S2 Episode 4 - "Secret Honor"

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The first question is from Mr. Niven and is for Vice President Next. Mr. Vice President, Senator Kennedy said last night that the administration must take responsibility for the loss of the Well first. of all I don't agree with Senator Kennedy that Cuba is law. I believe that we are following the right course. Proper one.

which will see that the Cuban people get a chance to realize their aspirations of progress through freedom. No, Cuba is not lost. And I don't think this kind of defeatist talk by Senator Kennedy helps the situation one bit. Senator Kennedy, would you care to comment? In the first place, I've never suggested. The channel. was lost except for the present.

A Republican ambassador, Earl Smith, a Republican ambassador in succession. Both have indicated in the past six weeks that Castro was a Marxist, that Real Castro was a communist, and that they got no Y'all. Instead our aid continued to Batista, which was ineffective. We never were on the side of freedom. We never used our influence when we could have used it most effectively. And today Cuba is lost for freedom. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan Jane. I'm Noah Colin. Episode four Secret Honor.

Picture this. You are Richard Milhouse Nixon. You've won every election in your life by staking out the position that communism was the you know numero uno threat to the American way of life. Right. Eisenhower, your president. Steely eyed general, he was even a little bit skeeved by your zeal. I mean, you ran ads like this. Mr. Nixon, what is the truth about our business?

fight the growing menace of communism. When Mr. Khrushchev says our grandchildren will live under communism, we must answer, his grandchildren will live in freedom. When he says the Monroe Doctrine is dead, we say the doctrine of freedom applies everywhere in the world. the work. Only answer to communism is a massive offensive for freedom. And then here comes John F. Kennedy, with the balls to call you soft on Cuba.

To suggest the United States isn't doing enough to get rid of Castro when he knows that you were one of the guys who actually suggested knocking him off in the first place. Right. What this debate shows is the weight of a decade of rampant anti communism smothering the discourse. In 1960, 22% of Americans lived in poverty, and yet the threat of a Soviet nuke was on everyone's lips.

and that anxiety would soon be trained further south. In the last episode, we looked at how the years of nineteen fifty nine and nineteen sixty played out in Cuba, and how the Cuban Revolution took on a you know distinctly radical character, Pursuing a policy of land reform unparalleled in the hemisphere. We talked about how that radical policy program, especially the seizure of American business interests, led to an intense and escalating hostility from the American government.

For the Cubans, as we talked about last episode, this escalating hostility was not intellectual. This was not an academic.

debate you heard if you turned on the radio. Planes were flying from the US, dropping bombs on Cuba, industrial sabotage of its economy. Several Cubans had died and been wounded in these bombings already. If you did switch on the radio, you might hear CIA broadcasts beaming into Cuba, and then things only get spicier after the Cubans, within their rights, buy oil from the Soviet Union, which the American refineries in their country refuse to process.

Cuba then nationalizes those companies so it can run its own country. And Eisenhower responds by finally killing the US sugar quota, the agreement to buy Cuban sugar, which presents the Cuban economy with a serious crisis. By October of nineteen sixty, the United States had established the embargo. On January 3, 1961, about two weeks before he would leave office, Eisenhower severs all diplomatic relations with Cuba. A spokesperson read a statement saying.

There's a limit to what the United States and self-respect can endure. That limit has now been reached. Meanwhile, our sympathy goes out to the people of Cuba, now suffering under the yoke of addict. Even before January nineteen sixty one, when Eisenhower cut off relations with Cuba, something that everyone knew was coming at that point, Eisenhower had already reached his limit.

with the Cuban Revolution. In fact, he, the CIA, and of course Richard Nixon had already put in motion a plan to get rid of the Cuban Revolution once and for all. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about the lead up to the Bay of Pigs invasion. We're going to talk about how the CIA and the White House cobbled together a plan to definitively take out Castro. We're going to meet some of the anti-Castro Cuban exiles that the CIA recruited for the effort.

And examine the strange task force that was put together for the operation. And finally, we're gonna talk about where JFK fits in, how the choices that JFK made in his presidential campaign and in the early parts of 1961 set him on a course for disaster.

Uh testing uh one two three four. Uh Roberto, this is for um eyes only. Um Our eyes. Vice President Richard Nixon was obsessed. With Cuba. I uh I I hear that the Gardner's wife, that Fernando's wife is in the hospital. Send her a new portable radio, please. Uh make it a good one. Just make it uh anonymous. I d no no no no no. Say that um uh say that it is from Friends of a Free Cuba. Uh Cuba

One story actually has it that his top national security advisor, a guy named Cushman, was once almost struck by lightning running one of Nixon's many anti-Castro errands. This is reported in a book by Peter Wyden. Cushman grew less and less fond of the project. Even when he got away from Nixon's prodding, it was no fun. One weekend he found himself on a small CIA plane with director Dulles.

They were going to Palm Beach to meet William S. Pauley, the arch conservative former diplomat and friend of Nixon. There was a scheme afoot to print up some Cuban bonds, presumably to jar the Castro economy. On the way to Florida, the plane was hit by lightning. Crockery scattered all over the walls and the ceiling. Cushman was delighted to be back at his desk, where he merely had Nixon to contend with.

Obsessive or not, though, Nixon had one thing correct, which was that Cuba, by the election year of nineteen sixty, had become part of America's domestic Cold War politics. Look soft on Cuba. Even after four debates against JFK, debates that, you know, at least according to popular imagination, did not exactly go well for Nixon, Nixon was considering a challenge for a fifth debate where he planned to set the record straight about Cuba.

In nineteen thirty nine I went to Cuba. Uh Victor, would you erase that, please? And the second reason that was pushing Nixon to pay so much attention to Cuba was because he knew about what the Eisenhower administration had already set into motion at his urging. And that was, as we discussed last episode, WH four, the January nineteen sixty plan that Eisenhower first approved of, which examined ways to target and undermine the Castro regime. Very

for you to take the high road. But you see, I couldn't do that. You delegated, I had to do all the dirty work right from the beginning. In March of nineteen sixty, two months after the creation of WH four. Eisenhower approved a much more ambitious anti Castro program, and by mid August of nineteen sixty, Eisenhower formally approved in a meeting a thirteen million dollar budget for a plan to overthrow Castro.

up there and you said can't somebody do something about that Castro fella? I heard you say that. But you understand that it was me that had to go out there and pull the goddamn trigger. I mean... This is where I think historians and scholars generally designate the Bay of Pigs plan as we know it specifically to come into focus.

This is, you know, sort of a part but related to all of the other counter revolutionary planning, all of the other, you know, American sabotage operations and so on. All of that still goes on, but at the same time now there is a specific plan

that is at least kind of on paper and that has a budget to actually move forward and get rid of Castro entirely. At that August eighteenth, nineteen sixty meeting, which is as clean a start date as any for the formal operation that would become the Bay of Pigs. Alan Dulles laid out the four key axes of the operation that Ike had pushed for and got some months earlier. One, developing Cuban exile support, two, establishing American military training for the exiles.

Three, ramping up the propaganda campaign, and four, creating a quote, standby force, preferably of non-Americans with special forces type training. The other thing that came out of this meeting was the biggest handcuff that the plotters put on themselves. No US military personnel would be allowed to be directly involved in combat. If this sounds familiar, it's basically because the entire playbook as drawn up in this rough concept was taken from Guatemala.

Richard Bissell, the deputy director of the CIA, who had been put in charge of the Bay of Pigs plan, was an advisor on the Guatemalan operation, and two of the lower level agents on the Cuba operation, who we'll introduce shortly, were previously involved in Guatemala as well. They very actively positioned the Cuba operation as simply doing Guatemala two point zero on a bigger stage, with more resources and far higher stakes.

We talked a little bit last episode about the Frente or the FRD, the political organization that the CIA assembled after the Cuban Revolution of Cuban exiles to, you know, sort of be this government in waiting type deal. The recruitment effort for the Frente and the most aggressive phase of it began in the spring of nineteen sixty. To go back to that moment for a second, I'd like to give the perspective of one of the exiles recruited, Manuel Artime.

Time was an ex revolutionary, am I right there? Yes, he was an ex-revolutionary who was, you know, favored very heavily by some elements within the CIA to lead the Cuban exiles because of his military background and his charisma. And he's one of the people who will become a sort of key figure as a face of the Frente in the future.

to go from South America, where he'd been going on a lecture circuit to drum up support for Cuban exiles. This lecture circuit was of course supported by the CIA. Sortime is told by his pseudonymous handler to go from South America to the Statler Hilton in New York. and to announce himself as George L. Ringo. And it was at the hotel that he was introduced to a guy named, or at least calling himself, Frank Bender, who is supposedly a rich steel magnate in Miami who wanted to support the exiles.

In reality, as our teammates suspected, Frank Bender was not a steel magnet. In fact, Frank Bender wasn't Frank Bender. His real name was Jerry Droller. And he was a CIA agent who reported directly to the chief of WH four, the anti Castro nerve center run out of Washington. Yeah, it's a nerve center. It's getting on my nerves. Here's what the quote unquote great Frank Bender wanted to know.

I told him that Cuba could not return to the old corrupt government, Artime said, that a return to military dictatorship would lead once more down the road to communism. I told him I believed we needed a genuinely democratic government. We needed social justice.

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

And you will give us the weapons? All the weapons you need, Bender replied. And also we will train radio operators so you could be in contact directly with Cuba. Bender wanted to know if our teammate could get men out of Cuba to be trained for such an operation. Artime replied that he could. Fine, Bender said, as he got up and handed Artime a piece of paper.

Call this number whenever you need me. Just say to Frank Bender from Manolo, and I will come to the phone. He instructed our teammate to go to Miami, where more friends would be in touch with him, and he said he had reserved a plane ticket for him.

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

Jerry Droller, aka Frank Bender, was, in the words of multiple colleagues of his at the CIA, a master opportunist and insanely ambitious. Born in Germany, he served in the USS in World War II. That's the precursor to the C. the CIA and had neither many friends in the CIA nor among the Cubans with whom he would be working as part of this new operation.

Droller was one half of the dynamic duo assigned to Wrangle Cuban exiles like Artime and the rest of the Frente. The other half of that duo was none other than Howard Hunt, his codename here being Eduardo. Wardo Sanchez is a white man that lives near Here. Stop. Digging for clues, Stevie. If you've heard of Howard Hunt, it's probably because of Watergate. An active CIA agent from nineteen forty-nine until nineteen seventy, Hunt was a spook characteristic of his time.

Insanely right wing, Ivy League educated, waspy beyond measure, and involved in all sorts of devious shit, including the nineteen fifty-four coup against Jacobo Arbenz. Hunt's intense right wing politics and a generally intense disposition, the fact that he wrote dozens of Maudlin's spy and crime thriller novels, it left an impression on the people who worked with him.

In fact, when a young William F. Buckley, fresh out of Yale, arrived in Mexico City in nineteen fifty one for a brief stint as a self described quote unquote CIA deep cover agent, his spy master was none other than Howard Hunt, who would go on to be a lifelong friend. Droller and Hunt began their work to organize a political movement shortly after Eisenhower gave the first major go ahead for this kind of work in March of nineteen sixty.

According to Joseph B. Smith, a CIA officer and a contemporary of both Troller and Hunt, the two men basically could not have been more ill-suited to the task. Here's Smith. How these two could put together a coalition of Cuban exiles involving the constant soothing of egos, I could never imagine. Hunt was almost the epitome of the kind of wasp that is not appreciated in Latin America, a man who would naturally talk down to Latins.

and Droller, who always seemed to go out of his way to be the caricature of a Jew invented by Goebel's propaganda ministry, and who in addition couldn't speak a word of Spanish, negotiating with Latin political leaders did not make sense to me. Now the CIA Inspector General report, uh which was released about twenty years ago

has this to say about uh Frank Bender. Quote Bender's linguistic accomplishments did not include Spanish, and this may have diluted his effectiveness in dealing with Cubans. Yeah, big shock there. Like we mentioned last episode, a key challenge for the American government was to tap Cuban exile leaders who were not followers of Batista.

With more and more Cubans leaving the island, including greater numbers of anti Batista middle class and upper class revolutionaries who had turned against Castro, this was theoretically becoming a more viable strategy. Up such a political organization to give the rebels a little push. From the very early stages of that spring, the Frente did not live up to Hunts and Bender's expectations.

Albeit for both different and shared reasons. To Hunt, Benders and some of his superiors' insistence on not using any Batistianos was needlessly limiting and offensive to the very people who constituted their most natural base of support. What they were both frustrated with was the sheer amount of cash that the Frontier had requested from the government, which came out to seven hundred and forty-five thousand dollars a month.

That's Hunt's claim. The CIA Inspector General's report says that they asked for five hundred thousand dollars. In the end, they got about a hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars a month. To Hunt, this was welfarism. To the frente, it was the basic amount of money needed to pay for supplies.

The reason that they had asked for so much in the first place was because they wanted all that money to purchase arms and to train themselves. They didn't want the US government to do anything more than sign a blank check. Uh-huh. Quite obviously, the CIA and Howard Hunt, that wasn't their MO.

Setting aside the natural tensions between Hunt and Bender and the Frente and everyone else, both of these guys were just weirdos. Bender would refer to himself in the pseudonymic third person, like he would say, Bender says yes. Let's just... See all my circuits. It's the movie. Yeah, we'll see that.

Hunt was actually worse, if uh you can believe it. He was once responsible for losing a briefcase full of secret documents containing the details of agency operatives. And uh was known for traveling around with you know Huge amounts of cash, like as much as a hundred thousand dollars at a given time. And these are the kinds of things that obviously draw

lots and lots of attention. But perhaps the biggest problems that Hunt and Bender and the CIA faced it in putting the Fronte together was not really anything that they could have changed themselves. For one thing, the most powerful anti Castro exiles were rich conservatives.

And for another, trying to create a false political unity among the exiles basically just turned the FRD into a perpetual front for power struggles. A good example of this is the development of Radio Swan by David Atley Phillips. Phillips, the one time actor, turned journalist, turned CIA agent.

who had created the radio station La Voz de Liberación, which broadcast from Honduras into Guatemala during the nineteen fifty-four coup. He set up a new, even more well resourced radio station on Swan Island between Honduras and Cuba. The Swan Island broadcast although eventually would start sending out, you know, a a kind of unified line designed to take down Castro.

Initially a ton of the programming was from anti Cuban exiles. And those exiles constantly put out messages attacking one another and attacking the C attacking the whole like it was it was a total Odds Now the first two places for the foreign training sites that were going to help the Americans maintain deniability, because after all, they couldn't be caught, you know, training the Cubans out in the open. One of the main bits of the mission that they decided on early on, right?

Yeah, they they had been located in these sites had been located in Panama and Mexico, and Hunt had actually even relocated to Mexico City with the expectation of helping to set up things there. But The Mexican government was opposed because they didn't want to be seen helping overthrow Fidel Castro, whom they had actually, you know.

a fairly friendly posture with publicly. So the operations headquarters do get reloaded relocated to Miami, which will cause some press and secrecy headaches for the CIA and the Cuban exiles to come, and was what the Cuban exiles wanted in the first place.

They they they wanted Miami. They w because I mean, why would you want to go far from home? Why would you want to go to Mexico? So the frente and other elements that were previously supposed to be these Cuban exiles who would be run out of, you know, Mexico and and have, you know, that kind of credibility.

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

The first batch of Cuban exiles to be trained for the invasion arrived in Guatemala in the summer of 1960. Though the first group of twenty trainees had expected to arrive at a base, they arrived at a decrepit coffee plantation called Finca Helvetia, owned by a pro American Guatemalan businessman who, in a weird twist, had actually once been our Benz's secretary.

There were no baths or showers, and the only building available for use was an administrative center. The place was dubbed Fort Trax. It was in the middle of nowhere, but this was also completely in plain sight. The plantation, this finca, was actually still operational. The laborers of the plantation could see in plain view that some sort of military installation was being set up.

And even though this Finca was in the middle of nowhere, the private roads that crisscrossed to you know, to get coffee in and out and transport the workers, they could also see what was going on. The other problem though was bigger picture. The premise of training guerrillas in Florida, Panama, or Mexico had always been that the Cubans would link up with domestic Cuban rebels, basically an American remake of the classic that Fidel in the July twenty-sixth movement had done a few years earlier.

At the time that Eisenhower had approved the budget in August of 1960, the idea of the operation hadn't evolved too much from there. But after August of nineteen sixty, the nature of the endeavor changed big time. Because months and months of guerrilla warfare had achieved so little, and CIA intelligence indicated that the existing counter-revolutionary militants in Cuba were of

highly limited value. It was clear to Richard Bissell, the deputy CIA director tasked with what would become the Bay of Pigs operation. It was clear to Richard Bissell and the Cuba program planners that a change in approach was required. It was at this point that the emphasis was placed on plans for a full-blown amphibious invasion. Here is how that plan looked in an October 31 cable that was sent from Washington to the Guatemala base.

Now this is a cable, so some of the writing is a little weird and stilted, so bear with me. One, plan employ not over sixty men for infiltration teams. 2. Assault Force will consist of one or more infantry battalions having each about 600 men. 3. Mission of Assault Force. To seize and defend lodgment in target by amphibious and airborne assault and establish base for further ops.

Automatic sea and air resupply will be provided. 4. Assault force to receive conventional military training. 5. Possibility of using U.S. Army Special Forces training cadres for assault force being pursued. We'll advise. 6. Assault of size now planned cannot be readied before several months. Do not plan strike with less than about 1,500 men. This is the first real idea of what the Bay of Pigs invasion would actually end up looking like.

It was also an acknowledgement that the original December invasion The burp of pigs. Ha ha ha! Try again.

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

Nicaragua's Somoza, a dictator b exponentially more brutal than any Castro could ever be credibly accused uh of being, Somoza graciously offered up an airstrip in his country for the training as well. Meanwhile, other CIA officials were searching for the ships they would need to transport their invasion force when the time was right. This was incredibly ambitious. An amphibious invasion, anybody will tell you, is perhaps the most difficult military maneuver to pull off.

Dwight Eisenhower had overseen the most successful and well-known one of all time, but military leaders all the way back to Napoleon have famously struggled with this. The CIA, with the explicit blessing of President Eisenhower and the participation of the Departments of Defense and State, was in effect in order to accomplish this incredibly ambitious goal going to create its own full service counter revolutionary army.

To bring it back to Fort Tracks, here's what Fort Tracks looked like when one trainee, Jose Basulto, showed up on the Fourth of July in 1960. This is an account he gave to a journalist after the Bay of Pigs invasion. It rained like mad and his first job was to help dig ditches around the barracks. They lacked foundations and the rain threatened to collapse them. The downpour kept up for weeks, but drinking water was very short, and no showers were built until October.

The four hole outdoor latrine was the social center. A single tattered issue of Playboy was the camp library. Three of the trainees were growing their own marijuana, and another was said to have developed a sexual affinity for a mule. This just sounds like me and my guys. Yeah, this is just guys being dudes as far as I'm concerned. Sound weird t m to me. And Basulto kept on making friends among the men who kept arriving from Miami.

Last time we discussed how not long after the victory of the revolution in nineteen fifty-nine, an assassination program against Fidel Castro was institutionalized by the United States. What began as simply trying to scramble a couple guys with telescopic rifles to bump him off? mutated into a set of schemes involving chemicals and drugs and LSD, until it finally crystallized in nineteen sixty as a contract between the Central Intelligence Agency

and the American Mafia. Specifically, Castro was designated to be murdered by associates of Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, the method Was to be poison pills. Now, with the political and economic sabotage of Cuba well underway and the Bay of Pigs operation in the work. By the middle of 1960, the CIA's Technical Services Division was hard at work experimenting on guinea pigs and monkeys, drawing up both the poison pills themselves.

and a separate backup plan to lace Castro's cigars with a botulinum toxin. Meanwhile, their point man for this operation, Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, was openly boasting of his importance to the CIA in front of the Maguire sisters. If you are one of our uh twenty-one year old Zoomer ML TikTok style listeners, or really under the age of 67 in general. The Meguiar sisters were a popular 60s musical trio that were sometimes known to cavort with these mafia types.

Giancana told one or more of the Maguire sisters that he was going to kill Fidel Castro that November, specifically mentioning poison pills. The odd thing was, November 1960 was not the CIA's plan. Their poison pills, in fact, would not get to Giancana's guys until next year. Giancana was going off script.

Was he bluffing to the Maguire sisters? Did he have his own poison pills? And if so, when was he planning to use them on Castro? According to one memo by the House Select Committee on Assassinations years later, quote, if the mob's private that the plot to kill Castro actually worked, and Castro died, then the syndicate had enormous blackmail potential against the CIA.

However, if their intrigue backfired, then their position would be that they were only attempting to execute the wishes of their government. So while the CIA was using Ginkana, or was it the other way around? Another one of Giancana's associates was also an informant for both the CIA and the FBI.

This was a former cop and then private investigator straight out of Blood Simple. He was talking to both agencies, informing on the other, and organizing arms deals for the Cuban exiles, and planning a trip to tap telephones inside of Cuba at the behest of the. Of ex-president Carlos Prio, who was still angling for his return to power in Cuba. So as ever, Gangsterismo was a key and in fact expanding element of the counter-revolution.

When I was a boy, just a few months after Castro came to power, I was already a prisoner in the communist prisons of Cuba. I was there in the first conspiracy against the Castro government, and then in the prison of La Cabana, and when I arrived in Miami, the first thing I did was to join the glorious twenty five O six Brigade. to go to the training camps of Guatemala.

Here's the story of how Brigade two five oh six, the Cuban exile invasion force, got its name as recounted by Peter Wyden, who wrote a well regarded history of the operation in the nineteen seventies. doctor Jose Almeida, the brigade's first physician, arrived at Track's base on september eighth, around two PM and was immediately commandeered to help search for Carlos Rodriguez Santana.

who had just fallen two thousand feet off a cliff on a training hike. Rodriguez's brigade number was two five zero six. Now, why was his number 2506 if there were only supposed to be something like 1500 brigadiers? Well, that's because

of a bit of CIA trickery. The CIA, when they began bringing these militant Cuban exiles, the kind of revolutionaries to Guatemala, the serial number that they gave them, those serial numbers began at 2500. The idea was that Should these exiles become captured upon arrival or upon landing uh Inside of Cuba. Right, that the Cuban intelligence and military uh and the soldiers who picked them up would say, Oh my god, look how big this invasion force is.

The idea being that they would see a dog tag that appeared to indicate there were hundreds, if not thousands, more troops coming than there were. Right. And they had patches and all this other kind of, you know, iconography that's sort of, you know, amped it up, supported of course by the American. According to an oral history published by Brigade 2506 members after the Bay of Pigs, the brigadiers began to feel the operation shift from those, you know, guerrilla infiltration routes.

to the im invasion strike force being imagined at the highest levels of the CIA in the fall of nineteen sixty. Although there were other special trainings being conducted, pilot trainings, frogmen trainings in places like Panama and Nicaragua and elsewhere in Guatemala, the core focus of the invasion planning was whipping this landing force, Brigade 2506, into shape.

Pepe San Roman, a wannabe architecture student turned Batista era military officer, was officially made the military commander in November nineteen sixty Supervising the by then approximately four hundred and thirty men who had arrived at Fort Trax. This was the original right wing pepe. Yeah.

I believe so, yes. The training itself had mixed results. For an example, one of the first planes that an older Cuban exile pilot practiced on, a C forty six, He busted his landing gear on one of the first return flights, and the pilot got a herniated diaphragm and had to go to the US for surgery.

Another example was not just in the military training, but in the actual, you know, basic facts and figures kinds of stuff that the CIA brought in. Here's a brigade 2506 veteran talking about it in his own words. The training was so bad, he said. For example, a man came to talk about Cuba to us, giving us Cuban geography, and he said that Trinidad was the second largest city in Cuba. Everybody laughed out loud at him. What is the second big

Yeah. The Cuban air trainees in Guatemala frequented a nearby brothel too frequently, going AWOL all the time, and the Guatemalan president Idigoras had become aware of it. Idigoras proposed opening up a brothel closer to the base specifically for the soldiers. Sure. And he said that he would take care of it himself.

Richard Bissle agreed, Itigoras set up the brothel, and the women were brought in from Costa Rica and El Salvador. Well behaved trainees could get coupons to sleep with them. The AWOL problem would disappear. Although there has been a lot of revisionist history suggesting that the Brigade 2506 members represented this really incredible dynamic cross-section of Cuban society, that's not the case.

They were whiter and wealthier than most Cubans, the people who had the most to lose from the Castro government. Here's a little told story that gives some insight. In November nineteen sixty, as the Cuban trainees were being trained in Guatemala, there was an attempted military coup against Idigoras. Idigoras, by the way, didn't just let Cuban exiles and the Americans train in Guatemala.

He'd been screaming about communism for a month, baselessly accusing Castro and the Cuban government of planning to invade Guatemala to spread the scourge of communism. Now the Cuban exiles were duped into thinking that this coup was actually a Castroite plot. No, it was just a a military revolt, and they were convinced to fly their planes to help suppress the coup, which they did.

And as the coup was quashed, Eisenhower took the opportunity to announce that the Navy was moving ships to protect Guatemala and Nicaragua because of unrest from the possibility of a Cuban invasion. Part of the basis for the officers' revolt in the first place, according to the historian Virginia Gerard Burnett, was the way that the Cuban exiles acted in the country. I mean they're very present.

It was embarrassing. You had men who got outrageously drunk in public and took extreme liberties and harassed people and women in public. And it's important to note also that per Cuban intelligence and other reporting, parts of the Guatemalan military were pretty sympathetic to Castro at this moment, and they certainly didn't appreciate Idigoras supporting a US assisted coup.

Here's how the American ambassador to Guatemala at the time, a career diplomat, later described the situation. Quote, You must remember that most of those Cuban youngsters were from the so-called better classes. They had means and they ran all over that country.

I'm sure that more were killed on the roads of Guatemala than were killed at the Bay of Pigs. At around the same time that the Bay of Pigs plan was being spun from a guerrilla campaign to an all-out invasion, people were getting wise to what was going on in Guatemala.

More than anything else, the control freak Richard Bissell demanded secrecy. He believed that siloing intelligence operations, creating little fiefdoms entirely under his control, For example, like the U two spy plane project, a huge intelligence coup that got Americans lots and lots of, you know, hard to get intelligence from high flying planes.

That was a project overseen by Richard Bissell and it was kept entirely under his lock and key. He believed that this kind of operational security was the biggest guarantor of success. That's why he approved of having the Cuban exiles participate in suppressing the Guatemalan coup.

It helped to preserve secrecy. And when you read Richard Bissell's memoir, and if you read his accounts of the Bay of Pigs, or of Guatemala earlier, or the U two program, he will always say that the endeavor in question failed or succeeded on the question of secrecy. But the thing is, secrecy in the case of building a plane is a lot easier than planning regime change.

And in the case of Guatemala, it wasn't exactly written in the stars that it would succeed. Alan Dulles himself had to intervene by getting a New York Times reporter off the story. Keeping a lid on the Bay of Pigs planning and training was a Sisophean task.

Castro's intelligence network among the exiles was even then notoriously effective, and the Cubans, at least according to the CIA, were too talkative, too willing to share confidences. One CIA official once remarked that two Cubans talking is a conversation, three is a riot. The CIA's gripes weren't totally wrong, but they missed two big points. First, the Americans were blabby as hell on their own.

After all, the British Foreign Office wired the embassy in Washington in 1959, asking for them to look into reports of quote, US authorities may be contemplating trying to stimulate or support an anti Castro movement along the lines of the action they took in Guatemala some years ago. Can you find out?

And there's another story that I think is a particularly good one that shows just how lackadaisical the secrecy was from the very CIA agents who demanded it. So Howard Hunt, who I mentioned before, had once misplaced a briefcase of secret documents never to be recovered.

Well, he actually had the bright idea that it would be a really big morale boost to get the photos of brigade rebels taken in training, and Richard Bissell, for whatever reason, thought that the idea was a good one. So Howard Hunt gets the photos taken. And then the next day, Tony Verona sees them in the newspapers where Hunt has placed them and starts flipping out because it becomes very clear what the entire purpose of the whole thing is.

Now while Dulles had been able to get a Miami Herald story killed in the fall of nineteen sixty about training exiles in Florida and how pissed some people at the State and Justice Department had gotten about that activity on US soil. It wasn't until a Guatemalan paper published a story in October nineteen sixty where you had the first time revelation of the existence of CIA built bases reported as such to train Cuban counter revolutionaries for an invasion.

In the Guatemalan foothills, there's a mysterious training depot where some of the raiders may have been based. The government there denies that Cubans are among the soldiers being instructed, but observers have said otherwise. Professional soldiers are Once trained, the men mysteriously disappeared. A subsequent visit to Guatemala by a Stanford professor revealed that practically everybody in Guatemala knew about the Americans' presence.

And the purpose of their presence. By mid-November, the Stanford professor was quoted in the American magazine The Nation about the camps in Guatemala. On January 10th, The most famous of these stories was published by the New York Times. It was a headline item about a feared clash with Cuba, prompted by the discovery of secret anti-Castro US bases in Guatemala, complete with a map and everything.

But these stories didn't really break through to the public. Most contemporaneous press shows that the news didn't really make a splash at the time. In fact, Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa made an accusation at the UN General Assembly, not dissimilar to the one that Jacobo Arbenz made less than a decade earlier. He said that the US was preparing an imminent invasion from Guatemala.

Cuban intelligence, as early as August of nineteen sixty, had known that dozens of US military advisors were training as many as a couple hundred quote old Batistianos and simple mercenaries. The American government, the denied all charges, telling the New York Times that the charges were, quote, ones we have heard before, end quote, false.

And absurd. At the end of December, as evidence of the American planned invasion kept mounting, the Cuban UN delegation supplied the Security Council with detailed evidence of the first time. of the U.S. plans, including the airfield in Guatemala where the exile pilots were training. Just as they had done two months earlier, the Americans denied it again, with the U.S. ambassador calling the accusations, quote, empty, groundless, Fraudulent.

He said that Cuba had been quote crying wolf for the past six months over an alleged imminent invasion of their country, and thereby are fast making themselves ridiculous in the eyes of the world. The Security Council did nothing.

Back in our CVS News election headquarters, let's look at that popular vote. With something over five percent of the precincts in, Kennedy is holding on to his very narrow lead. Upon running for president in 1960, John F. Kennedy wrote that American Cuban policy needed nuance. Understanding a fresh start, taking swipes at the outgoing Eisenhower administration. Fidel Castro, he wrote.

is part of the legacy of Simon Bolivar. Castro is also part of the frustration of that earlier revolution, which won its war against Spain, but left largely untouched the indigenous feudal order. He chided the Eisenhower administration for its closed-mindedness, called Fuencio Batista a bloody brute, etcet. But as the presidential race began to narrow in the fall,

Kennedy changed his tune. He began to rant about the radicalism of the revolution, of Fidel Castro and the communists in his orbit, saying at one rally in Jersey, quote, The Iron Curtain is 90 miles off the coast of the United States. He also played the Cold Warrior more broadly, banging on particularly about the missile gap that the United States could well lose against the Soviet Union.

Now Richard Nixon, as we pointed out at the top of the episode, was not one to be outdone in this area, so he called the Cuban Revolution, quote, an intolerable cancer, just for good measure. But further complicating things for Nixon and perhaps soon everybody, was that John F. Kennedy had in the fall been briefed by Alan Dulles and past intelligence by friends

about the nascent Bay of Pigs operation that was planned for the next year. It was Scuttle Butt. So armed with this information and running to the right, basically, to Nixon on Cuba, John F. Kennedy starts to call for something like a Bay of Pigs operation in his public campaign remarks. This put Nixon in a pretty tight spot. Our policies are very different. I think that Senator Kennedy's policies and recommendations for the handling of the Castro regime

He could not reveal the top secret operation that he had spearheaded as vice president and that was still underway, no matter who was gonna be president the next year. But he also could not bear to be perceived as soft on communism. Effect. Senator Kennedy recommends is the United States government should give help to The Exiles and to Those within Cuba. Who appears? So he muddled through with this line about how Kennedy was being irresponsible with all this loose talk of an invasion of Cuba.

Agreed. to intervene in the internal affairs of any other American country. And they as well have agreed to do like So once again, America's Cuba Mania now allowing John F. Kennedy to out Nixon Nixon. Goddamn CIA They went and they told Kennedy all about the the track two operation against Castro and then Jack. He outretted me by attacking Castro. And that made me look soft. I mean They promise me.

that the invasion on the executive action against Castro would take place before the election. I mean God out of this. But in truth, anti communism was not something new to John F. Kennedy. He had long as a senator been on record as a cold warrior. In fact, anti communism ran in the Kennedy family. His brother, Robert Kennedy, one of his first jobs was for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who himself was a chum of Joseph Kennedy, patriarch, investor, politician, and bootlegger.

Yeah, actually while working for McCarthy, RFK actually lost out on a job to Roy Cohn. Apparently it was because RFK at that young an age was not considered enough of an ass. To get the job. He was too soft. And McCarthy, as a matter of fact, was actually made the godfather to RFK's first kid. But there were other people involved in the Kennedy family that also had some connections to Cuba that we've already discussed.

There's reporting that shows that likely at the strong encouragement of Patriarch Joseph Kennedy, the Illinois mob helped put their thumb on the scale for JFK in the 1960 election in Illinois. This includes some of the gangsters we've already talked about. Sam G and Kana, who reportedly met directly with Joseph Kennedy at the time and who had significant business interests that we've discussed. The unexpectedly delayed climax saw Senator Kennedy the victor with a clear margin of electoral

At 43 years of age, he is the youngest man ever voted into the White House and the first Catholic chief executive in the history of the nation. Not till the middle of the next day was the victory. By one of the closest margins recorded, a plurality of barely over 300. On November 9th, the day after the 1960 presidential election, JFK rang up Alan Dulles and told him he wanted him to stay on board as the director of the CIA.

JFK was known for thinking quite highly of the CIA. He believed that, you know, they were guys like him, Ivy League educated, blue-blooded, and that it was their technical competence.

and World War II bravado that would, you know, be the proper kind of approach that he would want to bring to his presidency. Nine days after that, on November eighteenth, Dulles and Deputy Director Richard Bissell paid the incoming president a formal visit for the first time, giving him an official scoop on what was going on with the Cuban invasion plans.

By early January of nineteen sixty one, things had gotten toxic between the Cuban and American governments to the point that, as we discussed earlier in the episode, Eisenhower made the decision to sever diplomatic ties. This prompted the Joint Chiefs and the CIA to give a quick status assessment of where things were with Cuba now that this big diplomatic rupture had taken place.

The military chief of the Cuban invasion operation was told to come up with a summary of where things stood with the invasion force. The state of the forces was, according to this report, abysmal. Here are some of the dismal conclusions of this report. Quote, The number of qualified Cuban B-26 crews available is inadequate for conduct of strike operations. The number of qualified Cuban transport crews is grossly inadequate.

It is probable that the assault brigade can reach its planned strength of seven fifty prior to commitment, but it is possible that upwards of one hundred of these men will be recruited too late for adequate training. Unless special forces training teams are sent promptly to Guatemala, the assault brigade cannot be readied for combat by late February as planned and desired. Quote.

The question of whether the incoming administration of President-elect Kennedy will concur with the conduct of the strike operations outlined above needs to be resolved at the earliest possible point. Inauguration 1961. At the final meeting between Ike and Shortly before J F took office. J.F. before handing over the reins of power. The honor of your presence is requested at the ceremonies attending the inauguration of the President and the Vice President of the United States January 20th, 1961.

To our sister republic, south of our border. We offer a special pledge. Hãy subscribe cho kênh La La School Để không bỏ lỡ những video hấp dẫn Good. In a good deed. In a new alliance for progress. To assist free men and free governments. In casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution Cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know. That we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas.

And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house. A couple days before Kennedy's inauguration, Patrice Lumumba, leader of a newly independent Republic of the Congo, who shared with Fidel Castro a place on the CIA's hit list, was assassinated in his country.

Kennedy came into office and it was extremely clear that if he was going to have some sort of diplomatic reset with, you know, with the region and if they were actually going to mount some kind of defense against communism with meaningful cooperation, that you would need to have Some sort of new aid program, which is why in March of nineteen sixty one he introduced the Alliance for Progress.

Our approach must itself be equally bold, an approach consistent with the majestic concept of Operation Pan America. Therefore, I have called on all people of the hemisphere to join in a new alliance for progress. Alianza para progresia. The Alliance for Progress was explicitly designed to diminish the appeal of communism with development aid. The historian W. Michael Weiss put it this way: quote, it sought to reforge Pan-Americanism and its political arm, the OAS.

Into a sword to use against Castro and every other potential revolutionary in the Western Hemisphere. By comparison, the Marshall Plan delivered$13 billion in three years to post-war Europe against the$9 billion over seven years. That Latin America, a much poorer and more underdeveloped place, would get through the Alliance for Progress. A vast cooperative effort unparalleled in magnitude magnitude and nobility of purpose. to satisfy the basic needs of the American people.

Work. Land, health and schools Techo, Trabaho, Itiera, Salud Escuela. So while Kennedy is Savoring his election victory and his first few weeks in office, he is also beginning to be intensely lobbied about the final plans of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In late January of 1961, JFK gets his first briefing on the invasion plan.

Things that are active right now, the sabotage operations, the infiltration attempts, supplying counter revolutionaries in the mountains. That's not getting the job done. Uhhuh. It's time for things to be escalated, and it's time to pull out these invasion plans that they've been developing.

JFK signs off on this via a memo written by his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy. The Defense Department with CIA will review proposals for active deployment of anti-Castro Cuban forces on Cuban territory, and the results of this analysis will be. Will be promptly reported to the president. A week later, on February third, the Joint Chiefs give their approval of what's called the Trinidad Plan, which would quote not necessarily require overt US intervention.

A few days later, on February 7th, a group of state, defense, White House, and CIA officials gather and collectively acknowledge the plan has some flaws. The president's boy wonder advisor, Richard Goodwin, says, well, JFK wants pros and cons, presented as, you know, specific arguments. He wants a pro argument and he wants a con argument if there's not gonna be some consensus on a course of action.

In a meeting the next day, Kennedy basically asks if they can go backwards actually and just do a guerrilla plan, which of course, you know Dropping supplies to people already inside Cuba and hoping that they spark a mass movement. Right, because again, you know, as justice

As Eisenhower was concerned, Kennedy is even more concerned about actively showing the U.S. hand in this invasion. A week after the oral arguments invitation, State Department official Thomas Mann and Richard Bissell give their memos to JFK. Thomas Mann has the

anti-memo, and Richard Bissell gives the pro. After rejecting the Trinidad plan that was cooked up by the Joint Chiefs earlier for being too spectacular and not easy enough to mask as a Cuban operation, Kennedy told Dulles and Bissell to go back to the drawing board.

According to Bissell's memoir, the problem that Kennedy kept having with all this was quote noise. The Trinidad landing spot near the city of Trinidad and on the southern coast of the island, it was too noisy. The daytime landing was too noisy. And most ominously for Brigade 2506, airstrikes were noisy. By mid-March, the plan was rearranged, and the invasion location was shifted a hundred miles to the west, to a swampy stretch of coast called Playa Giron. The invasion was exactly a month away.

In JFK's mind, he was about to check a major campaign promise off his list, and he was getting to do it in the first six months of his term.

As all of this planning was going on, let's skip back a bit to September nineteen sixty. In New York for the General Assembly session was the greatest gathering of world leaders in modern times, all vying for the friendship and support of the new African state.

most fateful of many informal meetings in New York was that of Khrushchev and Castro, whose threat to Western hemisphere solidarity was background for Ike's talks with Pan-American In September of nineteen sixty, Fidel Castro touched down in New York City. He was there to participate in the upcoming United Nations General Assembly. The US government, which was less than four months away from severing all diplomatic ties with Cuba,

Gave Fidel tight restrictions on where he was and was not allowed to go. Secretary of State Christian Herder instructed him not to leave the island of Manhattan. Of course, a year before, when Fidel had showed up in the U.S., he had been a a TV sensation, and the public was actually quite enamored and curious about the bearded freedom fighter they had read about in the paper.

But a lot had happened since then, as we've described. All through nineteen fifty-nine and nineteen sixty, the American press and American politicians had demonized the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro personally. For many, he was now persona non grata. The tabloids called him quote El Beardo and quote a spoiled brat. Barry Goldwater described Castro as quote a bum without a shave. And Long Islanders literally burned him in effigy, which is perhaps the greatest testament yet.

to his character. Aides recalled that this time around, unlike the year before, as people watched his motorcave drive by in New York City, they were not cheering. But this is not to say his admirers did not show up. In fact, 3,000 people waited for Castro on the rainy day that his plane landed, but when he tried to get out of his car to greet the crowd on the other side of the fence, police officers used nights sticks to beat the people, and they prevented Castro from even leaving his car.

His crew was killing chickens and cooking moldy steaks in the Ritzy Shelburne Hotel. On the east side, the Cubans ended up making other arrangements, cementing the legend of Fidel's visit in nineteen sixty. This would be the moment that Fidel and the Cuban delegation checked into the Hotel Teresa in Harlem.

Raul Roa Kori was the junior most member of Cuba's permanent delegation to the UN at the time. In an interview with us, Roa explained how he had heard about the possibility of putting Fidel in the Cubans as

Up in Harlem. When the Cuban delegation had arrived in New York, as we mentioned, they were told to restrict their movements to Manhattan. Prior to Fidel's arrival, Raul Roakori and his Cuban UN colleagues discussed what hotel Fidel and the delegation should check into. The Waldorf The group ultimately settled on putting Fidel and his crew up at the Shelburne Hotel in Murray Hill, which was both close to the UN and easier to secure.

But they didn't stay at the Shelburne Hotel for very long. Here's how Raoul tells the story. I was at the time. in charge of relations with US organisations and intellectuals and I got a message. And uh member and founder of the Fair Play for Cuba committee, yes? Yes. There was this hotel Ferres in Harlem which was a few days.

But before Raoul could suggest the Teresa after this offer by Malcolm X, the delegation had decided on the Shellburn and Fidel made his way there. But eventually the manager of the Shellburn came to bother Raoul by demanding a conspicuously large deposit. hotel manager told me that he wanted to See if you will. And I told Fidel that the manager wanted to see him and he said, no, you go talk to him and see what he wants. So I went and he said that he wanted a $20,000 deposit.

The manager wanted a twenty thousand dollar deposit. thousand dollar deposit he says he is a bandit. You go and tell him he's a band. I'm not leaving this hotel. What were his exact words uh in Spanish, do you remember? Dile che è un bandido. And I told him, as a matter of fact, You passed on the exact words. the exact words and I told him the Prime Minister says that you are a bandit and that he is leaving the hotel meaning he will not make any possible

Known in its glory days at the Waldorf of Harlem, by the fall of 1960, Hotel Teresa was perhaps past its prime. But given the raucous reception that Fidel and his entourage immediately received upon their arrival uptown, that didn't matter one bit. Fidel's Harlem shuffle, as black activists and intellectuals would call it, quickly brought people into the street.

Maya Angelo, who was then thirty two years old, was at the scene that day, and here's how she later described it after learning Castro's move uptown from a fair play committee member. In moments we were on the street in the rain finding cabs or private cars or heading for subways. We were going to welcome the Cubans to Harlem. To our amazement, at eleven o'clock on a Monday evening we were unable to get close to the hotel.

Thousands of people filled the sidewalks and intersections, and police had cordoned off the main and side streets. Streets. I hovered with my friends on the edges of the crowd, enjoying the Spanish songs, the screams of Viva Castro, and the sounds of conga drums being played nearby in the damp night air. Juan Almaída, a senior Afro-Cuban rebel commander,

Crowds chanted his name and asked him to come out of the hotel. Historian and activist Rosemary Mealy would put together a book about Fidel's trip, compiling many testimonials. Among them was Sarah E. Wright, late black radical feminist.

And novelist, who said of this celebration and chanting, but these were not Cubans, these were my people, the poor, the abused, the disinherited, the trampled leavings of this country, offering their protection and and love to the leader of another poor, abused and disinherited people.

The streets were packed, but the crowd kept going, bringing light and warmth to a dark September night, bringing light and warmth into the bleakness of the Hundreds of heavily armed police tried to do their intimidating thing. The people did not even notice them.

We spoke with Bill Fletcher Jr., labor activist and former director of Trans Africa Forum about the significance of Fidel's trip to Harlem. The human revolution was then viewed by so many people, including the black Americas. This is this is a revolution. And there was Yeah. Mm-hmm. Oh. about the Cubans being at Harlem. capital of black America politically. Some would argue. Culturally. since it was clearly a

capital of black America. So it was something that to this day I think shocks many people. The first of the many illustrious guests Fidel would receive at the Hotel Teresa, and in fact, the person who got him into the Teresa, was Malcolm X. Even through the language barrier, Fidel made a striking impression on Malcolm X. who later told a journalist that Fidel was quote,

The only white person that I have really liked. There was an article about their meeting in the New York Citizen Call, written by black journalist Ralph Matthews. Malcolm X told Fidel, quote, Downtown for you, it was ice. Uptown is warm. The Premier smiled appreciatively. Yes, we feel very warm here. Then the Muslim leader, ever a militant, said, I think you will find the people in Harlem are not so addicted to the propaganda they put out downtown.

In halting English, doctor Castro said, I admire this. I have seen how it is possible for propaganda to make changes in people. Your people live here and are faced with this propaganda all the time. And yet They understand. This is very interesting. There are twenty million of us, said Malcolm X, and we always understand. We spoke with Rosemary Mealy, not only about the meeting between Fidel and Malcolm X, but what it signified.

This infamous meeting between Fidel and Malcolm X. It was not the beginning of Cuba of the Cuban nation's solidarity between African Americans and the people of Cuba. This encounter really represented a continuation of

of a over a hundred year old history of a solidarity that was born in the enslavement of African people in Cuba and the United States. During the abolitionist movement, there there are there's quite a few abolition black abolitionists who were linked to the um struggles that the Cuban people were having against Spain and then later on, in later years the US there were also ties Where Uh during Booker T Washington's era. We have criticism of Booker T's

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

And what does Fidel's visit to Harlem do to Harlem? How do Harlemites how did the Harlemites experience it as they told you? Well, um they they told me, you know, it it was an acknowledgement number one of black folk in New York, you know. That it was an of our reality, our existence. And also the recognition of Harlem at that time was where That was the safest place that black folk could live. I mean and and it was just not just and when I say black folk I'm not just talking about

African Americans. There was a large Panamanian community there. There was a large Dominican community, Puertorriqueños. So for Fidel and the delegation to come to Harlem, it was an acknowledgement that We existed. S this visit from Fidel put Harlem on front pages all over the world, one Harlem resident told a news reporter, quote, I'm glad Castro came up here to show these people we are somebody. Another was a bit blunter. Castro sure made a fool out of them white folks.

British historian Simon Hall also wrote a book about the Ten Days in Harlem, and in an interview he explained how the US government would often try to keep foreign dignitaries and foreign press. out of Harlem, such as the year before all of this in nineteen fifty nine, when Nikita Khrushchev tried to visit the neighborhood.

When Nikita Khrushchev visited the US in nineteen fifty nine, he was really insistent that he wanted to go to Harlem. And he kept on and kept on and kept on he wanted to go to Harlem. And eventually his um minders, the American minders, agree that he can go to Harlem. But they take him then basically at like five o'clock in the morning on the way to the airport.

Um just so it just sort of whizzes through it and there's no one around because they don't want it to become a um a kind of a thing because you know the last thing the American government wants is to draw attention to its domestic a race problem and particularly to draw attention to its race problem in the north.'Cause the story the Americans tell is that this is a southern problem, it's being worked out uh you know, peacefully and democratically through our constitutional form of government.

uh looking and particularly the international spotlight to fall on the problem of race in one of America's most important northern cities, a city which has a reputation as a kind of bastion of American liberalism. Castro forged other relationships during this trip. He met with North Korea's Kimil Sung, Indian Prime Minister Jawahar al Nehru, President of Ghana, Kwame and Kruma,

and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He also met with the leader of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who, as we mentioned earlier in the episode, would soon be assassinated in his country. And that's an important meeting for all kinds of reasons, but one of them was that

This was a year and a meeting of the UN at a moment in which so many African nations had kicked out their colonial overlords and become independent. And this was a point made by someone we spoke with, an activist and educator in New York, Joe Kay. Uh nineteen sixty was the year of Africa. Uh, that was the year when when so many countries became independent of uh their colonial masters. Pumumba epitomized became the the the most important uh focal point for that

struggles these struggles that I've been describing. Not only did he represent an a key element of the African liberation movement, but he was also had a much more progressive social outlook and um identified with the masses in a way that certain uh other African leaders

uh who were independence leaders had not. Therefore he was doubly dangerous and he had to be gotten rid of. Uh not to mention the annu of course that the Congo was the richest country i in in the world in terms of its natural Resource. Raoulita Roa also recalled for us when Fidel met Lumumba. And Fidel also met with Patrice Lumumba, leader of the newly independent uh Republic of the Congo. Yes, and Fidel met him and told him that we supported this fellow.

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

Once the Cubans had been browbeaten and then moved to Harlem, he writes, quote, We were furious when we heard about this swinish behavior toward the Cuban delegation. After consulting with the members of our delegation, I proposed we make a trip to the new hotel and shake Fidel's hand and express our respect and sympathy. No, not sympathy, but indignation. Now on his journey to Harlem, he writes.

Our comrades told me the head of the American police guarding us was asking that I not go there, because unpleasant incidents could happen in that neighborhood, and he was talking against this visit in every possible way. That convinced me more than ever of the necessity to make the visit. When we arrived at the hotel, Castro and his comrades were waiting for us by the entrance. This was the first time I had ever seen him in person, and he made a powerful impression on me.

a man of great height with a black beard and a pleasant, stern face, which was lit up by a kind of goodness. He bent over me as though covering my body with his. Although my dimensions were somewhat wider, his height overpowered everything. Khrushchev noted with distaste the obvious evidence of the inequalities of America when visiting Harlem, but he was very excited to have met Castro. They only spent twenty minutes together, but Khrushchev and Castro's meeting was, as Simon Hall writes.

Highly symbolic for practically everyone. Uh my favourite day, to put it that way, is the twenty second of September, the Thursday, because Eisenhower gives his speech at the General Assembly and then he hosts a lunch for uh the representatives of Latin America that he deliberately excludes Fidel. And so Fidel goes back to the Theresa and he treats the employees of the hotel Okay.

And makes a big show about how he's much more happy to have lunch with the humble people of Harlem than with, you know, the great sort of imperialist Eisenhower. You know, that was Fidel. That was that's the Cuban delegation. When they're when they're insulted and and pushed to the side, they know who their friends are, you know, so they return back and they set up um They made the d the luncheon at the uh at the Teresa.

Khrushchev v came to th the Teresa and that was quite a symbol of the m the most powerful leader in the world next to the to the American president. was paying homage and and making a pilgrimage to Harlem. That did not pass unnoticed by b both by the peoples of Harlem because Harlem became for a time those ten days the an international capital the in the e international capital of the world as it were. Uh it creates and and helps to reinforce this uh this bond of solidarity and

you know, you see later in the decade, you know, um, people like Sturley Carmichael or Angelo Davis travelling to Cuba. They increasingly view the struggle in broader terms as part of a struggle against imperialism rather than simply as a struggle for kind of civil

uh civil rights. So I think that this this nineteen sixty trip i is an important kind of part in the evolution of that of that wider story of of kind of black internationalism and the and the kind of anti imperialism of the nineteen sixties. But you see Castro, he was very smart. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, see. When Eisenhower refused to meet with Castro when he came to this country before the election,

That son of a bitch, Castro. He went up there and he had lunch with the goddamn colored waiters at the Teresa Hotel in Harlem. I mean, I would have got him. We already had the poison for Christ's sake. We ingested it on some monkeys.

By March of nineteen sixty one, Howard Hunt had been taken off the job of Wrangling the Frente. With D Day approaching, Hunt's incompetence, and his insistence on trying to make his friend Manuel Artime the leader of the exiles, resulted in getting tossed from this job. After all, as he bragged in his memoir, there were enough Cubans going in and out of his Coral Gables apartment to make his landlady think he was just a really promiscuous gay guy, which he insisted to her he was not.

And there was of course all the cash, the lost secret documents, the photographs, it's et cetera, et cetera. His time was up. So the responsibility for forming the exile political coalition moved upstream very fast. Jose Miro Cardona, Tony Verona, and other members had agreed to make nice after being strong-armed. Manuel Rey, the you know, self styled most progressive of the bunch, who obviously all the Batistianos thought was a Marxist. Right. Um

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

It's all off. It's done. And you won't get to go back to Cuba and have your little country again. At the press conference in late March of nineteen sixty one announcing the formation of the CRC, what should have been a moment for unequivocal relief for Richard Bissell. Finally, the Cubans, they've been wrangled. Of course it had to come with some heartburn. Tony Verona said, quote, We have the forces necessary to overthrow Castro, end quote.

And saying that they'd been trained in camps in the Western Hemisphere. And Jose Miro Cardona, the head of the organization, he declared that the CRC would of course be the provisional government should any regime change in the future happen to Cuba. Oh Did I say that or just think it? So as all these pieces of the Bay of Pigs come together bit by bit, something else takes place in March of nineteen sixty one. It's partner. In the middle of the month, Florida King Pin Santo.

Chicago capo Sam Giancana and mob associate Johnny Rosselli meet in Miami Beach in Texas. The Patterson Johansson heavyweight match. weighing 194 and 3 quarter pounds. from Rockville, Central New York, Floyd Patterson. CIA handler Jim O'Connell arrives and passes three capsules of botulinum. Johnny Russelli. Rosselli in turn will get the pills into the hands of the actual assassin. A pair of tired heavyweights here at Miami. He's found someone very close to Castro.

Someone who is inside of the revolution. Not only that, someone who's inside of Castro's office. All they have to do is somehow slip. Castro. The invasion. At the bay of Thank you. Brand Johansson corner, as you see, is Whitey Bemstein is working over the cut in the white eyebrow. the final twenty seconds of the round.