I LOVE The Cold War. It's honestly my favorite part of history. Everyone acts like Captain Jack Sparrow. You never know who is on whose side & how long its going to stay that way. You have be quick on your toes in the Cold War, things can change in the blink of an eye.
I'll be honest with you. There are some less than truthful things that I've been known to tell people.
I'm not a liar, liar, pants on fire. I have a very, VERY, good reason to tell people these lies.
You see, not that many people have degrees in history & for the most part, unless they watch Fox News, they are apt to believe the few of us that do, especially when it comes to all things long dead. It puts you in a unique position, because, well, people talk.
They weren't malicious lies, they were just cleverly constructed to see if, maybe one day, in a bar or at a gathering, I hear my bull shit story told back to me.
If you want to, you can call it a lie but I like to look at it as a study in memetics.
THE FOLLOWING IS UTTER BULL SHIT!
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
THE FOLLOWING IS COMPLETE & UTTER BULL SHIT!
Actually, no, most of the story is true. You want enough truth where people can look it up.
During World War II, old W-W-I-I, the Nazis went steaming into Russia. Just like Napoleon did. In fact it was pretty much the exact same idea & it was because Hitler never played Risk as a child.
Risk was a game designed to teach children NOT to invade Russia. Seven extra armies, fine, but you can't hold that shit. Don't invade Russia until you already control the world.
Anyway, the same thing happened to Hitler as happened to Napoleon. It got cold.
But before it got a little cold, it looked like Hitler might achieve what Napoleon could not, & the last thing the Soviets wanted was to see their fearless leader in the hands of the Nazis.
Listen, for those of you that watch FOX News, we were allied with the Russians in WWII, we were NOT at war with them. Get your heads out of your asses.
So what the Soviets did was smuggle Stalin off to a safe harbor, someplace controlled by their American allies. You know, someplace warm where he could live in peace in exile.
Cuba, the vacation paradise.
Back then it was a vacation paradise, we've all seen Guys & Dolls. Cuba was once controlled by a series of brutal fascist dictators that answered directly to the United States so we could buy cheap sugar & have a nice vacation island & a couple of navy bases, all on the backs of poverty ridden Cubans.
It used to be a paradise....if you were a rich, white, & American.
But, while exiled in Cuba, Stalin met a promising young law student.
They bonded over many things. One of them being baseball. It turns out Stalin loved baseball as much as Castro did & he actually taught the young law student how to throw the curve ball that got him drafted into the Washington Senators.
Fortunately for Cuba & unfortunately for America, Castro decided to follow Stalin's other teachings, communism, & opted to be a revolutionary & NOT a second baseman.
END OF BULL SHIT!!!!! END OF BULL SHIT!!!! END OF BULLSHIT!!!!
The lie there was that Stalin never set foot in Cuba. Everything else was true. You want to always put a LOT of truth into your bull shit stories in case people actually look it up.
Feel free to tell as many people the bull shit story as you want. I do want to hear a stranger tell it back to me.
END OF BULL SHIT!!!!! END OF BULL SHIT!!!! END OF BULLSHIT!!!!
Today we are going to talk about rocks & hard places. More specifically, how Castro kept Cuba free when two super powers wanted to take over his little island.
Keep in mind, it wasn't just the US that wanted to make Cuba a puppet state, the USSR wanted it too. In fact, the only people that wanted Cuba to be Cuba was the Cubans.
Our story sort of starts with this:
It's the USS Maine & America blew it up so that we could blame it on the Spanish & take Cuba, the Philippine Islands & a number of other strategically located colonies away from Spain, "Liberate" them & make them US colonies.
That's why the Spanish-American War was not fought in either Spain or America.
My famous Great-Grandfather actually fought in Cuba.
He's super easy to spot, he's the little Paddy in the picture.
Anyway...we "liberated" Spain & installed a brutal dictator & after he stopped doing what we wanted we organized a "revolution" & removed him & put another dictator in place who would continue to do exactly what we told him to & we did this all because of...
We were honestly very open about Cuba being a colony. We had this thing in Congress called the "sugar quota" where we voted on exactly how much money we were going to allow Cuba for the fiscal year in exchange for its sugar. Most of the time, we liked to keep the island on the brink of starvation.
And then in the late 1950s there was another revolution.
Just as a side note, they were buds. Castro ended apartheid in South Africa...seriously he really did end it.
Stories like this are why I love the Cold War. You gotta be on your toes for this one.
You see in Angola, there were oil refineries that were owned by Americans & selling oil to Cuba even though there was a embargo...which only matters if you are a US company at home. When you are a US company off shores than the embargo means fuck all.
Don't believe it? Coca-Cola made Fanta Orange to sell the Nazis & IBM aided in the holocaust. National loyalty doesn't get in the way of business. You can look it up, most US corporations tend to sell to the countries we are fighting.
Now the CIA was attacking the US owned oil refineries on behalf of De Beers, because they were getting in the way of the blood diamond trade & Cuba needed the oil so they defended the refineries.
But Cuba didn't have a navy, so they rented one from the Soviet Union, used it to take their troops into Angola, to defend the US oil refineries from the CIA who was attacking them on behalf of a company located in Luxemburg in order to defend the diamond trade.
It is really SUPER complicated & it wasn't so much to defend capitalism & the free world from communism as it was to defend the money coming into US businessmen from the stock they held in De Beers.
At any rate, after Cuba defended US oil refineries from the US paramilitaries, funded by the CIA to pit one capitalist interest against another, it marched its army to the border of South Africa & gave them an ultimatum...since they were already in Africa & getting a navy was a pain.
And that's why Nelson Mandela & Fidel Castro are all buddy-buddy. Castro sort of helped him when no one else would.
Moving on. Or rather, moving back to our story....
The Russians had a revolution to overthrow the Tsar & put this guy in charge...after he won a counter-revolution against the United States Government who was backing the other Russian Revolutionaries & then after they lost, he won another little counter-revolution, this time against actual American soldiers...who were just pretending to be Russian.
It was during the Russian Civil War & we were backing the White Forces...if you want to look it up.
It's amazing what you don't learn in most history classes. Backing the white forces is why the USSR never really trusted America, even when they were allied with us.
But then Stalin came to power & he murdered the guy that actually won the Revolution & sent Trotsky to exile in Mexico where he was murdered with an ice-pick.
Stalin said, no, we are NOT going to be communist, we're going to have state-capitalism & he sort of tore down everything that Lenin & Trotsky worked so hard to build & redesigned the economic system to reflect capitalism only to have it controlled by the very top so he would have as much power as humanly possible.
And to top it all off, he starved his fellow Ukrainians to death.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it sounds horrible.
But Stalin was able to win WWII...sorry, it was really won at the Battle of Kursk, not D-Day...& while he was at it, he took a poor & backward agricultural country & industrialize it & modernized it in a single generation & no one has ever succeeded in doing that before, so by the time that World War II ended Russia was a super power.
And so was America.
There are two big boys on the block & while they are showing the world who had the bigger cock, a revolution was taking place 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
A Revolution staring these guys:
Fidel Castro
& Zack de la Rocha:
I'm sorry, I meant Ernesto "Che" Guevara
And thanks to the American education system, 90% of graduates in 2000 thought Che was actually Zack & the famous T-Shirt with the Korda photo was a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt.
Anyway, at first the US didn't bat an eye. Cuba kept having revolution after revolution in an attempt to shake off US control so it could actually feed it's people & one revolutionary after another let America buy him off once he got to power.
This Revolution was different, but we in the US didn't know that yet. So we invited Castro to New York to buy him off & like usual we hooked him up with an all expense paid room at the famous Waldorf Astoria as was the American tradition when buying off new Cuban revolutionaries.
But it turns out that Castro didn't go directly to the Waldorf Astoria like we expected him to. Actually, he went here first:
And of course that was because Castro was & is one of the world's most baseball obsessed leaders. So obsessed that he called the CIA & told them to postpone the meeting because he had to take one more trip.
And after he saw the Pirates game he went back to New York & because he was a fan of the American Civil Rights movement & absolutely despised racism, Castro opted to not take the all-expense paid room at the Waldorf Astoria & instead checked into a motel in Harlem.
And he did it to show his solidarity with the African-American community.
But he still made his second meeting with the CIA & they were pissed that he backed the Civil Rights movement.
Now the thing is that Castro wanted to cozy up to America. In fact, he idolized an American president & wanted to base the Cuban Government on his economic policy.
But the CIA didn't like that idea. They were cool with the baseball games, but really pissed that he showed solidarity with the African-Americans & even more pissed that he wanted to be a equal with the US on the floors of the UN & not subservient to us.
So the CIA got a whole bunch of soldiers & tried to stage a counter revolution
And it had worked before, the plan that we know today as the Bay of Pigs or "Operation Mongoose." It worked fine when we overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala in 1954 in Operation PBSUCCESS.
Which is the reason that Eisenhower got pissed at the CIA & gave his famous Military Industrial Complex speech.
So the CIA just scratched out the word "Guatemala" & wrote in the word "Cuba" & scratched out "PBSUCCESS" & wrote in the word "Mongoose."
.JPG)
The only problem was that Che was living in Guatemala in 1954 & he went straight to Castro & said:
So they sort of took all the guns that they could find & distributed them to public & told them to shoot anyone that invaded.
The CIA "exile army" was sort of faced by not only the fledgling Cuban military, but the entirety of the Cuban population. It was a dismal failure.
Even though it was this man's fault, Mr. Allen Dulles:
It was actually President John F. Kennedy that got the blame.
He took the blame in the press & then turned to Dulles & said.
Only it was Jack so he said it in a thick Bostonian accent.
And after the smoke cleared Castro looked around & said.
Because now one of the world's two super-powers was out to get him. So he lit a cigar & listened to his good buddy Che.
And when you are waiting for another US invasion that you probably wont be able to defend yourself against that sounded like a great idea.
So he got on the phone & called this guy:
His name was Kruschev & he was the head of state of the world's other super power, the Soviet Union, the USSR, Mother Russia.
And Kruschev said:
And it sounded great, because now Cuba had a deterrent against the next US invasion.
And then Nikita gave Castro a big hug & everyone thought it was love at first sight.
Until Nikita said:
And all the eye witnesses report that Castro said:
He was invaded because he didn't want Cuba to be America's bitch & now the Soviet Union told him that he was going to be their bitch.
And it is called the Cuban Missile Crisis because it happened in Cuba.
But it was really a face off between the USA & the USSR
And Jack said:
And then Castro said:
And Nikita said.
And then Castro lit a cigar because it was finally fucking over & now he had to sit back & try to figure out how not to make Cuba Russia's bitch now that it was free from the United States.
And that is why I love the Cold War.
So now you know the story of Cuba, heavily abridged & you can act like everyone else, pretend you are Captain Jack Sparrow & say:
I'll leave you with this:
I'm not a liar, liar, pants on fire. I have a very, VERY, good reason to tell people these lies.
You see, not that many people have degrees in history & for the most part, unless they watch Fox News, they are apt to believe the few of us that do, especially when it comes to all things long dead. It puts you in a unique position, because, well, people talk.
They weren't malicious lies, they were just cleverly constructed to see if, maybe one day, in a bar or at a gathering, I hear my bull shit story told back to me.
If you want to, you can call it a lie but I like to look at it as a study in memetics.
Memetics is the study of ideas & concepts viewed as "living" organisms, capable of reproduction & evolution in an "Ideosphere."
In other words:
You are familiar with them because you are on the interweb.
The first lie I liked to tell was about America's favorite past time:
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
THE FOLLOWING IS COMPLETE & UTTER BULL SHIT!
Actually, no, most of the story is true. You want enough truth where people can look it up.
During World War II, old W-W-I-I, the Nazis went steaming into Russia. Just like Napoleon did. In fact it was pretty much the exact same idea & it was because Hitler never played Risk as a child.
Anyway, the same thing happened to Hitler as happened to Napoleon. It got cold.
Listen, for those of you that watch FOX News, we were allied with the Russians in WWII, we were NOT at war with them. Get your heads out of your asses.
So what the Soviets did was smuggle Stalin off to a safe harbor, someplace controlled by their American allies. You know, someplace warm where he could live in peace in exile.
Back then it was a vacation paradise, we've all seen Guys & Dolls. Cuba was once controlled by a series of brutal fascist dictators that answered directly to the United States so we could buy cheap sugar & have a nice vacation island & a couple of navy bases, all on the backs of poverty ridden Cubans.
It used to be a paradise....if you were a rich, white, & American.
But, while exiled in Cuba, Stalin met a promising young law student.
Fortunately for Cuba & unfortunately for America, Castro decided to follow Stalin's other teachings, communism, & opted to be a revolutionary & NOT a second baseman.
END OF BULL SHIT!!!!! END OF BULL SHIT!!!! END OF BULLSHIT!!!!
The lie there was that Stalin never set foot in Cuba. Everything else was true. You want to always put a LOT of truth into your bull shit stories in case people actually look it up.
Feel free to tell as many people the bull shit story as you want. I do want to hear a stranger tell it back to me.
END OF BULL SHIT!!!!! END OF BULL SHIT!!!! END OF BULLSHIT!!!!
Keep in mind, it wasn't just the US that wanted to make Cuba a puppet state, the USSR wanted it too. In fact, the only people that wanted Cuba to be Cuba was the Cubans.
Our story sort of starts with this:
That's why the Spanish-American War was not fought in either Spain or America.
My famous Great-Grandfather actually fought in Cuba.
Anyway...we "liberated" Spain & installed a brutal dictator & after he stopped doing what we wanted we organized a "revolution" & removed him & put another dictator in place who would continue to do exactly what we told him to & we did this all because of...
"In my country, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the wee-mon."
We were honestly very open about Cuba being a colony. We had this thing in Congress called the "sugar quota" where we voted on exactly how much money we were going to allow Cuba for the fiscal year in exchange for its sugar. Most of the time, we liked to keep the island on the brink of starvation.
And then in the late 1950s there was another revolution.
Stories like this are why I love the Cold War. You gotta be on your toes for this one.
You see in Angola, there were oil refineries that were owned by Americans & selling oil to Cuba even though there was a embargo...which only matters if you are a US company at home. When you are a US company off shores than the embargo means fuck all.
Don't believe it? Coca-Cola made Fanta Orange to sell the Nazis & IBM aided in the holocaust. National loyalty doesn't get in the way of business. You can look it up, most US corporations tend to sell to the countries we are fighting.
Now the CIA was attacking the US owned oil refineries on behalf of De Beers, because they were getting in the way of the blood diamond trade & Cuba needed the oil so they defended the refineries.
But Cuba didn't have a navy, so they rented one from the Soviet Union, used it to take their troops into Angola, to defend the US oil refineries from the CIA who was attacking them on behalf of a company located in Luxemburg in order to defend the diamond trade.
It is really SUPER complicated & it wasn't so much to defend capitalism & the free world from communism as it was to defend the money coming into US businessmen from the stock they held in De Beers.
At any rate, after Cuba defended US oil refineries from the US paramilitaries, funded by the CIA to pit one capitalist interest against another, it marched its army to the border of South Africa & gave them an ultimatum...since they were already in Africa & getting a navy was a pain.
"Stop this racist shit or deal with Cuba. We will invade & everyone hates you more than they hate us."
And that's why Nelson Mandela & Fidel Castro are all buddy-buddy. Castro sort of helped him when no one else would.
Moving on. Or rather, moving back to our story....
It was during the Russian Civil War & we were backing the White Forces...if you want to look it up.
It's amazing what you don't learn in most history classes. Backing the white forces is why the USSR never really trusted America, even when they were allied with us.
And to top it all off, he starved his fellow Ukrainians to death.
But Stalin was able to win WWII...sorry, it was really won at the Battle of Kursk, not D-Day...& while he was at it, he took a poor & backward agricultural country & industrialize it & modernized it in a single generation & no one has ever succeeded in doing that before, so by the time that World War II ended Russia was a super power.
And so was America.
A Revolution staring these guys:
Fidel Castro
This Revolution was different, but we in the US didn't know that yet. So we invited Castro to New York to buy him off & like usual we hooked him up with an all expense paid room at the famous Waldorf Astoria as was the American tradition when buying off new Cuban revolutionaries.
But he still made his second meeting with the CIA & they were pissed that he backed the Civil Rights movement.
Now the thing is that Castro wanted to cozy up to America. In fact, he idolized an American president & wanted to base the Cuban Government on his economic policy.
So the CIA got a whole bunch of soldiers & tried to stage a counter revolution
Which is the reason that Eisenhower got pissed at the CIA & gave his famous Military Industrial Complex speech.
"Dude! Dude! I know exactly what the CIA is doing!"
So they sort of took all the guns that they could find & distributed them to public & told them to shoot anyone that invaded.
The CIA "exile army" was sort of faced by not only the fledgling Cuban military, but the entirety of the Cuban population. It was a dismal failure.
Even though it was this man's fault, Mr. Allen Dulles:
"You're fired bitch!"
Only it was Jack so he said it in a thick Bostonian accent.
And after the smoke cleared Castro looked around & said.
"Fuck."
Because now one of the world's two super-powers was out to get him. So he lit a cigar & listened to his good buddy Che.
"Dude, the USSR is a super power too, we can, like, totally be communist & get them to protect us."
And when you are waiting for another US invasion that you probably wont be able to defend yourself against that sounded like a great idea.
So he got on the phone & called this guy:
And Kruschev said:
"Vonderful. Mother Russia vill be Cuba's friend. Ve Vill take you under our vings. Ve vill be the buddies."
And it sounded great, because now Cuba had a deterrent against the next US invasion.
Until Nikita said:
"Now ve vill give you the missiles."
And all the eye witnesses report that Castro said:
"Fuck."
He was invaded because he didn't want Cuba to be America's bitch & now the Soviet Union told him that he was going to be their bitch.
But it was really a face off between the USA & the USSR
And Jack Kennedy said:
"Take the missiles down!"
And Nikita said:
"No"
And Castro said:
"Please listen to Kennedy!"
And Nikita said:
"No!"
And Castro said:
"Fuck!"
And Dean Acheson said
"Start a nuclear war with Russia!'
And Jack said:
"No!"
And Dulles said:
"Then we'll see you in Dallas."
And Castro said:
"Fuck!"
And then Bobby said:
"We'll trade you our missiles in Turkey & not invade Cuba ever again if you take them down."
And then Castro said:
"Please, please, please, take the fucking deal?"
And Nikita said.
"Deal."
And Dulles said:
"See you in LA, Bobby!"
And then Castro lit a cigar because it was finally fucking over & now he had to sit back & try to figure out how not to make Cuba Russia's bitch now that it was free from the United States.
So now you know the story of Cuba, heavily abridged & you can act like everyone else, pretend you are Captain Jack Sparrow & say:
I'll leave you with this:
Fucking Great Sam! LOL
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