The Cold War II: MKULTRA

Warning Explicit Content:   Possibly Offensive

There  are some things in history that people just refuse to believe.  It doesn't matter what the facts are, you can show them the declassified reports & congressional trials & the testimonies & they will still look at you like you're crazy.  It is too horrible for them to believe, too far fetched, too science fiction.

It's the type of shit that Alex Jones & Libertarians don't even believe.  You know, the really crazy people that think Lincoln was killed by the Federal Reserve Bank & that 9-11 was a Jewish conspiracy planned by the Rothschild family.  You know the truly insanely paranoid people in America.  They won't even touch this.

But the fact is it happened.  What you are about to read actually happened.  You can't get around it, the evidence is there & it is all just a FOIA request form your fingertips.

So, are you ready to go down this rabbit hole?

"Don't go near that elevator - that's just what they want us to do... trap us in a steel box & take us down to the basement."

 Cream colored ponies & crisp apple streudels
Doorbells & sleigh bells & schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

“There are times, however, & this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison & sex is death? If making love might be fatal & if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV & relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich & others eat shit & die.”

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose & eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

“In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.” 

Well, now that that ugliness is out of the way, it's time to get down to brass tacks & find out a little about history, or rather LSD, or more specifically mind control, domestic terrorists, murder, & forced child prostitution.

I actually had a friend who was shocked to find out about this & in retrospect I should have posted something about this sooner.  Especially, you know, since a lot of my emphasis in college dealt with the Cold War & Latin America & the CIA & MKULTRA sort of weaves its way through all of that.

Just as a warning, this one is probably going to be a little too dark to have fun with.

That's right, we are talking about:

MKULTRA

It's an honest to goodness real thing that hardly anyone has ever really heard about & even fewer people actually believe.  But it is true, it was a program & Bill Clinton apologized for it, after it really hit the presses, despite the fact that it was supposed to have been closed before he took office, & that was thanks to the Church Committee who said some pretty awful & pretty honest things about what the CIA was doing.

You see in the 1990s something wonderful happened, it was a gift for anyone that majored in History, a gift that was called the Freedom of Information Act.  Which sort of means, if you want to know something that the government is doing or has done, all you have to do is ask.  

Majoring in history sort of became the act of filing one FOIA request after another after another & we have this guy to thank for all that newly declassified information.

His name was Bill Clinton & he sort of tried to do what his favorite president promised to do thirty-odd-years ago.  The thing is, Bill went about it differently.  He tried to deconstruct the institution from the outside be declassifying things & his favorite president tried to splinter the CIA into a thousand different pieces from the inside.

His name was Jack Kennedy & he wanted to destroy the CIA.  He made a promise to splinter it into a thousand pieces & he did it because of a warning he got from his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower.

When Eisenhower was president the CIA was in transition.  They moved away from the hole Operation Paperclip, "we are going to preform intelligence & counter intelligence work" & moved into the "we are going to serve US business & not the US government."

So, without telling the president what was going on, & with a series of lies to Congress, the CIA & a man named Allen Dulles preformed an act of espionage that can also be considered treason.

He was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency & like everyone else in the CIA at the time, he was born to a rich family that wouldn't let him run the family business.  So, during WWII, he joined the navy & started working for ONI & was almost immediately transferred to the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.

OSS stands for "Oh So Secret."

I'm joking, it really stands for "Office of Strategic Services."

At first they were there to run intelligence during the world's biggest war.  But, afterwards, during the Cold War, the CIA dropped the whole intelligence thing & the FBI had to pick up the slack.

That's why the FBI had all the major counter-intelligence busts during the Cold War.  If you want to learn about how to catch spies, it's the FBI that did it, not the CIA. 

What the CIA was doing now was making money.

It is a little country called Guatemala & it is in Central America.  It is important because the United Fruit Company (UFCO) owned a lot of land & the nation's rail roads.  ALL the nations rail roads.

It is also important because Allen Dulles & his friends owned a LOT of stock in UFCO, you know, the company that gives us Chiquita Banana.

Well, it turns out that Guatemala had an election & the people voted for a reformist named Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán who ran on a platform of increasing the literacy rate, ending poverty, & feeding the people.  And he was going to pay for all of that by taxes.

These taxes included taxing the land that UFCO owned, for the first time, at a couple of cents per acre.  Not much at all.  But that would cut a little into the profits.

So Allen Dulles lied to congress & overthrew the new government in Guatemala in order to save a couple of penny's an acre in taxes for Chiquita Banana, which was a company that he & his buddies owned stock in.

It was called Operation PBSUCCESS & after everything went down Eisenhower found out the truth about what happened.  They weren't overthrowing a communist backed regime with ties to the Soviet Union, they in fact overthrew a democratically elected president that refused to cooperate with the Soviet Union.

Don't believe it?  Look it up, it'll take you two seconds.  Don't believe any of this?  Look it up, what you are reading is declassified & taught in Universities all across America, it is not at all secret any longer.  You can easily look all of this up.

So Eisenhower gave the nation a warning:

But by the time he gave the address, he had already served his time in office & a brand new president was taking his place.  Jack was coming into office.

And Eisenhower felt the need to warn him too.  The CIA was not under America's control, they were making their own missions based on business & corporations & not the will of the presidency or the American people.  In essence he told Kennedy that he lost control of the CIA.  It was the military industrial complex, not the government, that Dulles answered to.

And this was proven accurate because the very moment Kennedy took office, the CIA tried to do the same thing in Cuba, using the exact same plan that they had used in Guatemala.

Only this time the plan failed, because you can't play the same trick twice & actually expect people to fall for it.

You know:

"Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...fool me twice...er...um...fool me twice you can't get fooled again."

Like Caesar, Kennedy was surrounded by enemies & he saw one thing very clearly, he had to destroy the CIA.  So he fired Allen Dulles & started working on dismantling the organization.

The CIA was under threat from the president, but thankfully they had read one of the most popular novels of the era & found inspiration within its pages.  It started in the 1950s, but after Jack's attack, they pushed the program into high gear.

They knew they couldn't exist with the presidency after them, so they looked to turn science fiction into fact as a means of staying alive & surviving.

They called the project:

MKULTRA

And before they could find the solution, through what some consider a monumental stroke of coincidental good fortune, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Jack in Dallas Texas, ending the CIA's problems.

He was a lone communist sympathizer & he murdered president John F. Kennedy because he loved the Soviet Union & Cuba & it was the perfect Cold War story.

Or it would be if he admitted to killing the president.  He never did.  He was still claiming he was innocent.  He was claiming he was a patsy.

Fortunately, that lone communist sympathizer was then liquidated by a patriotic American, before he had a chance to stand trial...& while he was in police custody.  Not at all suspect.

But we all know that this is the honest to God truth because there was an investigation on the assassination & we can read that investigation in The Warren Report.

And we know that The Warren Report was accurate because the investigation was lead by a man that had planned more assassinations of more high ranking politicians than anyone else in US history.  A man that knew the spy game better than anyone.

The investigation was lead by none other than Allen Dulles, the man who had been head of the CIA until Jack Kennedy fired him.  But got his job back the moment Oswald killed Kennedy.

So, bullet dodged, great, but now the cold hard realization had hit home with the CIA.  If it happened once it can certainly happen again & there is absolutely nothing to stop another president from dismantling the corporate intelligence agency & giving it back to the people.

So the question is, how do you program people?

The answer seemed clear at first.

Lysergic acid diethylamide was a chemical discovered by a man named Arthur Stoll using ergot, which was a grain fungus found on rye that is known to make people hallucinate.  It was one of the things that we blame the Salem Witch Trials on.

It seemed like a good enough place to start.  Why not, clearly a power hallucinogenic alters the individual's perception & that might be the place to begin probing into brain washing with the intent of mind control.

And we already knew that LSD could alter the mind to an extent where people can achieve nearly impossible leaps of imagination.

James Watson, for instance, in 1953 made enormous breakthroughs in DNA, breakthroughs that pushed the envelope of modern science & genetics all while, you know, tripping balls on LSD.

And it was about the time that we started to find the link between things like cave art & the birth of abstract thought, spirituality, & civilization as we know it all came with the first known uses of hallucinogenic drugs.

Essentially, archeologists & anthropologists were starting to say that we have things like cave art because certain drugs forever altered the way we as human beings think.

Essentially we were starting to link cave art with Ancient Aliens.  Fuck, my bad, I'm sorry.  What I meant was that we have cave art & the birth of culture as well as programs like Ancient Aliens because of things like Magic Mushrooms.

So it wasn't really that far of a stretch.  The science was sort of sound.  All the CIA needed to do was take what we already knew that hallucinogenics did to the mind & use it to program a human being into an assassin that doesn't know he is an assassin & an elected official that that is under your control & has no free will.

We've all done it before.  Remember when you were dropping acid with your friends in college & you thought it would be a good idea to fuck with them, so you leaned over & whispered shit in their ear?

"Sara, hey Sara, Satan says he wants you to get Sam a cream soda & an orange.  Make sure to peel it for him.  Satan doesn't know if  can peel it himself."

We've all done it before for fun, but the CIA was doing it to turn people into weapons, not to persuade your friends to get you some orange citrus goodness.

But, even as early as 1953, there were people that worked for the CIA & thought that this project was going a little too far.  Frank Rudolph Olson was one of them.  He was working for the CIA as a biological warfare scientist when they tried to test it on him.

They slipped him LSD while he was at a pretty upscale party in downtown Manhattan.  He was staying at the Hotel Statler at the time.

When they gave it to him he had no idea about the existence of MKULTRA & after he came down, about eight-hours later, he started making phone calls & discovered that he was an early test subject for the new mind control program.

Nine days later they threw him out the window of the Hotel Statler for threatening to out the program to the public.

After Olson, they picked different test subjects.  The CIA started administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts & prostitutes, "people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it.  It beat the hell out of drugging their own biochemical scientists & besides, prostitutes, prisoners, & drug addicts were far more expendable.

They kept one man hallucinating & awake for 179 days on end while they were attempting to program him.

It was after this Kentucky 179 day incident that they saw a little success on the mental patient.  He wasn't exactly programed, but he wasn't as insane as he had been when they started, so they decided to expand the LSD experiments to colleges & universities.

Some notable graduates of the LSD MKULTRA experiments are:

Ken Kesey, Mary Prankster & author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Robert Hunter, the singer/songwriter best known for his association with the Grateful Dead.

And one of my favorite writers: Allen Ginsberg, famous for Howl.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix."

In other words, thanks to the CIA's experimentation with LSD we had a certain movement in the '60s & '70s that Timothy Leary gets a lot of the credit for.

And they also sort of discovered that feeding people LSD has the exact opposite effect.  The conclusion of MKULTRA was that, even after a single use of LSD, the subject becomes impossible to program & far less likely to be open to outside suggestions including the simple use of propaganda & interrogation techniques as they discovered through the merging of MKULTRA with Project ARTICHOKE. 

Essentially, the Libertarian belief that fluoride in the water has the same effect as LSD & is used to brainwash people is completely bull shit because LSD makes it impossible to program people & fluoride has no mind altering properties.

The mind control program hit a dead end thanks to the Merry Pranksters.

However, thanks to the LSD experiments, Fort Brag started a New Age branch of the military that tried to make soldiers into Jedi Knights, had links to the Heavens Gate Cult in  California, & ultimately resulted in two minor successes.

1) The use of the Barny Theme Song during interrogations.
2) The 1980s & 90s television recruiting slogan "Be All that You Can Be."

But you know it best as:

And, at any rate, that is NOT what Clinton was apologizing for.  In fact, he wasn't even apologizing for the time when the CIA sprayed LSD into New York subways to see how it would effect the crime rate.

What Clinton was apologizing for in the video at the start of this lesson was a branch of the MKULTRA program called Operation Midnight Climax.

That's right, Clinton was apologizing for the use of Child Prostitution in the MKULTRA program that was designated "Operation Midnight Climax."

It started with brothels in San Francisco.  Brothels filled with little American girls that the CIA had abducted off the streets, frightened Amber Alerts that were going to be forced into prostitution so that the CIA could gain valuable information.

Mind you, the information that they wanted wasn't from Russian spies.  They were using child prostitutes to gain information from American businessmen & politicians, people who worked for rival corporations that the CIA did not yet have ties to & vested stock portfolios in & politicians that might want to shut the CIA down or be unfriendly to their corporate interests.

Let's face it, when you have enough wealth & power to make Solomon blush, you feel entitled to taste the most forbidden fruit possible.  Laws don't apply to them, laws apply to the lower classes.   In this case, the wealthy & powerful in America wanted to rape little girls & the CIA wanted to spy on them for corporate leverage. So they just appealed to their most base desire...human exploitation.

It was a side project, but one that fell under the greater MKULTRA framework, as many of the little girls that were used were also victim of the new experiments.

Let's face, if the Libertarians win, & they get both their platform of deregulation of business & the legalization of prostitution, Operation Midnight Climax will be horrifically legal & not just horrific.

MKULTRA took a turn down an even darker path.

LSD didn't work, so they turned to torture.

 The concept originated with the US Marine Corps boot camp & an ongoing debate between how the other branches train people & how the Marine Corps trains it's people.

You see the Marines believe that you have to break your recruits down & then you build them up again from scratch & the Army, the Air Force, & the rest of the Navy all seem to believe that once you are broken you stay broken.

This seems to be confirmed because it is the Marine Corps discharges that tend to do things like the shooting at the University of Austin Texas.

Only where the Marine Corps is tough on enlisted men, it doesn't physically torture them until they break down into a stuttering mess.  This is exactly what the CIA did & they started it with the little girls, the Amber Alerts, that they took to stock their brothel that they wanted to use to spy on wealthy Americans that felt entitled to the taboo.

And it proved moderately effective, at least it made the girls so fucking frightened of their CIA handlers that they were willing to do anything to not get tortured again.

Like the LSD experiments, the CIA expanded it's torture experiments to the University population & had some interesting graduates.

Candy Jones, the actress & model had gone through both the LSD & the torture experimentation in her life time.

James "Whitey" Bulger was one of the prisoners they tested on when he was in jail & the CIA was making the transition.

Of course you know him better as Jack's character in The Departed.

But the most interesting character to date, the man who graduated from the MKULTRA torture experimentation at a very young age is  Ted Kaczynski.

But you might not recognize the name or the photograph.  You know him better as this guy:

Ted wrote a "Unibomber Manifesto" & made it pretty clear that he was targeting the university professors that were working in the MKULTRA program.

You can actually read it, it used to be available at Borders & you could pick it up on Amazon & a fair amount of websites, if you are interested.

We are coming to the end of our story.  Or at least what we know of our story.

Sandra Day O'Connor said this about the MKULTRA court cases she oversaw:

"No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary & unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, & the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential ... to satisfy moral, ethical, & legal concepts.' If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators."

But the thing is only the tip of the iceberg hit the courts.

A taste came out in the 1950 Feres v United States case.  A little more came out because of the death of Olson.

A big chunk of it came out 1975 because of the Church Committee.

Frank Church, a US Senator & a Democrat from Ohio  took the CIA into congress & headed a committee to attempt to dismantle the organization like Jack Kennedy had promised to do following the Bay of Pigs.

What we know of MKUlTRA today came out largely during the Church Committee & the rest came out in the congressional testimonies in the middle 1990s because of Clinton's wave of declassification.

But it was really only the tip.  What we know is only what congress, what the US Government was able to seize before the CIA systematically destroyed the real horrible secrets of MKULTRA out of fear of exposure from the Church Committee.

Don't believe it?  Look it up, it'll take you two seconds.  Don't believe any of this?  Look it up, what you are reading is declassified & taught in Universities all across America, it is not at all secret any longer.  You can easily look all of this up.

I'll leave you with this:

The Cold War Part I: The Mongoose

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.

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:

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...

"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.

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.

"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....

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."

The only problem was that Che was living in Guatemala in 1954 & he went straight to Castro & said:

"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:

It was actually President John F. Kennedy that got the blame.

He took the blame in the press & then turned to Dulles & said.

"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:

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:

"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.

And then Nikita gave Castro a big hug & everyone thought it was love at first sight.

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.

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 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.

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: