S2 Episode 3 - "New Normal"

IKEA presenterar Ljud av förändring. Finns vi där. Som när familjen växer snabbare än du tänkt, och hemmet måste hänga med. Välkommen till IKEA! CBS Radio presents is Cuba Going Red. Good evening. The inescapable fact is brutally simple. The island of Cuba, 90 miles off our shores, sight of the American naval base that guards our southern defenses, anchor for our defense of the Panama Canal, and key to the political future of Latin America. Right up.

This Cuban island is today a totalitarian dictatorship and is rapidly becoming a communist beachhead in the Caribbean. Cuba is today a one man government held together by promises and fears. That is why this report will be told. voice rather than the voices

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm no call. And this is episode three, New Normal. We started off there with a clip from CBS in May of nineteen fifty nine asking, Is Cuba going red and calling it a totalitarian dictatorship? We'll see in a little bit why that broadcast might have aired in that month.

of that year, because last episode we traced the origins of Cuba's relationship with the United States, which culminated in the uprising, the revolution against Faincio Batista and his cronies. Now, in nineteen fifty nine, the first year of the Cuban Revolution, The revolutionary government will start to enact some revolutionary policies. This will start a chain of events that send US Cuba relations spiraling until Cuba is down one superpower trading partner,

and up one blockade. We'll see in this episode how the revolution's initial moderate government gives way to a bolder socialist revolution. We will see the origins of the Cuban counter revolution. We'll see the beginning of a terror campaign directed against Cuba, launched from the United States.

a mysterious explosion in Havana's Harbor, we will see the beginning of the assassination programmes against Fidel Castro. And in the face of all of this, we will see the budding friendship between Cuba And the Soviet Union, which will only drive America further toward a manic obsession in the Caribbean. So last we left our story, the revolution had triumphed.

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

The victory of the revolutionaries in fact spelled doom for the mafia's racket in Cuba, which was, you know, entirely despised by most people. Yes. fact cleaning up Havana and cleaning up the mob owned casinos and hotels was one of the more obvious points on the agenda for these guerrillas and the organizers who had campaigned so hard against the dirty mob ridden government of Batista.

Florida mob boss Santo Traficante, attempting to find a weak link here, tried to infiltrate the new Cuban government the way that Mafia guys would do back home, but he didn't get very far. In fact, he was soon arrested on suspicion of heroin dealing by the Cuban authorities. Traficante, after making it out of this jam and returning forever to the United States, said this

Quote, I thought we would never stop making all that money in Cuba. Those were great times. Who would have known that crazy guy, Castro, was going to take over and close the casinos? I thought the Marines were gonna straighten everything out. We were talking with Rafael Hernandez, editor of the Cuban magazine Temas, about this moment in which the mafia was still open to doing business with the revolutionary regime. But they did not get any love back.

I have a friend who was one of the top leaders of the Cuba State Security Yeah. Продолжение следует... of the of the mafia business in Havana came to see him And let me guess. He said no. And of course! I'm not cool with that. So the mob would have to wait a bit before they had the chance to really strike back. Asking you to leave. Yeah. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok You and this bullshit. That's what this is, you know. Satanic black magic. Such shit!

In early january nineteen fifty nine, just days after the victory of the revolution, You saw the first real anti-Cuba campaign waged by U.S. officials and the press. This moment was key in shaping a long-term boogeyman out of the Cuban Revolution, in the minds of both Americans and future counter-revolutionaries. The big story coming out of Cuba, supposedly, was this Barbaric executions of Batista era war crime. Castro has accused the Batista forces of 20,000 murders.

Now he takes revenge through a series of war crimes trials that convict and execute more. Immediately after their victory the first thing that the revolutionaries did was to make good on another one of their longstanding promises, which was to bring in the worst of the torturers, killers, and thieves of Batista's military, I mean, not even government, military. Yeah. And bring them to what was

is, you know, called revolutionary justice. Now one example of these trials would be, as Time magazine offered, a naval officer who roasted six people alive in Pilon in nineteen fifty six. And who supervised three hundred people slaughtered all at once in San Fuegos after an uprising in nineteen fifty seven. Seventy-four convicted war criminals. Signed up, shot, and buried in a ditch by a bulldoze.

The trials were swift and they were held in public areas like football stadiums as crowds cheered while they watched a lot of these men go to the firing squad. Okay. Castro wanted to know how his countrymen felt on the subject, and the hysterical reception shows that Cubans would support just about anything he did. But let's look a little closer at this.

Scholar Michelle Chase writes most concede that the men were probably guilty as charged, and according to Cuba's own Revolution magazine at the time, there were acquittals, and some avoided the death penalty. Still, the New York Times, who had actually once provided the rebels with much needed press coverage, now tut-tutted and scaremongered. The New Republic, the Atlantic, all the usual suspects, started running anti-Castro pieces. Uh 90 miles away. Miami feels the backwash.

As refugees stream in to avoid the firing school. The Washington Daily News would tell you that, quote, Fidel Castro's determination to proceed with quote rebel justice, drumhead trials, mob juries, and arbitrary executions, cannot avoid stirring second thought. Among those who had hoped the revolution signaled the end of tyranny. Joining the media chorus were actual American politicians. One Senator Cape Hart of Indiana told of a quote spectacle of a bearded monster stalking through Cuba.

Presumably Fidel Castro. Another congressman from Ohio said that the US needed to quote calm Castro down before he depopulates Cuba. If Batista was like Hitler, truly Castro will prove to be like Stalin. The unfortunate people of Cuba will discover that they have been betrayed. Let's have a look at this so called depopulation. Reliable counts put the estimate of those Batistianos executed.

north of five hundred. This was, frankly, conservative compared to the numbers following the nineteen thirty three coup ousting Gerardo Machado, in which at least one thousand people were killed, and the United States had supported that coup. And of course this was far, far fewer than the thousands and thousands that Batista security forces had killed in the preceding two years of civil war.

It was, for example, as the Times of Havana put it, lower than the number of bodies, quote, found in the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft showing evidence of torture by agents of Batista during the war.

And if you thought all of this was coming from some caricature of a bloodthirsty revolutionary propaganda mill, in fact, American expatriates, including another New York Times correspondent, remarked that the aftermath of nineteen fifty nine was far more disciplined and controlled than nineteen thirty three.

And why might that be when many Cubans were depending on justice for the thousands of their own slaughtered by Batista's military? Well, one reason might be that the revolutionary government was in fact containing a potential bloodbath, not carrying one out. Fidel Castro personally appealed to the people of Cuba not to take matters into their own hands, declaring it was the duty of a government and not vigilantes in the streets.

Broadcast speeches urging the people to be calm and telling them that every one will be tried, arrested, and punished. One priest in Cuba at the time recorded. Quote Thanks to the wise campaign directed by Fidel, seconded by his people in the villages and the cities, the people of Cuba gave a high lesson in civic responsibility. Incomparably superior, he added, to that of the European people.

Still, as one time CBS journalist Robert Tabor put it, the US press, which had viewed the atrocities of Batista and for that matter the Holocaust of Hiroshima with equanimity, was horrified at these five hundred Batistianos killed. But perhaps it wasn't really about the number of deaths or killing in general. Members of the press and the US government

seemed to just not like the look of these ruffians that had taken over the US sugar colony. And interestingly enough, it was Alan Dulles, head of the CIA, who seemed unfazed, telling a congressional audience, quote, When you have a revolution, you kill your enemies. They have to go through this. ¡Con qué larga! Subana sabe también pelear y ganar. Bye-bye. The chances of the ex-president's followers are not worth a cupful of burnt sugar. Despite outside criticism of Castro's methods... Try all.

and execution

So the Cuban revolutionaries are now in government. What now? Water has Following the final Yeah. Vielen Dank. Let's start with money. Because one of the less pleasant things about successfully pulling off a revolution is that you get stuck with the bill. Right. Right. Because there was a reason you carried out the revolution in the first place. That that starts to that starts to become clear. The Cuban rebels took over

A very dismal balance of payments, courtesy of the lopsided trade deficit that Batista was running all those years. And by the benevolent magic of capitalism, three hundred million dollars was sucked out of Cuba in dividends and interests. while only one hundred and twenty million in foreign capital was going in.

And that doesn't even mention the millions of dollars belonging to the Cuban government that were frozen by the United States government, or the hundreds of millions today again, billions of dollars that had been sucked out of the Cuban government by the rampant corruption under Batista's rule. Maybe most Most alarming was the gold and foreign exchange reserves.

were depleted. And it would be Che Guevara, in a role maybe no less intense than his time as a medic and a guerrilla commander, who would be put in charge of the national bank soon enough. It would be his job to stop the bleeding, so to speak, and build up reserves right quick.

So this is an insane situation for anybody to be in. I mean, we see governments all the time today run by people with PhDs and that have, you know, theoretically been around for decades and they can barely manage to get their affairs in order. Sure. The Cuban revolutionaries had never run a government before. On top of it all, they were extremely young.

Yes, the average age of a minister, according to Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, was thirty three years old. And in a self crit, many revolutionaries would later stress. the improvisational nature of these early days bemoaning their quote inexperience. Because while there were still elements of the professional classes inside of Cuba, we will see that they will not prove to be the sturdiest.

plank of the revolution. And oftentimes and increasingly there was a choice between poaching someone eminently qualified, so called, or someone genuinely loyal to the revolution. But still a lot was accomplished even within the first few months.

Just to run through some of it here, there were price control laws, confiscation of property that had been stolen or embezzled by the Batista cronies. There was a whole government department dedicated to it actually. Rents and mortgages were slashed, up to fifty percent for apartments costing under a hundred bucks a month.

and a ceiling was put on housing prices, and a home building programme was initiated. Several New Deal type programs were slated for fields like education, housing, and health will See more about how that developed later. The electric company, a US subsidiary worth three hundred million and supplying ninety percent of the island's power, was ordered to reduce its rates by twenty percent and extend its services to the neglected

countryside. Cuba's telephone company, a one hundred and fifty million dollar investment, was forced to abolish recent rate increases and also improve its services. You had taxes reduced, made more progressive, and well to do tax dodgers were hunted down. Journalist Robert Tabor adds, quote, The business classes had asked for honest government, and they found to their surprise That they were getting.

All of this was set in motion in the beginning of nineteen fifty nine by a liberal government. Fidel Castro did remain the commander in chief of the new rebel army, which had completely taken the place of the previous military edifice. Because as Paul Sweezy puts it, quote, previous Latin American revolutionary regimes risked being thrown out by the old army if they moved to implement their declared program. Fidel's regime risked being thrown out by the new army if it failed. To do so.

Doctor Castro, it is reported that you feel that your role in the revolution is about over, and that you Perhaps this return to civilian life. Is this true? And if not, how soon do you think it'll be before you can do that? my obligation with the people. पता ही हाब तो No. and in the future is that what will be good for my country and if for my country it is necessary that I renounce to any position I would gladly renounce to any position because sincerely

I don't ambition, power, money, nothing. Only to serve my country. Yeah. Yeah. So let's look at the civilian leadership. The president of Cuba was a guy named Manuel Urutia, a middle class politician who led a government made up of mostly middle class professionals. They wanted reform and they wanted independence from the US. To a point. And that's a point that will become clearer in just a bit. So from the get-go, there was this tug of war between radicals like Che and conservatives like Ortia.

And so in February, Fidel becomes prime minister. Arruti is still president, but Fidel becomes prime minister because the government is starting to show that. that some in it are unwilling to break with the status quo, what many felt that the revolution was really meant to deliver.

And from there, this friction, you know, what the radicals were driving for and what, you know, those representing the more respectable people were driving for, this friction only increased and things took on a new momentum. Right.

By july nineteen fifty nine, Orutia would resign as president. He had been making a bunch of the same anti communist noises as many a counter revolutionary in the US and elsewhere, and he had picked a fight with the immensely popular leadership. And he was replaced by a fidelista. By november nineteen fifty nine, Che would be put in charge of the National Bank, and by the next year you had a government that much more closely matched the orientation of both its army and its peasants.

Yeah. Twenty sixth of July movement. Meetings all over Havana, and almost always Celia Sanchez takes her place near Castro. Known as a dedicated communist sympathizer, she now holds an important spot as private secretary to it. Now this process we're describing is an important thing to stress or to underline because remember, at this point

The Cuban government is not carrying out a communist or socialist revolution. Not even the radicals or the Cuban Communist Party is claiming this. And it's not clear that Fidel is anything more than a left-leaning nationalist. as Alan Dulles himself told Congress when the revolutionaries were taking power. But the acceptance of communists and the more radical policies being discussed in the new government set Cuba apart.

from other revolutions or reform movements that fairly quickly or easily dissolve into more of the same US clientelism. And the moderates

The conservative middle class types that were fellow travelers against Batista only a short time before, they are starting to fall into a very well trodden path toward anti communism. So out of either fear of the United States or Or genuine principle, maybe a mixture of both, the moderates were not showing themselves willing to truly break with what had made the revolution happen in the first place.

One could argue that they were taking a lesson from Guatemala, which is that the association of Arbenz with any communist was what resulted in the destruction of his regime. Sure, I suppose the lesson of Guatemala, you know, you could be taking this one of two ways. The moderates were thinking, okay, we don't want

Guatemala to happen to us. We don't want to test the patience of the United States and lose the gains we've made after overthrowing Batista. The more radical position Said, Well, let's take a lesson from Guatemala that we should not resubmit ourselves to be servants of the United States and in fact let's get working on a way so that we don't have to worry about what they think, no matter what we choose to do as a country.

And the real moment of truth about all of this came in May nineteen fifty nine, the same month that we heard that CBS broadcast in the beginning of the show, which just so happened to be when the Cuban Revolution kicked off land reform. On May 17, 1959, the Agrarian Law was signed. Fidel handed a$100,000 check to Commander Rene Vallejo and said, produce. You're a producer, Dan. Produce.

This law would deliver a key promise of the revolution, certainly one the guerrilla fighters owe to the Campesinos and the Sierra Maestra, to take the land and therefore the wealth and power of Cuba from the few And give it to the many. Now the basic points of the agrarian reform law were this.

Most holdings over a thousand acres would be expropriated by the state to be distributed to the hundreds of thousands of landless rural workers, the families of whom were guaranteed around 66 acres free with the ability to buy additional land. No more sharecropping, and in the future land would only be transferable by inheritance or to the state, so there could be no private concentration or amalgamation of property.

Compensation for those expropriated was in the form of 20-year government bonds, which paid 4.5% interest, payable in pesos not convertible into dollars. And within one year, around sixty percent of land was taken over and two hundred and fifty thousand acres of previously uncultivated land was used to start trying to diversify crops so Cuba would not have to import as much. We spoke with Raphael about the importance of land reform.

The long reform was hitting the heart of companies as big as the United Fruit, King Ranch, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. We are fighting the United Force. Terrible. What's going to happen very soon? Correct. That's it. Now, as important as this policy was, a policy laid out by Fidel's speech in nineteen fifty three, if you recall, making this mass of people who own no property owners of land overnight, the law would go beyond redistribution.

There was an agency created that became very powerful for the first several years of its existence. the Institute for Land Reform, or INRA, INRA. INRA would build new homes and people stores. These were shops funded by the state so people could buy goods where they couldn't before. Cooperatives were established where workers could live.

send their kids to school and where they made wages two or three times higher than they used to. And at the end of the year, a cooperative that had made a profit off of what it produced split the profits among its members. Now this was certainly a victory for the masses in Cuba and therefore a revolutionary policy.

But in the grand scheme of things, it really wasn't that radical. For example, when the US enacted land reform in postwar Japan, the terms given to expropriated owners were actually less generous than in revolutionary Cuba. The difference here Was that it was U.S. landowners and their associates being told by a smaller former client colony to cough up, not the other way around.

And it would cost them billions of dollars in expropriated property, forcing the US to pay much higher prices for imports of the raw materials that were they were previously able to get on the cheap. And for them, these cheap raw materials, you know, it's sort of the whole point of exploiting these countries in the first place.

United States immediately denounced Cuba's land reform. But every cloud has a silver lining, and this did make one thing much easier for our friends at the State Department and the CIA, and that was recruitment. for the Cuban counter revolution.

Fidel Castro is not only the architect of the Cuban Revolution, he also made Miami what it is today. After his successful revolution, hundreds of thousands of Cubans poured into Miami. The exiles came from Cuba's upper and upper middle classes. They were professionals, industrialists, Property owners, politicians, even some gangsters among them. They made Miami an economic and trade center of the Caribbean and Latin America.

It was a Cuban psychologist, Dr. Franz Stettmeyer of the University of Oriente, who once identified a key aspect of counter-revolution as quote, the anticipation of loss, unquote, the fear of losing status, not only for yourself. But for your legacy, for your family down the line, your children and your children's children. And this anticipation of loss, this was felt.

By the middle of nineteen fifty nine, in Cuba by the upper and some of the middle class who had enjoyed comfortable, charmed lives. While the average working person had been languishing until now. It was felt by the old military aristocracy, it was looking around at a new and strange rebel army. It was felt by landlords whose income had been halved, large landowners whose empires were marked for expropriation.

It was felt by bankers and businessmen who faced credit and import restrictions, and, as we were just discussing earlier, It was felt by political and professional leaders who realized they were not really fitting in to the flow and momentum of politics post-revolution. Even some commanders who had fought Batista in the muck with Fidel and the rest. would soon show their true colors as anti communists through and through, who would become enemies of the new government.

When we When uh the Cuban Revolution occurred, the people who obviously had the most to lose were the wealthy and the well well-educated doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs, as well as a few gangsters here and there, of course. uh who had no desire whatsoever to hack away at the the sugarcane in the fields. We spoke with Marta Nunez Sarmiento, a Cuban sociologist and lifelong supporter of the revolution.

about this moment in which the middle classes are starting to get spooked and beginning to leave the island, especially because she comes from a family of middle class professionals, Catholic middle class professionals at that. But her family decided to stay. Uh my family was uh my milieu was uh an upper middle class family. My father was a very well known journalist in one of the main Cuban newspapers. My mother was uh

teacher, high school teacher, and my father was also a public relations person for two American companies in Cuba. So I'm I'm coming from several generations of professionals. m our families didn't have properties, they just had the university titles and they were quite well paid. You said that you attended an American school. Yes. I'm assuming you were still at this American school over at the time of the revolution.

Could you tell me a little bit about, you know, sort of what the other families at this school like, you know, you described this experience to me of how you were the only one left standing or something to that effect. uh in the school um as a student over the course of the revolution. Could you describe how that happened and why?

Well, this uh school was a very prestigious, very elitous, very expensive school. It was called Ruston Academy, R U S T O N. I was raised, I was really brought up, as well as my brother. to become a Cuban American, a real Cuban American. In 1959, in January, and during the first months, there was a sort of a of a joy uh towards a revolution, even in my school. Even in my school. These things started to go down, to decrease.

when the agrarian reform started in May nineteen fifty nine, because the majority of the students were either their parents were working in the uh American embassy or were working in American enterprises in Cuba and had properties in Cuba. So when they started nationalizing first the agrarian reform and then in October nineteen fifty nine they started uh the revolution made the urban reform which meant that the owners of homes were nationalized.

we all became owners of homes. Let's say there was another thing that affected the parents of my Cuban classmates. And what was your experience, your journey really, from this middle class, conservative, Catholic scene into becoming a revolutionary? By the beginning of the revolution, the sector which I belonged to, the upper middle class, yes, the majority of us were Catholic. Wow.

Cuba has never been a Catholic nation. Never. We have been portrayed always as a Catholic nation. We have never been. The Catholic Church in Cuba was very against the remote. very, very aghetic of revolution because there were no Cubans there. The majority were Spaniards coming from Franco and so that was a type of of of of church that we had in Cuba.

So that was something I belonged, my parents belong. A movement that nobody talks about it was very important that beginning of revolution. It's called con la cruj y con la padria, with a cross and with uh homeland or the motherland. That was the name. It was uh not a very big one. It was only in Havana. It was upper middle class, white, association of

uh Catholic revolutionaries. And in that menu, it was really when I became a revolutionary because because at the same time I was a member of the Young Catholics League. in the in the school that was very, very against revolution. And you know what? gave me the notion of being revolutionary, not seeing, not watching the poor people in the streets or around the churches.

The revolution that was one of the first things the revolution did. We stopped seeing poor people on the streets while the Catholic Church just did charity. We never did something to erase that poverty upon that people. And the revolution did that. And I saw that. And that was one of my main arguments when I was debating in my American school with the other Catholic students.

Sea Wright Mills put it well. Every revolution has its counter revolution. That is a sign the revolution is for real. Organizer of counter revolution was, of course, Fulgencio Batista, the immediate former leader. Batista had fled to the Dominican Republic after being denied entrance to Florida by Eisenhower.

But under the hospitality of fellow right-wing dictator Rafael Trujillo, and with a fortune stashed away of his own embezzled public funds, Batista set out to become the central figure, the dawn of Cuban exiles. once in future king. Right, he was, after all, the fallen leader of the old order.

So Batista, remotely from the Dominican Republic, starts to fund counter revolutionary operations through Florida, to which the Eisenhower administration helpfully turns a blind eye. In fact Historian Jack Calhoun notes that Batista's former interior minister was in the United States, quote, sponsored by the CIA at the time, perhaps indicating tacit support of these operations.

Right. By the middle of nineteen fifty-nine it was basically an open secret that Cuban counter-revolutionaries were being trained, equipped, and recruited in Florida. The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Miami Herald, they all published photos and reported on it. Local police were paid to look the other way and

The main operation he was running was this. Batista used the money he'd stolen from Cuba to buy the Biltmore Terrace Hotel in Florida and run it remotely as a counter-revolutionary headquarters. Yet another mafioso for our story, a guy named Norman Rothman, managed the Biltmore, and more importantly, managed guns and ammo to Batista's nascent network.

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

So according to FBI documents, quote Rothman supplied dynamite to an unnamed Cuban exile group to blow up Cuban aircraft at the Miami International Airport in August nineteen fifty nine. He supplied another hundred pounds of dynamite to quote blow up the Revolution newspaper offices in Havana. Rothman also assembled a private air force to carry out bombing missions inside of Cuba, and this was the first wave.

of terrorism sponsored against Cuba that would become a fixture for many years to come. Mercenary pilots at this point would fly small airplanes into the country to bomb sugarcane fields. and sugar mills in order to destabilize the Cuban economy. According to the FBI at the time, the Biltmore Terrace operation had already hired a group of pilots to fly ten firebombing missions over Cuban sugarcane field.

Rothman also met with a feared Cuban ex-senator and really warlord named Rolando Masferrer at the Biltmore Hotel. And they planned a hit on this one mercenary who, having been discovered by the Cuban intelligence, was now operating as a double agent. They wanted to knock this guy off for betraying them. The gangster Rothman said he was quote in solid with the Manorino organized crime family in Pittsburgh.

He offered Masferre financial assistance for sabotage operations in Cuba, quote, in exchange for certain concessions for the Manorino crime family if Masferre toppled Castro. This is the kind of network That the counter revolutionary exiles were organizing from the very beginning. Pure, uncut gangsterismo.

The most ambitious Batista sponsored operation was known as the Pedraza Plan. It was organized by a bunch of thugs from the Batista era who had escaped Cuba united under the tutelage of a mob connected general, and their plan was an invasion of Cuba. Yeah, it was called the Badresa Plan, it was named after that general. And the FBI monitored this operation, with J. Edgar Hoover reporting, quote, former Cuban president Valgencio Batista has contributed two million dollars.

And thirty or forty other wealthy Cubans also made large contributions. August nineteen fifty-nine, this exile invasion force, which had already been discovered by Castro and his men, landed by plane in Trinidad inside of Cuba. The rebel army, waiting in the bushes, emerged and smashed the invasion rather handily. Not long after this, Foencio Batista soon realized that outside of this motley gang,

He did not command the respect of the growing exile community. Batista eventually shut down the Biltmore operation, moving to Europe and spending his golden years. in Spain and Portugal. And an odd little end note here. At the time of this recording, if you go and look up Batista's Wikipedia, it claims, without citation, that he rather ironically went on to become the chairman of a Spanish

Life insurance company. But I could not find any evidence for this, so our tireless fact-checker for this season, Matthew Giles, reached out to one of Batista's biographers. Frank Argote Ferrer of Cane University, who is in touch with the Batista family and says they deny this. And as Argote Ferrer put it, Batista was so wealthy, he did not need any employment.

Job title, exile dictator with a boatload of money. And with that boatload of money in Europe, Batista would grow old and fade from relevance and from memory. But the Cuban counter-revolution was not going anywhere. In fact, It was about to pass over into much more capable hands.

In mid-April 1959, Fidel made a trip to the United States. He was actually greeted by huge crowds and a lot of press, and it was meant to improve the fraying relations between Cuba and the United States. One can imagine that while Fidel was aware that his giant neighbor to the north was not particularly enjoying the trajectory of Cuba's new government, He wasn't gonna have any easier time running the country with the US looming over him as a full blown enemy. It appears he thought some level of

of mutual respect and recognition of each other's government was possible, even desirable. But not only did President Eisenhower refuse to meet Fidel, his Secretary of State Met the Cuban leader in a hotel rather than the State Department, making it clear apparently that the visit had no official character. Eisenhower skipped the meeting to play golf, sending Richard Nixon to meet Castro in his place. Nixon's opinion of Castro? He needs to be watched.

Shortly after that, in Buenos Aires at a meeting of the OAS, the Organization of American States. Fidel challenged the United States to give Latin America the kind of help that Europe got after World War II with billions in direct loans to industrialize. The US would ignore this idea for now. Now by this point, Alan Dulles, who as we heard last time, initially hedged on the ideological character of the Cuban rebels. Now a few months later

He was stating that Cuba was the biggest problem in the Western Hemisphere. Dulles, of course, was the id of the American secret police, but as Jack Calhoun puts it, Quote. With the passage of Cuba's Agrarian Reform Act, land reform, a new consensus toward the Cuban Revolution began to take shape in Washington. The Eisenhower administration's attitude hardened.

As policymakers consider the implications of the nationalization of properties of large US landowners in Cuba. Because in effect, the Cuban Revolution had been a declaration of independence from the United States. Land reform had the effect. of juicing talks of intervention. Even the relatively straight laced Associated Press, you know, a wire service, was writing that the US might have to step in to intervene and save Cuba from quote chaos.

When a new American ambassador arrived in Havana after the revolution, the first question he asked the Cuban Foreign Minister was quote, What do you intend to do to clean up communism in Cuba? Phrased a little bit differently, but making essentially the same point, the demands of the Eisenhower government in the aftermath of the land reform was.

what compensation is coming to US stockholders for all the sugar land and cattle land and other things that have been expropriated under your land reform? And Fidel would later tell the UN General Assembly Quote, notes from the State Department rained down on Cuba. They demanded three things: speedy, efficient, and just. Payment. That means pay right now in dollars and whatever we ask for. Business bed You pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Yeah. Fuck you pay me. The place got hit by life.

Fuck you, pay me.

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

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

Alexander Alexiev wore thick glasses and was the owner of quote a big boned body. During World War II, he was posted in Moscow in case of a Nazi takeover and became a career KGB man. spending time in Iran, North Africa, France, and in the nineteen fifties, Latin America. And although he was simply designated a cultural advisor, Alexiev, more than any future official Soviet ambassador, became the guy that the Cubans dealt with on the island.

And what were his first observations upon arriving in Cuba? Yeah, he got there in October, as we just said, and later confessed, quote, I could not understand what kind of revolution this was, where it was going. Now Alexeyev's initial thoughts there Reflected in general the USSR's stance on Cuba at that point. The Soviets had sent a few Warsaw Pact weapons in late nineteen fifty nine as a little gesture, and they had sent Alexeyev, but that was it.

Even Che Gravara, one of the most open and gung ho communists on the Cuban side, said that the country's relationship with Moscow should probably grow more gradually due to the open hostility coming from America. Meeting Fidel for the first time, Alexeyev wore a nice suit.

And Castro, still in his signature military fatigues, teased him. He said, Alexandro, how old is your revolution? And Alexev says, you know, since nineteen seventeen. And Castro said, So then in forty two years we will also be as bourgeois. Alex Supposedly never wore a tie again.

In their meeting, Fidel's main concern, as expressed to Alexeyev, was economic strangulation, as he put it, by the United States. He rather presciently worried that the US could destroy the Cuban economy in as little as two years. Alexeyev, for his part, noted that the one thing Castro would refuse to budge on was accommodation with American imperialism.

In a dinner meeting with Alexeyev, Castro told him that he desperately needed to import oil and export sugar. Yeah. Which Alexeyev promptly related to the Soviet first deputy and top diplomat Anastas Mikoyan. So we're in late nineteen fifty nine now in the fall, and the State Department and the CIA have plans not only to destabilize the new revolutionary government and economy, but in the long term to overthrow it.

Assistant Secretary of State Roy R. Rubottom, very much an Assistant Secretary of State name, recalls On october thirty first, in agreement with the CIA, the State Department recommended to the president approval of a program which authorized us to support elements in Cuba opposed to the Cuban government. This is the key part. While making Castro's downfall seem to be the result of his own mistake.

US policy in Cuba was being rebranded, as Jack Colhoun puts it. The Cold War rhetoric would increasingly obscure the origins of a confrontation between the United States and the Cuban Revolution. which evolved out of Cuba's turbulent history and the US role on the island since eighteen ninety eight. In other words, and we see this process often on the show, we were going to pretend as though the relations between Cuba and the United States were a blank slate.

If anything, we had always been nice to them, and that the Soviets were the real empire, bringing this poor country into their orbit with their perverted favorable trade deals and defense pacts. Simultaneously, Fidel Castro was painted as both a duplicitous fire breathing radical and a complete sellout who had given his country and his revolution over to a nefarious foreign influence. L. Castro. Thank you. But Castro betrayed his revolution. And sold his country's birthright to the communists.

It really doesn't matter whether Castro is a communist or a willing dupe of communists. The result in Cuba is the same. Castro was a communist from the beginning, or whether he sold out to the Reds after he took power. Fidel Castro, hungry for approval and adulation, will persuasively tell any given audience what he thinks it wants to hear. Those who fought with him supported him and hailed him. and their nation.

As these types of broadcasts went out, air raids that we've previously discussed continued dropping arms to quote rebels in Las Villas in the middle of the island. They were still bombing Cuba's all-important sugar cane. And one of them is

In October caused several casualties. The US knew nothing of this stuff, wink wink. The Eisenhower administration's official moves against Cuba were just as devastating. They stopped selling them planes for crop dusting, cut off US technical assistance to the island, credit even from Europe was blocked. And then there were noises, really scary ones for the Cubans, that the US would eliminate its longstanding deal to buy Cuban sugar. Obviously the US was

the market for the one crop that Cuba was still dependent on. In late October nineteen fifty nine, Eisenhower threw sharp words at Castro for alleging US complicity in the terror attacks on the island. Here is a country that you would believe, on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends, Eisenhower said. The whole history of our intervention in 1898, our making and helping set up Cuban independence.

It is a puzzling matter to figure out just exactly why the Cubans would now be so unhappy when, after all, the principal market for sugar exports is right here. And if that's Eisenhower's attitude publicly, then it's no surprise that by January nineteen sixty, new year, new approach, Eisenhower tells his Special group on Cuba, a group of advisors closely held who informed him specifically on this issue that it was time to get serious about Castro and his revels.

Not long after Richard Nixon met with Fidel, he realized Castro was actually definitely, in his opinion, a communist. Quote, I sided strongly with Alan Dulles in presenting this view in the National Security Council. I was present at the meeting in which Eisenhower authorized the CIA to organize and train Cuban exiles for the eventual purpose of freeing their homeland. From the communists. Indeed, in March of nineteen sixty, Alan Dulles, and the first time.

Head of the Central Intelligence Agency brings in Dick Bissell, head of planning, his protege, a guy he had previously brought in with the goal of grooming him to take the top job at the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of these guys were alumni from doing a coup in Guatemala in 54. Yes, yes. So Dulles brings in Dick Bissell, and he also brings in Nixon, Secretary of State Christian Herder, Admiral Arlee Burke, and Colonel J. C. King.

And they're all gathered in the Oval Office. And now the sabotage of Cuba, up until now, was a somewhat improvised kind of affair after 1959, but now it was gonna be given the formal imprimature of a US government covert operation. And this memo by Secretary of State Herder sums up their reasoning as good as anything else. Quote: Not only have our business interests in Cuba been seriously affected.

But the United States cannot hope to encourage and support sound economic policies in other Latin American countries and promote necessary private investment in Latin America. if it is or appears to be simultaneously cooperating in the Castro program. So now we're starting to see it's not only that US interests within Cuba are threatened. The United States is now realizing that the Cuban Revolution may be serving as an example to other countries.

in the region that the US has had a similar relationship with. Maybe it'll even start to Help people within those countries organize their own revolution. This kind of lofty official memo was one way of understanding the United States on the subject of Cuba, but another was the way Richard Nixon would soon talk about it on the campaign trail. Right way. is the deal. I can't. In the world.

Now the first recruits to counter revolution right after the revolution in nineteen fifty-nine had been these hyper wealthy Batistianos, and we saw how Aside from a few air raids or some hare-brained invasion plans, they really ended up lacking the goods to get the job done. But in nineteen sixty, there was a second wave of counter-revolutionaries who were made up more of the, you know, middle class, bourgeois type nationalists.

But as the CIA would underline, these people were reliable because they were no less quote anti-communist. And so in nineteen sixty, as Jack Calhoun observes, the CIA shifted from support for counterrevolutionaries inside Cuba to organizing an exile network inside the US. Now the ultimate goal of this, as Dick Bissell laid it out, was to get a political alliance that could command something like a paramilitary force of Cubans.

to quote land on the island and detonate a coordinated resistance at the appropriate moment. Economic sabotage inside of Cuba, Colhoun notes, would be complemented by sanctions from the US. Meanwhile, a paramilitary force of five hundred exiles was set up in Guatemala, with training scheduled to be wrapped up by november nineteen sixty. The CIA had already begun meeting with potential leaders for its umbrella group, known infamously as the Frontex.

including some in Castro's own cabinet. In addition to the CIA, you also had the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department on the prowl for this future post-Castro set of leaders, but it was a tough search. Batista was obviously out. Carlos Prio, the ex president and rumored coke runner, Well this is what one CIA report read about him quote.

Carlos Prio would be a great man if he had morals. His weakness of character leads him to a tolerance which does not cease even before gangsterism. His economic ambition and causes him to cultivate all forms of robbery and petty thievery. But otherwise he was a good guy. I think more attractive to the CIA was Tony Verona. Yes. Bald, round faced with big tortoiseshell glasses. Verona had been a senator and a prime minister of Cuba in between the Batista years.

And he had already proven his true colors by shutting down communist newspapers inside Cuba in nineteen fifty. Sure. Not only had he been pinching himself already for this kind of job, he was already a CIA asset, and wouldn't you know it, connected to gangsters inside and outside of Cuba.

Yes, in fact, Tony Verona, in a pattern we'll see again, of a kind of parallel campaign against Cuba from the United States government and the mafia, was courted not only by the CIA, but by Meyer Lansky from Jack Cohen, quote. In august nineteen sixty, a telltale bargain was struck between exiled Cuban politician Antonio Verona and organized crime leader Majolansky. In the meeting in Miami,

Lansky offered Verona several million dollars to form a Cuban government in exile to replace Castro's revolutionary regime. Lansky also promised to arrange a public relations campaign in the United States to polish Verona's political image. In return, Verona endorsed the mafia's single minded objective to reopen its casinos, hotels, and nightclubs.

in a post-Castro Cuba. And the public relations firm that they would use here was also connected to Santo Traficante, myriad mafia gangsters, and, completing the loop, the Central Intelligence Agency. And then you had Manuel Artime, who had recently broken with Castro over the communism issue and had founded the MRR, the Movement to Recover the Revolution, which was funded by rich guys like himself and also Catholic hardline.

Yeah, the CIA liked him too, but there was one motif that would make itself known early on, and Dulles would brief Eisenhower a bit later in August of nineteen sixty, saying of the Frente and its leaders Quote, this has been successful up to a point, but the problem is that there are no real leaders, and all of the individuals are prima donnas.

Now aside from organizing the frente, the US would also have spies inside of Cuba, much to the pleasure of types like the CIA and Richard Nixon, speaking of this is where history lobs you a softball. One of the spies working for the U.S. inside of Cuba was Philly-born Frank Fiorini, later Frank Sturgis.

of Watergate fame. He moved to Cuba years earlier and ended up fighting Batista on behalf of Carlos Prio, but then sounding the alarm on the communism of Raul and Che Guevara. Frank did, in his own words, a quote black bag job while spying on Castro for the US government via the Air Force attache in Cuba, quote. I broke into the chief of the army's HQ, I broke into their files, and I did photograph and steal documents.

Now of course this new covert war would need a propaganda campaign. And so naturally the US government turned back to the Guatemala bag of tricks. There was an extensive propaganda radio war, the apparatus for which was resuscitated for this new fight against Cuba. Outposts like Radio Swan, a CIA station based in Honduras, were set up to spread misinformation, disinformation, and calls to abandon the new revolutionary government.

This was like your radio free Europe, voice of America, like most types of things we describe on this show from history, stuff that still goes on today. But one of the biggest propaganda achievements was Operation Peter Pan, or Pedro Pan. This was a campaign of disinformation and scaremongering beamed into Cuba by the CIA from its nearby station off of Honduras, Radio Swan,

as well as counterrevolutionaries within Cuba. And the central messaging of the campaign was this Cuba's new and ambitious education drive, an attempt to create a modern egalitarian education system on the island, was in fact an insidious plot. by which the revolutionary government would steal children from the care of their parents, maybe even shipping them off to Russia for re education.

This rumor campaign was based on bogus documents cooked up by the reactionaries on the island and with the help of the US government. But that did not stop religious groups, particularly right-wing Catholics.

from eventually organizing a massive project to remove, over the course of the next several years, as many as fourteen thousand Cuban children from their homes in Cuba. And the parents of these children, largely of the middle classes, helped these religious organizations ship their kids out of the country

ironically thinking that they were saving their kids from a mass kidnapping. Due to the ongoing tensions in the following decades, many, if not most, of these children would never return to their homes and grew up in the United States. known as quote Pedro Pan Kids. We spoke with Nelson Valdez, Professor Emeritus at New Mexico University, who himself was a Pedro Pan kid. True that indeed there was a bogus document that was prepared by an M. Agent.

it would be announced that Cuban parents no longer had authority over their children. This was called de patria. Power. over how to raise their children and and and so forth. Despite the fact that we do know now that there was no such legislation that the legislation that circulated around Cuba was written by we do know who wrote it. members of the Central Medical Agency, this whole thing. Well so. connected to a portion of the Catholic clergy from Poland and Hungary. Exceedingly uh right wing.

When Nelson got to the US, he spent time in several foster homes and witnessed in himself. and others a real struggle with what had happened. He also noted that you often hear this whole story presented as one in which, A, the CIA is not mentioned at all,

it was just an organic thing that happened, and B, that the Pedro Pan kids are just overwhelmingly happy now that they're grown up to have been, quote, Americanized in the first place. According to Nelson, the story is far more complex, to say the least. it it was traumatic for both of us, those who left and those who stayed behind. The parents sent children were even seven Eight years. I live in three different forms. And and that was true for many other Thank you.

a kids as well. We I had no choice. Bye. to go through a mat rush of learning uh English and um becoming Americanized, you have peer time kids that experience regardless of their ideological position nowadays. They experience separation. From the most important elementary, primary social relations. That is your relationship with parents, brothers, sisters, uncles.

We also ran into Pedro Pan with Marta, who mentioned to us that the principal of her school, where you may remember she was brought up to be Americanized, turned out to be involved in the Peter Pan plot himself. Know something else the school was very important in the Peter Pan plan. The principal of my school, mister James Baker. Yeah. was one of the promotors of this Peter Pan plan, the principal of my school. So none of us, none of the students of Rusted Academy.

was involved in the Peter Pan plan. Why? Because they just simply started leaving W was the target of Peter Pan people like the people who went to your school, or were the people who went to your school the kinds of people who organized Peter Pan to get other Cubans to leave? to get at the Cubans, lower middle class. people.

middle class people to uh get the children outside of of Cuba and the parents here in Cuba so they would just revolt against the uh the leaders of the revolution, overthrow the revolution. But the principle was one of the leaders of the Peter Pan plan.

Then, of course, there were the poison pills. Back in july nineteen fifty nine, the editor of Look magazine, who was in Cuba to interview Fidel, attended a party of Uppercrust Cubans. That included some CIA officers as well. And at this party, the topic of assassination of Fidel Castro was openly discussed. Quote I was told quite flatly by Julian Lobo, a sugar magnet, one of Cuba's richest men.

quote that Castro would not live out the year, that there was a contract on him. Between then and early nineteen sixty, the CIA flew two Cuban exiles with high powered telescopic rifles to Cuba. You can probably guess what they wanted to use those for. Now these assassins never reached Castro as they were arrested by Cuban authorities, but the plotting did not end there.

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

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

Uniforms designed by Celia Sanchez and similar to the tunic she wore in the Sierra, a loaded quote bullet belt about two inches thick, plus a magazine of ammunition that fit into a leather pouch. They'd be handed a check rifle, and they'd go with their policemen to their assigned locations. And then he said I've got uh another problem. Well, he says I gotta go in front of some commit. I killed cat, Ralph.

The CIA's assassination programs against Fidel Castro are probably one of the more infamous examples of the agency's activities over the past century. And this is where they start to really institutionalize the contract murder of Cuba's leader. There were already early schemes and bizarre plots against Castro being cooked up by the CIA's scientists. Some of the first of them were to make Castro trip in public, thereby humiliating him and causing him to lose control.

One plan was to contaminate the air of the radio station he broadcast from with an LSD type substance. Another version of this plan would lace it into his cigar during a public speech. There were also schemes to debeard Castro, depriving him of his masculine charisma, experimenting with thallium salts so that when he ingested it

Them, his beard would fall off. But the more direct assassination thread became much more real when the CIA made contact with the disgruntled former viceroys of Havana in the American Mafia. Now, Dick Bissell by this point had told his subordinate that the CIA, quote, needed an asset to carry out a gangster-type action against Fidel. The CIA had decided to go through Iron Bob Mayhew, DC representative of Howard Hughes, and who had been a CIA asset. since nineteen fifty four.

Mayhew's boss, Howard Hughes, had his own reasons to back this kind of thing. As journalists Warren Hinkle and William Turner write, quote, Hughes wished Mayhew to increase his empire's collaboration with the CIA in return for government favors.

And Hughes had his own designs on Cuba. According to a former aide, Hughes envisioned a Castro-less Cuba as a giant tax dodge for himself. As soon as Castro was gone, the aide said Hughes intended to rush into Cuba and buy up casinos, as he later did in Vegas. develop a series of resort parks on the beachfront, and build his own jumbo airport, thus setting himself up as the new king of Cuban tourism. Quote

Hughes had a lot of respect for the mob, especially Meyer Lansky, a former aide said. My guess is that he hoped to form some sort of partnership with Lansky. Thus the billionaire joined the Secret War. Mayhew got in touch with Johnny Rosselli. We remember Johnny Rosselli, he managed mob clubs in Havana before the revolution.

And Rosselli in turn introduced Bob Mayhew to Sam Giancana, godfather of the Chicago mob. Now Giancana rejected A traditional gangland shooting of Castro, because Giancana thought that no mafioso would risk getting that close to a head of state to carry it out. She and Kana, who knew a thing or two about pulling one of these off, would begin to work with the CIA on a much more subtle method.

Assassination plans, sabotage, spies, sanctions, propaganda, politicking, and covert training of paramilitary exiles. This is how nineteen sixties. Started for the Cuba task force. In Cuba itself, the revolutionary government was making good on its promises of land expropriation, including tens of thousands of acres once held by the mighty United Fruit Company.

But foreign aircraft continued to strafe Cuba's sugar mills and caneland. In february nineteen sixty, one plane bombing a sugar mill was shot down. the body of a US citizen was found in the wreckage. So the Cubans were at this point attempting not only to solicit loans from other countries, but to buy weapons and equipment to defend themselves. From what was clearly going to be an ongoing American campaign of sabotage and bombings and covert action.

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

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

Che Guevara, upon hearing the news, breaks away from a meeting and shows up at the scene to tend to the wounded, and it was at a memorium for the dead the next day that someone snapped a portrait of Guevara that you've no doubt seen before. Meanwhile, in an emotional speech, Fidel Castro points the finger at the CIA.

Dr. Castro, the Cuban Prime Minister, added fuel to the political flames by saying that sabotage caused the disaster. His implication that United States officials were responsible brought an immediate and rigorous denial and protest. The late journalist Jean Guillard reported later, quote, The complete file of the investigation by the shipping company of the vessel is being held in the strongbox of a French Maritime Foundation, with a 150-year restriction on its release.

We spoke to Marta about what it was like in the aftermath of the La Cuba explosion in Cuba. Корректор А.Кулакова In March nineteen sixty, in March nineteen sixty. My school was still open. I was there and uh it was a shock because it was horrible. We we saw the people that were torn to pieces. People dead. immediately said that it was something that had to do with the CIA. So that was something obvious. I mean we started seeing obvious things.

In a speech several months later on May Day, Fidel begins to prepare people for the possibility that the United States really might launch a war against Cuba. Privately, he predicts four steps the United States will take one more terror attacks. Two a break in relations. Three economic sanctions four an overt attack.

After the explosion of the La Cubra in March, establishing tighter links with the USSR was a no-brainer, though you couldn't tell that to Washington. Anastas Mikoyan had already visited in February before the La Cubra and hammered out their first big trade deal. The Soviets would buy one million tons of Cuban sugar per year for five years, payment partly in cash, partly in credit for the things the Cubans desperately needed. Machinery and replacement parts, trucks,

tractors, a variety of manufactured products and whole factories, along with technical assistance to get them up and running for the rapid industrialization of a lopsided economy. One major factor of the deal was an old friend of this show. Oil. A crucial part of America's overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadak in Iran were attacks on their oil supply, and Castro is sensitive to a similar weakness in his country.

After the Lecubre, the Cubans also appealed to the USSR for weapons, and this was the moment, with a clear escalation in tensions between Havana and Washington, that the Soviets would have to choose how close they wanted to get with revolutionary Cuba.

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

for being insufficiently militant in supporting world revolution, sending a message perhaps not only to Washington, but also Beijing, Under Khrushchev's direction, the Soviets accepted all of the terms for arms requested by Fidel, Raoul, and Che, agreeing to send 100,000 automatic rifles and around 30 tanks.

Moreover, the Soviets surprised the Cubans by coming right out and saying that they did not expect any payment for the weapons purchased. According to Khrushchev's son, quote, Father continued to watch Castro closely for some time longer, but already as a potential friend and congenial thinker, he found more and more to confirm Anastas Mikoyan's opinion and admire the heroism of the Cuban people.

We as internationalists must help Cuba, Khrushchev thought. We will not allow the revolution to This is what happened next.

May 1960. The Soviets send the oil. Also, an American U-2 spy plane is shot down deep within the borders of the USSR. Press conference. Tyrie. The oil begins to arrive in Cuba, but American firms such as Standard Oil, Texaco, and Shell all refuse to refine the oil at the direction of the U.S. State Department. Cuba, determined not to be deprived of the fuel, seizes the oil refineries and nationalizes them.

July. Eisenhower, enraged by the nationalization of the oil refineries and the increased trading with the USSR, cancels the US sugar quota. This leaves 700,000 tons of sugar unbought. The Soviet Union steps in and announces it will pick up the tab and purchase the product. Khrushchev personally adds that American aggression toward Cuba will put it in direct conflict with the USSR.

As the Soviet launches its most belligerent anti-American propaganda barrage and research By September, Cuba has also nationalized electric and telephone companies, the oil refineries, and sugar mills all over Cuba announcing that their owners will be compensated when the US starts buying sugar again. Cuba also nationalizes banks across the island, including those owned by Americans. had promised foreign investments will always be welcome and secure. He confiscates American industry.

Uban security services and the people's militia thwart an attempted US mission to deliver guns to counter revolutionaries in the Escumbre Mountains. On the second of September, Fidel gives a speech to a massive crowd. This comes after a resolution by the OAS to oppose the Cuban Revolution. Fidel lays out what becomes known as the Declaration of Havana.

He proclaims the right of all peasants to their land, the right of workers to the fruit of their work, the right of children to education, the right of all races to the full dignity of man, the right of women to civil, social, and political equality, The right of nations to to their full sovereignty. By the end of it, the crowd climaxes, chanting, quote, Cuba Sea, Yankee, no. Che Guevara watches, quote, more than a million hands raised to the skies, one sixth of the country's total population.

Later that month, Castro visits Manhattan for the UN General Assembly. The Cuban delegation leaves their appointed hotel to stay in Harlem. There, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev meet for the first time. October nineteenth Eisenhower establishes an embargo. Fidel would one day tell his biographer, If you're not radical, you don't do anything. You organize a party, you hold twenty elections, and nothing happens. But by the end of nineteen sixty, Cuba had had a very radical couple years.

And a lot had happened. These years were messy, confusing, at times frustrating. The new government still needed money, it still needed experts, technical assistance, as the upper and middle classes were abandoning the revolution. But these twenty four months had also brought changes.

no one had really imagined were possible before. In a country that, until the Revolution, saw a lopsided distribution of medicine, of housing, education, of basic nutrition between Havana and the rest of Cuba, The Cuban government had put the biggest share of new housing, roads, and goods to the countryside, electrifying rural areas and expanding medical services.

The land reform, combined with the new minimum wage, spurred year-round employment for rural workers at New State Farms. These workers entered pension plans for the first time in their lives. The countryside supported the revolution overwhelmingly, as we know by now. But how about the more traditional working class in the towns and the cities? Scholar Maurice Zeitlin conducted a study on the revolution in the 60s.

Published by Princeton, and in it he interviewed workers inside of Cuba. And here is what some of them had to say. A copper miner. Cuba is a cup of gold to me. It is the only country in the world that is now moving forward. a Havana brewery worker. For the first time one can do what one wants without fear. A former farm worker now employed at a nickel plant, before I couldn't look a boss in the eye. I looked at my feet.

Not now. Now we have liberty and walk where we want. It is a great joy to be alive now. And a shoemaker who was a boot black before the revolution. I was left in the streets by my dad, I grew up there. Now I have three sons with a future. I have an eighty year old grandmother who was young during the war against Spain in the eighteen nineties. She is proud of Fidel. She was not proud of any government before this one.

These interviews were conducted not in the honeymoon period of nineteen fifty nine but years afterwards. Zeitlin concludes rather over two thirds of workers consider themselves in favor of the regime several years in. In fact, another study reads, support for the regime is evidently strongly correlated with former income. As it is also with skin color, since race itself correlates.

With income. The government is supplying a good deal of what previously would have had to have been bought. A social security bill established benefits for incapacitation and widowhood. Private clubs, including racially segregated ones, had their doors thrown open to everybody. Domestic servants were brought out of servitude to be trained in new jobs. And all of this is before the revolution would begin the year of education in 1961.

which will eliminate illiteracy inside of Cuba. After all these years of gangsterism, of Americanism, of capitalism. This was the alternative that was being built in Cuba, under great strain. We asked Marta what it was like to witness this transformation. Initially, there was this great joy. Uh-huh. What did that give way to more broadly as the hostility of the Americans became more and more overt?

Well, the joy became a little more I'd say this is the first time I've been answering such a question, and it's very interesting. That joy among the population, the majority of the population in Cuba, that joy Uh was like a big party, we just uh jubilee. That joy became let's say committed to some sort of national security. I mean we have to defend this. We have to defend this and the main uh enemy is starting to be the United States.

In 1960, Che Guevara gave an interview to Look magazine, and he said this. What lies ahead depends greatly on the United States. With the exception of our agrarian reform, which the people of Cuba desired and initiated themselves. All of our radical measures have been in direct response to direct aggressions by powerful monopolists of which your country is the chief exponent.

US pressure on Cuba has made necessary the radicalization of the revolution. To know how much further Cuba will go, it would be easier to ask the US government how far it plans to go. And next time we will find out.