are kind of getting built in little tower blocks. So there's something huge happening here. Yeah, it looks like any building that you would see in Chicago and like downtown that's new, it's just, you know, I think that's supposed to be a hotel. But I don't know who can say it might be an office building, but yeah, and then also next to

it, I think I'm a left a little bit farther. That's the, I believe that's the hotel I want to leave it, but I don't know honestly from this vantage point. So how's the, how's the embargo going bad? Next slide, these slides we got there quick. So why am I here? So the DSA sent a delegation, the Democratic Socialist of America sent a delegation to Cuba, pictured here on the left meeting with the committees for the defense of the revolution, where we it was a fact-finding mission and a mission to sort of in 2019 we voted to add sort of the end of the embargo to our platform. And this is part of the embargo to our platform. This is part of the International Committee's work is to agitate for that.

We're there to create links between us and Cuba and see what was going on. We also experience some of the effects of the embargo. Menus change daily because they can't guarantee that they have shit. We were insulated as much as it's possible to be insulated from this because they obviously wanted us to come away with this being very pro-cuba. But we can see, oh, the bus that we're all on, we all have to be on that bus because there's only so much oil or there's only so much gas to run that bus and even though it's a high efficiency Chinese model It's like well, we don't want to run out of it, right?

So, you know, we we experienced many of the effects of the embargo You will see also on the right. This is kind of like the state of like rural Havana There is a building that the the CDR Or the series of buildings that the CDR built because the CDR is neighborhood watch KGB and also neighborhood improvements, which is a fun combination. That doesn't happen with neighborhood watch in the United States. Yeah, the neighborhood watch in the United States is very normal and not at all full of weird freaks. And I tell you what, the roof looks good.

Yeah, no, actually, it was a really nice building. All the people from the CDR were really nice and really cool those three people there the guy in the middle is I think the chief of the CDR for this Section the guy on there the gal on the left is I want to say the reason or representative Got on the right is the national head and also one of the Cuban five I want to say it's Basically like meeting like the head of the KGB. Yeah, I mean, the thing is right. It could go this way or you could have the like Duwei thing where that, you know,

that has it has done in China, where it's designed that you have like a, you know, a residence committee, a village committee that works along these lines and then betraying the revolution happens and you end up with a kind of neighborhood watch that forgets that it's supposed to be the KGB. Yeah. And can be the KGB when it feels like it, but mostly is just not, you know? Yeah.

So that's not what this is. They're still, they're basically like, there's two levels of law enforcement. This is the level that's like, if you have like neighbors stealing from each other or like petty disputes, they settle it as opposed to calling in the cops or somebody's having a mental health crisis, they settle it. Yeah, because that cops are like based on the like Soviet like militia system, you know, it's quite militarized. So but the point is they were telling us, oh, like, you know, we're seeing the embargo,

the effects of the embargo out here and like, yeah, there's a government, but also it's pretty plain to see that you just can't get the materials you need. Next slide, please. So the point of this is to do a sort of exchange of the Cubans, agitate for an extent and then to the embargo. And the Cuban government was like, yeah, sure. So they were honestly pretty frank about a lot of the failures of the current government and the revolution. So, you know So this was the international committee for part of the Big Ten org. The international committee was like, OK, you're going to go

and you're going to make up your mind. We don't have a line on this. So you can see all of us here. If you want to circle me in the way of it, because my mom got me that. I'm right. Middle row, sort so to from the left Left left is this side right white shirt, but like there you are okay. Yeah

Oh, no, I wasn't I mean I can it's like a Maybe a bunch of your listeners are fucking like I don know, like San Francisco tech guys who grew up in Massachusetts. You know, what are you going to do? I think I think if they've listened to 3,044 minutes of this, you can't tell that I actually know that the fact that one of our listeners is exactly that I know I know that listener precisely. Well, that listener, why have it as like a form a form of fancy shirt that you wear that's technically a dress wear, so I'm technically an informal wear in that photo. Anyway, so to return to the hospital from the

beginning, we're going to go full circle. That is the Calixto Garcia. And the current state of the embargo is that Cuba cannot access most international finance because it's difficult for them to operate in dollars. There are shortages of many things, but primarily fuel. We saw huge lines of people waiting for ration gas, as well as just public transit that was extremely packed. And there are tremendous impacts on the healthcare sector, which is why this is here. This is the University Hospital in Havana.

We were given a tour of this hospital by its staff. Next slide please. This is a photo of us in the dialysis ward. And when we walked through, they were very, they were like, look, we're not showing, we're showing you what a normal day here looks like. We, you know, and it was very clear that it had not been staged and these were just random people who were there to receive dialysis. And I will tell you this, the Cuban healthcare system is committed to providing healthcare free for everybody who lives in Cuba. You are guaranteed that right by the Constitution. And it operates very effectively in that regard as much as it can. One of our, a member of our delegation was concussed

as a result of a fight with a union buster or rather a union buster attacking her and hitting her against the wall, but she got that concussion checked out in Cuba and they x-rayed her. They had her bring over a photo of that x-ray on the phone. The doctor looked it over and was like, here are things that you need to do

and to ensure that you stop having concussion symptoms and she did that and she was fine. What you're seeing in this photo is my reaction to this doctor here whose name I unfortunately forget. I'm so sorry to that doctor, but telling us that they have to reuse single use dialysis filters because the company that they used to buy them from,

which is Swedish, was bought by an American manufacturer. So what that means is Cuba's no longer able to access that. And what that means is that there's a guy whose job it is to be in a room and clean these filters. They're reused on a patient by patient basis, but they have no other choice than to do this. But in fact, this could cause their blood-borne diseases. That's why you don't reuse these filters,

but there's literally no other way for them to obtain them. And there's people that will die if they don't get the dialysis. And then he told us that they had to reuse pacemakers, because most pacemakers are manufactured in the United States. And I believe it to your imagination how pacemakers are reused. So this is what I mean when I say that this is going to be a depressing episode in the sense that like this is the real impact that it has on actual people who could very well receive top of the line medical care and are simply not able to because of the peak of

the United States because the United States government decides that that's not something that we want to allow for no fucking reason other than we're salty that we can't control their politics. So we allow people to starve and we allow people to die. And we'll get to another example of this later, but like it is a there is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. And there's a failure here that topples all of our successes. Quote Steinbeck. Yes. Slide please. The oranges are having kerosene poured on them. Exactly. And another thing is that the Constitution and also

liberalizing reforms of the 90s allowed for some degree of private businesses in the form of paladares, which are like restaurants that you run out of your house. And a lot of times those restaurants are having to grow their own produce. And the top left, you're seeing, there's a restaurant that we went to, it's El Jardín de los Milagros, which is very, very good. I had a lamb over there that was incredible. So they grow their produce in these beds on the roof. You can see it down there on the left to the entrance on the right. And so they've accidentally kind of gone into doing like local organic

agriculture because they don't have the fertilizers or the, you know, the ability to do mass scale industrial agriculture like the United States does. So there's a lot of local organic stuff and urban farming and that sort of thing. Next slide please. So the currencies were synchronized and put back on the dollar because that's kind of what you have to do. The exchange rate is about 110 pesos to the dollar. It changes based on where you're at. Some restaurants will give you a better exchange rate. Some restaurants will give you a worse exchange rate, etc. But it's pegged officially at that rate with the Cuban government. And the economy relies heavily on the exchange of these for dollars as we covered, like in East Germany, because they need to be able to have a liquid

currency because otherwise you can't buy food. Right? So these are all bills that I got. The Che bill, a guy scammed me. And I was like, OK, like, that's fine. He was like, it's my birthday. Give me $20 and I'll give you this Che Bill. I'm like, you know what? This is not a lot of money for me, but this is a lot of money. That's very funny to be like, if you give me $20, I will give you three pesos. Yeah, I mean, like he also tried to give me a cigar.

And I was like, this is the last day I'm here. I can't take it through customs, because it's illegal to take tobacco or liquor products through customs. But like, yeah, is the three is the three peso bill is uncommon as like the two dollar bill? No, because like three pesos is how much it costs to take public transit. So yeah, it's like it's like a like a five dollar. There's just like just like the Soviet Metro is three copax. Yeah. And so like there's a three pencil coin that also has a chair on it. And if you see that I have it on a necklace, because I drilled a hole in it and put a chain

through it. Next slide. So blackouts are very frequent. The top left photo, by the way, taken by Danny, who has my comrade Danny, who has a really good series about this. Check out. In the top right photo, we were eating dinner at a rooftop restaurant, technically, but a big skyscraper in Havana. There was a blackout while we were there, because you can't get oil for the power plants. And there's significant damage to a lot of buildings,

because there's a lack of structural maintenance and upkeep because you cannot get paint. Like literally, there's a paint shortage. So you have to use boat paint, which is why everything's in big pastel colors. Boat paint is also not appropriate for stucco. Yes. So the United States makes this worse by the embargo,

but also by encouraging Braindrain. There's something called the Cuban Adjustment Act, which makes it much easier for Cubans to immigrate to the United States than anybody else. And they use it to encourage people to leave the island, especially young people. Next slide, please. From a civil defense standpoint,

this is us in the Civil Defense Bureau. That's the guy from the Civil Defense Bureau who's always on the news talking about hurricanes or whatever. This is DSA planning and invasion of Florida. It's opposed. They're right to do it. They're going to do it. DeSantis and restore trans rights. That's right. So, Christ, I wish. So, this is where they, like, we were in the situation room where they do, like, the hurricane planning and whatnot. But they can't replace transformers if they fail, right? So they have to basically orient their entire infrastructure around getting engineers there

before the hurricane hits and make sure that they're, like, in place to fix anything. They have to actively relocate people. It's a huge pain in the ass. And climate change is causing problems by creating, you know, the destruction of low lying coastal settlements. So they have to rehouse those people. And they don't have resources to do that in a lot of ways. So next slide.

All right. So how does it work? That's the meat part. It doesn't. Yeah, it's meant not to. It's meant not to be a functional country. The whole point is that it doesn't. Well, it's not even that. It's that the embargo itself does not, you know, accomplish its aims. Because sanctions have never done that, right? We've sanctioned the Iraqis. And how did that turn out, right? Like, we've sanctioned 30 billion different things. And what that does is that it actually makes people be like oh the government is

Excused from doing expines. I mean, that's not the general sentiment But like it relies entirely on people being unable to identify the source of the economic hardship Exactly and also vastly overstates how likely people are to overthrow their own government. Right. I don't like my government. I'm not going to overthrow it because this is a lot of work. Yeah, as a drug sale. I probably get killed or thrown in jail.

You know? No, I can barely get up in the morning at like eight o'clock, you know? And like, additionally, it validates everything that the Cuban government says about the United States. There's like a siege mentality in that sense, right? Like, and it's a siege mentality because they are literally under siege. And so politics in Cuba cannot progress while the embargo still exists. But it also it sucks because it also causes damage to us in a lot of ways. But it also, it sucks because it also causes damage to us in a lot of ways.

Because like it causes about one point five to four point five billion dollars of damage a year to the United States economy. And it has caused since its inception about seven hundred fifty three billion dollars of damages to Cuba total. But the United States is still the fifth largest exporter to Cuba because you get licenses as a Treasury and you export agricultural products So Cuba still has to buy all those things in fucking cash But there's actually more costs if you go to the next slide you may know this but Cuba has Recovid vaccine guys at the start layer three COVID vaccines. It's got a bunch of weird shit, too

It's like a whole they have a lung cancer vaccine. You cannot have it It's like a whole bunch of... They have a lung cancer vaccine. You cannot have it. They have a treatment for melanoma that you can't have and a diabetic ulcer treatment that regrows affected skin that you also can't have. And by the way, as a result of the embargo, and this gentleman here who is, you know, the head of the biotech department. They're like a state-owned firm, the biotech firm.

He was talking to us about how he would treat people who are diabetic with this treatment and they would get better and then the embargo hit and they have to be in the hospital like three times a week. And you can't do that if you can't get to the hospital because there's no oil for the buses. They have free gender affirming surgeries. They have free healthcare. They have all sorts of shit that you can't have. They have rum and cigars, which is, you know, like smaller percentage of this,

but so good the rum. I don't care for the cigars. But all of that is illegal for you to have because of the United States government. I can go out and buy a bottle of Havana glass and get my gender affirming surgery right now if I want. I welcome you to do that. I think that would be great. Also, definitely do not mail me anything. Presidente Diaz-Caniel, please tell me that you do not have a sort of BMI restriction on your gender affirming surgeries. I am a very fat woman. I'm not even very slightly fat, whatever. That's right. Um, no, I mean, like literally, like, American

citizens can't have access to this. You can do whatever the fuck you want. Yeah. Although there's still restrictions, I think from the UK in some regard, but not nearly as bad. I can't hear you over the fact that I'm smoking two cigars at the same time Yeah, rub it in that I had to drink Bacardi in that mojito because like I couldn't find don't go which is the better Rum Fuck out of my diabetic ulcers right now. You have no There is the lung cancer vaccine is sort of in trials in Minnesota with, I think it's

in Minnesota, with a, because a private equity firm has funded it in collaboration with the Cuban government. And that's the only way you can do it in the United States. But like, because of the embargo, now the Cuban government won't see any money from that collaboration, which fucking sucks. We got a lung cancer vaccine. Does that just mean you can smoke all the cigars you want? Yes, kind of.

Now, I mean, that's that's called synergy, right? Yeah, I was about to say, you know, this is my bias up. This is the reverse. That's disease. Yeah, it's sort of I'm not clear on the sort of biological technology aspects of it. So somebody who's smart will have to answer that. So why do we do this?

Well, have you heard of Florida? Oh, my God. Oh, yes, I have. So all the exiles went to Miami. And it's actually kind of like, it's kind of like Zionism in that there are a lot of people who are progressive except for this one issue Which completely flies in the face of the values they claim to have And which the Democrats treat as a winnable constituency despite the fact that Democrats

Consistently lose Florida And the Democrat the Democratic Party in Florida is fucking dog shit doesn't do his job Yeah, the generally not something you can win anymore the Democratic Party in Florida is fucking dog shit. It doesn't do its job. Yeah. Yeah. Generally not something you can win anymore. I think once they established the villages, it was over. Yeah. It's gone. Cast it off.

Cast it into the fire. That's one reason. And then also remember that thread about property crimes and the Haitian Revolution? The United States still holds Cuba responsible for millions and millions of dollars in like property theft internationally. Right. So corporations.

Always comes down to property crimes. Exactly. And then Bob Menendez specifically is a Cuban exile or his family is Cuban exiles. So he has an insane right-wing view on Cuba and has single-handedly made sure that our policy on Cuba is weird as shit with the help of a tranked up Irishman, Joe Biden. Cool. On the other side, you got Makarubia, you know. Yeah. By the way, if I remember correctly, his family actually immigrated

under Batista, like they left under Batista. That is for sure true of Ted Cruz. But his parents left under Batista because of repression, the face of under Batista, which is very funny. Okay, next slide. This is the last slide. What do we do? Okay, so the conclusion. This is a humanitarian disaster that is solely caused by the United States. There's some mismanagement on the other side, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad without the United States. There is no reason crime that has been perpetuated for years with no benefit to us and no benefit to the Cubans, obviously. So call your senator. Get involved with the DSA International Committee and its work on Cuba, as well as its other international work, but do something because genuinely there are people who are suffering who don't need to be and it's all because of us What a surprise

Great Cuban embargo bad. I think we've learned this over the past four hours Yeah Then it was another this podcast I have a That's Italian Tenemos una parte de este podcast que se llama. Tengo una fracción, es italiano, de esta podcast, el nombre de Safety 3. ¿Dónde está la biblioteca? ¿Dónde está el Safety 3? Don't they a style safety third please? All right, I'm gonna try and do this quick cuz I gotta use the restroom I Can read this if you want I can just blast through it and that way yeah sure I'm gonna I'm gonna use the restroom I'll be right back. That's luck safety third. Hello Justin

Alice hi yay Liam knock off off. And Schrodinger's guest. No, not that. Hey, that's me. You guys seem to like my last safety third, and while I do have other prison stories, I thought I'd mix it up. Oh, it's the forklift prison guy. Okay. Hi, how are you doing?

The attached image is of the worst place I ever worked at, Subway. And while not the same Subway, the external facade is almost identical. This is a story that ended well, but easily could have ended with several dead bodies. For context, this particular subway was run by one Indian family that owned like half the subways in Indiana. The previous owner had bailed after maybe, possibly, allegedly defrauding some or several three letter agencies and forging passports for migrants from India and the new owner was a cousin or nephew of the big boss of this massive family run franchise. He stayed for maybe a week

and then fucked off to India to inherit some land promptly telling none of his family stateside and all of us employs a different time as to when he'd be back. Due to all of this and the fact that about a month before, had this place been robbed at gunpoint. A day I was there, pro tip, if robbed at your job, stay calm and do exactly what they ask, don't die over someone else's register. Staff retention was extremely low, and I often had to work the whole closing shift solo, 3-9pm Monday to Friday. I was maybe 17 at the time, doing school from home due to being a dipshit and getting expelled, and that's had a real stupid need to be a good worker and impress my parents by sticking with this shitty job before finding a new one. Because of this, I would make deals with my friends that if they came and helped me

close, I would give them like 4 free sandwiches. And it sounds like pretty good. That's praxis. It is. With that background, let's get to the story. And this particular subway was in a strip mall with large parking. From time to time, people would park in the lot to sober up, either from what they were already on before getting there, or from whatever they consumed in the two bars that also inhabited the strip mall. This day, there happened to be a grey Honda minivan with two people doing exactly that. They had pulled up at least an hour before I started and had been there for about three

hours by the time of the incident. Oh, no, I'm back. Welcome back. This guy, it's our prison friend again. He worked in a subway. Yeah. Yes, I know. I put it in the slides.

I was making this guy a rotisserie chicken wrap on tomato basil, basically a red tortilla, when suddenly a dark grey Chevy SUV screeches into the spot next to the minivan and several guys jump out, one of whom racks a glock and shoves it in the driver's window. The guy whose wrap I'm making asks if I can hurry up so he can leave, to which I would say I would stay where the cover is as I walk and and begin spamming the 911 button. Keep that in the back of your mind for later. At this point, I believe I'm about to watch everyone in this van get executed.

Just like the movie heat. Just like these guys ready to rock and roll the drop of hat. After doing that about 20 times, I go back, finish making the guy's wrap, and then we both sit there and kind of just watch what's going on. The other guys who got out of the SUV have at this point posted up around it in the minivan, while the guy who shoved the glock through the window now has the driver buy the shirt and is clearly threatening him. This goes on for another 10 to 15 minutes, with the glock guy seemingly calming down

before the guy who ordered the wrap decides to leave. I'm out of here, I'm done. I'm going to Quiznos. What's got his wrap? I just sit back and casually observe until one of my friends who was going to help me close that night pulls up. I immediately go outside and tell him to get the fuck inside and bring him up to speed.

We sit and chat for another 15 minutes or so watching the situation before the two gentlemen seem to come to an agreement and start walking towards my store. I tell my friend to get in the back. The two walk in and the guy with the glock now shoved loosely in a pocket stands in front of the door with his hands in front of him. The minivan guy, who couldn't have been more

than a buck ten soaking wet, asks if I have- Quick! Asks if I have changed for a hundred. Preparing mentally to get robbed again, I say yes. Me filling up first. And he walks over to the cooler, grabs a blue gatorade, pulls out a hundred and says, sorry for the inconvenience. I am mostly on autopilot at this point.

Do the whole check to see if it's real with the light and the pen. Why? This is called a death wish. That is literally like me in Cuba. Here is $50. Give me change. It is. So I punch in the Gatorade, open the register, and give him his change.

He thanks me, and the two walk out. My friend comes out from the back and asks what happened, and then we go back to just casually observing. We see some bills and a bag change hands, and then the Glock guy and his friends get back in their car and drive off, followed by the minivan a few minutes later. We both sit there and make jokes about the events and catch up. This goes on for about 30 minutes. Remember how I said, I kept spamming the 911 button in the back of your mind?

As we're sitting there- Alright, people are always spamming the 911 button on the back of my mind. It's called an anxiety disorder. As we're sitting there, our adrenaline having gone down, suddenly a lone IMPD cop in four kits swings around the outside corner of the subway and sweeps the whole dining and food prep area with an AR. Oh yeah, this is Indiana, isn't it? My friend and I both immediately throw our hands up and we spend the next two minutes

in a weird standoff, where this cop is loosely holding us at gunpoint and trying to shout questions through the window covering the dining area. Eventually he comes in and asks where the robbers are and I explain the situation. After giving vehicle descriptions etc he tells me that the button is only for if we're being immediately robbed and to just call 911 next time. Now this event did occur a few years ago, so the lengths of time between certain actions may be off. But I'd bet my bottom dollar that it was at least 10 minutes between the guys leaving and the cops showing up,

not to even mention the time between that and me slamming the panic button. This, along with the actual robbery that took place there a month or so prior, started my long journey towards radicalism. Anyhow, I ended up leaving that job a few weeks later and the subway is now a Mexican restaurant. Love the show is always keep it up. Thank you. Wow.

An incredible interaction, real slice of life there. And in Indiana, Indiana, moment. Ceremonial moment. Precisely. Should have worked for, should have worked. What's the thing that got out there? Penn Station subs, I think it is out there. Oh, God. It applies to the existence of Penn Station dobs. Thank you. Hello. This has been Safety Third.

Shake hands for danger. Estrella la mano. Believa. The next episode will be about your noble does anyone have commercials before we go things for these going to be to join DSA right join I mean that's always my commercial get involved with the Democratic Socialists of America wherever you are we want more people and I'm good time good time to pay more dues to DSA right now. Not going to go into detail, but it's always good to have a little bit more money.

More turnaround money, you know? Yeah. Yeah, not going to go into detail unless you want to scroll through my Twitter and see me quote dunking on people. Which again, sorry, Amy from Mug. Yeah, join DSA,sa get involved do some activism Do some activism on Cuba if this episode has made you angry that we're starving people What if you helped us not starve people? Um, that's all I've got. Oh, actually wait a minute. Um, sorry coming up

the How much do we love film industry unions? How much do we love film industry unions? Some more. My brothers and I asked, yes. I watched a bunch of Euro spy movies for them, specifically so as not to break a picket line. I wasn't subject to because my co-workers are paranoid about that. Yes, so. And you know what?

Thank you, Dev, for supporting the revolution and also for having to edit this very long episode. I love you so much. Yes, thank you. Definitely. Plus, so the the film industry is going through some contraction right now, which is why I have changed it careers. But there is an IAZI contract renegotiation that is going to be happening.

This may lead to another strike because I asked these contracts is very... It's a sticker. I can't say that. Yeah, but I can. But it is lacking. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Liam. Thank you for saying what I can't. It is lacking in many respects versus what SAG and the WGA currently have. So there may be some things to plug into in DSA where we are going to be doing strike support like we did for the WGA and SAG, we raised $92,000. Don't want to watch 20 years, fine, man. No, no, no, no, no, you won't have to watch any,

no, no, no, unlike, so SAG was the only union that had that stipulation. So I honestly will probably not have that, for a number of reasons, including that they're more of a business union. But there may be a campaign for people to pull you into through DSA. You raised $92,000 and did 500 drops of food and water to pick at lines. And we'll be doing a similar thing, but nationally. If IAZI goes on strike, so please do get involved with that. DSA is good. That's the end of... And I'll he goes on strike, so please do get involved with that. Uh, DSA is good. That's my the end of

And I'll fight you on Twitter if you think it isn't. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming We have a patreon where you you know, I as many hours of content you got today We have more on the patreon. Yeah, I thought this is gonna be a bonus episode because I was like I was gonna be like a lot of stuff to get through. But I like to be on the free feed. We can release it as a bonus episode. I don't even know. I don't know.

But I'd love to be on the free feed. Fine. We didn't use already. Fine. Everybody. Yeah, there's a public service to knowing about the Cuban embargo that says go on a free feed. We wrap this shit, please.