Episode 151: The Cuban Embargo

Hello, and welcome to Willares Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who is talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I am Alice Gordor Kelly.

I am the person who is speaking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Viva, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Thank you.

Hi.

Well done.

I don't know.

I don't know any Spanish.

Sorry.

Hi, I'm Liam Anderson, and my pronouns are he and him.

And we have a guest.

We have

El guesto.

Well done.

If the racially sensitive drop.

Buenastar des y bienvenidos a bueno aí está su problema un podcas cuandí apositivas.

Mi nombre es noa y uso el problembre el en español y ji him en inglés.

Okay, vaya.

I like the him in English, but in a sort of accent.

You know, I approved of that.

Precisely.

I will be doing that many times in this podcast accidentally.

Bonde estar la biblioteca.

Yeah.

Great question.

Who can say?

The level of sort of cultural sensitivity that we're going to demonstrate

over the next five to six hours.

All I can say is.

You have an excuse because I am Puerto Rican.

So like it's, I'm technically allowed to, you know,

I'm technically allowed to say it.

fantastic i'm allowed to say buenos yes

i think they allow most people to say the phrase buenos dias

don't get in the seat of buenos yes

hola como estás oh jesus manso cisto we

we're off to a great start um it's gonna be a great podcast yes i taught you spanish in high school

Why am I here?

Well, if you look at you look at this photo, do you look at this photo?

Yeah,

I can see the photo with all of the lack of freedom happening.

Yes.

Yes.

There's no freedom here.

None whatsoever.

There's so much of it.

There's no consumer choice.

There's, you know.

This isn't maybe one of the worst things I've ever seen morally.

I mean, I do this for work all the time.

I'm constantly seeing like NTSB photos of like kids who have been thrown from 30,000 feet or like people who have like died in like horrible situations.

Diver dolphin.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

People who are just like reduced to like back bacon.

But you show me this.

You come to my workplace and you show me one brand of each consumer item.

The most

antive

anti-capitalist, anti-liberal thing you could show me.

I do want to actually, you know, correct that because there's actually multiple brands brands of the same consumer item but they're all government owned um we are here to talk about the cuban embargo um and why you cannot have decent rum in the united states unless you buy dong coo they don't pay me to say that it's just good

this is yeah this is why you can't get

the garza

it's why this is why you can't get the goods you can't get the good scars you can't get the good rum uh and

and it also causes famine um so that's nice cool that's we'll we'll get into that an uplifting an uplifting five or six hours of cultural sensitivity oh yeah this is going to be my version of you know when liam gets like really upset about something god damn it

when liam gets like really like like like um

uh sort of like moral crusade moment that's going to be me on this entire episode yeah because of how incredibly anxious I feel about that.

Speaking of famine, we have to do the goddamn news.

Well, five minutes of intro.

It was really dicey there whether I would have the right drops queued up.

I mostly just focused on the Rambo five Buenos Diaz and the

clear and present dangerous Si Senor.

So the International Court of Justice has said to Israel, hey, cut that out.

Yeah, they've said

that

in a kind of limited way.

So South Africa brought a series of very easily proven charges of genocide and war crimes

in

the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, which is the UN's highest court.

It's not the same as the ICC, the International Criminal Court, although they're both in The Hague.

And what the ICJ has done is they have announced a series of interim measures.

Not everything that South Africa asked for.

What the South Africans wanted was the ICJ to order Israel to withdraw their troops and cease military operations, which they were, you know, all of this is unenforceable.

Israel's never going to do any of it, but they wanted them to be told to stop.

What they've been told instead is to stop committing genocide,

which, you know, is an insulting kind of slap on the wrist thing, but that's international law for you.

You can tell that this has some effect on Israel's sort of like prestige and standing and stuff based on the fact that every Israeli government spokesperson on Twitter is the angriest they've ever been, and they're going to try and destroy the UN Relief and Works Agency in retribution.

Oh, yeah, they just came out with a bunch of bullshit like the day afterwards, and everyone pulled funding.

Yeah, well, not everyone, just a bunch of well, in the US, UK.

I mean,

I listen, Israel already fucking kills enough UNRWA staff and destroys enough of their facilities.

Nothing new.

Yeah, so let's go through what changes.

Everyone's Hamas.

So, you know, everyone's a target.

The ICJ is Hamas.

The Hague is Hamas.

The Netherlands is Hamas.

The UN is definitely Hamas.

The DSA are Hamas.

Hamas is also ISIS.

You've got to remember that.

That's true.

So by the transitive property, the UN is ISIS, which ISIS are doing properly.

UN is ISIS.

Does ISIS have internal caucuses, do you think?

Yeah, I'm an ISIS.

Sure.

You'll have to bleed that whole sentence.

Sorry.

Yeah.

So um just cut it actually but

all of my guys get door door-to-door canvassing for isis

yeah so what this joining isis to push it to the left

we're doing entry as from within yeah yeah what what this is doing is uh this is setting off an investigation the icj is now going to investigate whether or not Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

They will report back on that in two to three years minimum.

Yeah, so it's going to take them two to three three years of, I don't know how you spend that time.

Like, I know what fisting your own ass.

Yeah, because I know what war crimes investigators are.

And I know that like those investigations can take a long time when you don't have a sheaf full of fucking TikToks of the people doing the war crimes saying

we are doing the war crimes.

Right.

We dare anyone to investigate us about it because there's nothing you can do.

It's literally like a Captain Planet villain being like, no one will ever.

Yeah, exactly.

No one's going to stop us doing this genocide that we're really happy to be doing.

You're in a big factory marked genocide factory.

You should be

as a lib, obviously.

You know, confirmed liberal that I am.

Well, we also get Bellingcat dollars.

I don't know if you saw that point.

Congratulations.

It's been funny that Bellingcat has stopped talking about any of this, by the way.

But yeah, so it's not weird, right?

But it's notable.

um what i was going to say is that this is good that this has happened even though it's meaningless not only because it isn't annoys the israelis and lends a air of much justified and needed legitimacy to all kind of resistance and protest against the genocide right but also because if you want to have some kind of system of international law left debatable but if you want to this was the bare minimum right if if the icj sort of deal yeah exactly if the icj had just been like no you're fine go right right ahead, then it would have killed the whole like prospect of anything even pretending to be international, humanitarian, or stone dead.

Right.

Oh, that's that's cheery.

Yeah, I mean, this is the cheery podcast.

We're going to talk about

things that are nice, things that are good.

Rum, probably.

Yeah, which has no, you know, there's not any cruelty associated with my consumer goods.

That's right.

Right.

And there's not going to be anything depressing in this episode.

Don't worry.

Yeah.

Another

news.

Ooh, Earth Ryder.

Thanks for the Great Lakes.

This election is so fucking useless and depressing.

Yeah.

Just make me president.

I can't take office for ever three more years, but it's fine.

But so President Biden, right?

Guy that we love, friend of the show.

Oh, absolutely.

We have to be very ableist to him by noticing the fact that now it seems that he don't talk good.

He was not talking good at a visit to a brewery earlier this week.

He's pointing out that this is, we should point out that this is not us just ragging on him for slipping up, but this is like a pattern of noticeable mental decline.

And we deserve better as a people than two that are rapist and Joe Biden.

Two rapists.

Two rapists.

Two rapists, really.

This is the most insane thing about this is that when multiple women accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, one of the people who said that she believed those women, because believing women was in vogue for those two weeks, was Kamala Harris.

His vice president

is on the record agreeing that she believes that he's a rapist.

He's a part of all that is around.

It's true.

Someone at the DNC headquarters right after that was like, okay, we got to shut down all the Me Too stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

everyone stopped talking about that.

Yeah, exactly.

So twisting the Me Too dial back and forth and looking back at the audience.

The thing is,

if Joe Biden is facilitating a genocide, as he is in Gaza, about to help facilitate

another one on the US's southern border, as he is,

and if he's, you know, a sort of like accused rapist and assaulter of women, which he is, then it makes me want to not be as as fair to him when he says something wrong and it's funny.

And it's

as well, the kind of the ableism thing here is that it's interesting because Biden's part of his whole deal, right, is that he grew up with a stutter.

He crushed that speech impediment by sheer force of will, like Teddy Roosevelt, in order to become a politician in the first place.

Right.

And, you know, occasionally he still fumbles stuff.

That's fine.

Like, I'm not doing it.

Right.

Sure.

This is not that.

we're not all facilitating genocide well it's it's it's two things right first of all it's the fact that this appears to me to my untutored eye to be something worse than the guy fumbles some of his lines sometimes he's getting stranger and worse in a way that to me seems distinct from that but also

i think if this guy has out of hubris made himself the sole bulwark between the US and another term of Donald Trump and maybe no elections ever again, we all get killed, then I don't think you can meaningfully be ableist to him.

And I don't respect him saying or his supporters saying that it is ableist to notice things about him.

Right.

Did Bregan ever get this bad?

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, he did.

But I also, I do want to push back on the idea that this is necessarily mental decline because I live in Los Angeles.

And

sometimes when you do like a lot of Botox and facelifting, it becomes very difficult to move your mouth muscles.

He genuinely should not have had the last facelift.

And the thing is that you don't mess with them

if you don't want.

And I agree with that.

Don't mess with the women of America unless you want the benefit is what he's supposed to have said that time.

What does he think the benefit is?

Well, actually, I think we know what he thinks the benefit is considering what we had said earlier.

But a valuable lesson.

Don't mess with the men in America unless you want to get the benefit.

So what he meant to say was that investing in infrastructure, this is his big pitch, right?

Is to go to the fucking Minnesota and Wisconsin for some fucking reason and be like, I'm spending money on infrastructure.

I built you this new bridge in Demsville, Blue State.

And then go.

Jump monkeys, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Please, please vote for me in two states that I'm absolutely going to win anyway.

But the point.

Wisconsin is dicey, actually.

So that makes sense.

The two points, the point he was making, right, was I've invested in the Great Lakes to make them cleaner.

And that water from the Great Lakes is used to make the beer here

at Earthrider Brewery.

Thanks, Great Lakes, for Earthrider beer.

What he said was, in brewed beer here, brewed beer says,

break the brew beer here.

We're finding ooh, Earthrider, thanks for the Great Lakes.

And I'm sorry, but that's funny.

You can't tell me that that isn't funny.

The beer brewed here

is used to make the brew beer

to find,

ooh, Earth Rider, thanks for the Great Lakes.

What a great country we have.

I won't be voting for this guy, so I don't care.

I live in California, so stop harassing me.

Stop harassing me.

And I'm,

you know, thank God I've just been to Cuba so that I can, you know, flee and get a asylum.

I'm a political prisoner.

Just the arrogance, the absolute arrogance to make yourself the guy, the sole guy, right, who is like...

And he says this.

This is part of his marketing.

I'm the only one who has beaten Trump in an election.

I'm the only one who can beat him in an election.

By the way, bits are falling off of me.

And also, I have just destroyed the entire

caucus of

youth voters.

Don't need it.

That and all the Muslim voters, too.

Says white.

Yeah.

On the bright side, either of these two very old men could just kick the bucket at any moment and die.

President Levi, President Kamala, we know she knows her Marxism.

Yeah.

It's a long con.

A long game, but she's her and Starmer in it together to create this sort of 16th international.

Away from the lathe, please.

Kamala Harris doing the inside-outside strategy.

Speaking of reasons to flee the United States, in other news.

I just cut you off with the beeps there.

I'm so good at this.

There's border stuff happening.

All of it is bad.

They're making this movie called Civil War, written and directed by Alex Garland.

It's going to be interesting.

A24's Chud vs.

Woke is happening in real life slightly sooner than it should have been.

It's a marketing campaign.

Yeah, now that the strikes are over, you can promote your movies again.

I get it.

Yeah.

Yeah, so what's actually happening is that uh

texas wants to brutalize migrants even more than anyone else by dumping like razor wire obstacles upon which like absolutely grotesque to give you an idea of the kind of desperation involved doesn't stop people they just get hung up on the razor wire um right yeah

yeah so the feds have like want them to dismantle some of these razor wire obstacles in like a state park or whatever um and the attorney general and governor of Texas are running the constitutional law playbook of the Confederacy to be like, the federal law doesn't apply to us.

We can do whatever we want.

The sort of discredited idea that the federal government is a compact, a voluntary compact of the states.

We fought a war over this.

We literally did.

It's very decisively decided.

Yeah.

And now you have a bunch of

other governors sort of performing support and offering to send their national guards and stuff.

And Biden is doing as Biden loves to do and not not being

decisive.

And instead...

Oh, who's being decisive?

Yeah, he's being decisive to make it worse.

But a fucking way.

It's to do the like compromise border bill thing.

Yeah.

Which is probably one of the most racist things I've seen in city presidents.

Yeah, it's worse.

Like, it's as bad as anything Trump did.

I mean, it's, yeah.

And if Trump were to be doing it, the liberals would be like, how dare?

And now instead, like, because it's Biden doing it, because it's blue dude, you have to be like, oh, well, you have to vote for him because the other guy is going to do something that's exactly the same.

He's just going to do this.

He's going to be a different color party.

It's an easy solution to kids in cages is to put the adults in there with them.

Yeah.

I don't think that this is likely to escalate to

A24 Civil War.

However.

I will say two things about this, two caveats, right?

One is that you put things into these kinds of configurations configurations and they have a way of escalating unexpectedly sometimes.

And the other thing is, and this is for President Biden, because I know he's a fan and listening,

it doesn't matter whether you want to have Civil War II, if the other guy really wants to have Civil War II.

And right now, a bunch of them are pretending they want to have Civil War II.

And it's a pretty short leap with a lot of very radicalized people and they are playing with fire.

Oh, yeah.

It's a moment of some danger, I would say.

All I'm going to say is that if there is, in fact, civil war,

Presidente Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, y fair California, suenas el libre dead níña estadunidense por favor en vianos fusiles, y avión.

I don't want the Mexican military to liberate anything because the Mexican Navy still has it out for all of us, I think.

I am personally happy to be liberated by the Mexican military and remind them that

as a former member of the steering committee of the Democratic Socialists of America Los Angeles, I can be useful in implementing

a Marxist letters program in Southern California.

President Xi, please send Cheng Du J24, joint strike fighter.

Yeah.

We graduated to the J24, have we?

Yeah.

Need those

generation shit.

Yeah.

I mean, they're cool planes.

They've got canard wings.

What are you going to do?

I mean,

there is a part of me that just sort of like

gets the desire to just fucking

massively overreact.

I think that's in many ways the safest thing to do.

Like, I think, were I Biden in this situation and my brain worked,

you know, I would sort of like immediately just massively overreact to this and stamp down now.

You know, this is the kind of shit that should get you arrested as a governor.

Right.

Yeah.

And this is the sort of thing.

Yes.

You go into the secret Abraham Lincoln archives and pull the big lever that says restart reconstruction, you know.

Yeah, genuinely.

I mean, so day one, you should be, you should be federalizing these states' National Guards.

Um, but which you have the power to do.

We

as recently as like the 50s, we did that.

It's completely, completely possible.

But we can't do anything that would make anything better in any way.

So it has to be worse.

We have to like continue stepping towards this, like, I guess, perceived inevitability of the big woke versus Chud showdown.

Um, and my, my concern is-I'm just gonna keep caving.

Well, my concern with this, as with everything else, is that you kind of these things aren't predictable, and you may find yourself at a kind of flashpoint where things trip over into woke versus chud before anyone thinks.

But what can you do?

Besides, um,

I really, really hope that Joe Biden,

like, soon, like, immediately.

Thank God that the entire global economy is not based off of American currency reserves or anything like that.

Which we'll talk about.

It's fine.

Woke controls all the ports.

Yeah, that's true, actually.

You know,

as with last time, all you have to do is like count the miles of railroad track,

count the population.

It's a kind of wrong thing this time.

If it actually comes down to it, I feel pretty confident in saying that despite whatever kind of democratic subversion happens, my money is big on woke in woke versus Chud.

I think

Chairman G will be supplying woke

because it's his creation.

So we'll be lying.

Yeah, that,

you know, apparently Putin is funding woke now because they're all calling for ceasefire.

I've heard this.

So who the fuck is funding Chud?

Nobody, you know?

No one's funding Chud.

Chud is actually a graphic.

My pillow guy.

My pillow guy is fucking broke.

Okay.

I'm excited to get flung into the air by a landmine somewhere in Arizona as part of like the 35th Berigal Internacional Gavin Newsome.

Yeah, genuinely.

I'll die for Gavin Newsome.

Like, I'm too stupid to learn Ukrainian and I was too scared to go be Peshmauga, but like, I'll absolutely join Woke's Foreign Legion and get killed in like a bitch in Arkansas.

Sorry, the Woke Foreign Legion.

It's a really good bit.

Like going around and like saying your pronouns and your war cries.

Yeah, well, it's like the like the French Foreign Legion, except not only do you have to choose a new name, you also have to choose Neo pronouns.

And you have to, when you're, when you're like, when you're doing like French Foreign Legion style war crimes, you have to acknowledge the you have to do land acknowledgement.

Oh boy.

Well,

that's the grim future of the woke versus Chud war.

That was the goddamn news

speaking of woke um you've heard of this

you've heard of this it's the democratic socialists of america oh wow you heard of this yeah the the sort of primo wokeistas of of the world

of the woke

i uh the the the the uh most successful uh marxist-leninist formation in the united states um i i kid of course um so what you're looking at is you're looking at two pictures.

You're looking at pictures of a delegation that was undertaken by the Democratic Socialists of America

last year in October.

On the left, you can see a photo of us with some of us with a bunch of medical supplies that we brought to Cuba.

You look very happy, you know?

Yeah, I do look.

Justin, can you circle me on the

this is you, right?

Yeah, in the in the floral, yeah, yes, yeah, um, there we go.

Um, Yeah.

They let Twinks into the DSA now.

So that's nice.

So those are 500 pounds of medical supplies in a variety of bags, which is great.

On the right, you can see me right after we delivered those medical supplies

and

got

basically got a tour of the hospital.

You see what we're going to do.

Less happy.

Yeah.

Everyone, in fact, in that photo seems like

alarmed and depressed.

Well, it's a hospital.

You know, to the left is a hospital, right?

Right, exactly.

So to the left is before and the right is after.

And I think the photographer, good friend Lorna, who is in the green on the left, she captured the exact moment where we were told a fact that's going to come up later.

And I will tell you what that is.

But what we're going to talk about is the reason that my expression changed from one to the second photo.

Next slide, please.

All right.

The first thing we have to ask, Justin, do you want to do that?

First, we must ask, what is Cuba?

Yes, correct.

Yes.

Is it this thing?

It's not that thing.

It is that thing.

Shut up.

Oh, my dad is going to eat this shit up.

Instituting socialism in this thing.

Yes, please.

Justin, your dad is so cool.

I'm Liam, bud.

Oh, sorry.

Jesus Christ.

I have half of my keto, and suddenly I'm mixing up the names of those.

Liam, your dad is so cool.

Justin, your dad's also probably cool.

I don't know.

No, no.

Okay.

Okay.

Sorry.

No verdict on my dad's coolness, apparently.

I'm just here, you know.

Did your dude, did your dad do some mountaineering shit or something?

My guy, yeah,

my dad does like fucking ultra marathons and skiing and shit.

It's wild.

I didn't get like fucking any of those like heritable traits, it seems.

I'm sitting here.

I'm sitting here working eating Haribo, the like vegan kind or vegetarian.

Back to dad talk.

Anyway,

for those of you, for the as you on audio who didn't get the visual joke, this is Caba, not Cuba.

That's right.

Well done.

Okay.

So we're going to go to the next slide then, and we will talk about what is Cuba.

It's a very big island in the Caribbean Sea, but that's not important right now.

That's right.

So write that shit down.

That actually is important right now.

That's what we're on a podcast for.

Where to go, Alice?

Yeah.

It is the largest island in the Caribbean

a big margin.

It is part of the sort of Antillean island chains.

There's two plate systems that collided to form it.

Look at it.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, nice shot.

Very pleasing.

It's very like, it's like if you made Chile's borders aesthetic

in a lot of ways and then rotated 90 degrees.

So

it's part of

the general Caribbean region along with Jamaica, Hispaniola, which contains Haiti and Santo Domingo, the occupied colony of Puerto Rico.

And it thus is active geologically.

There are fault systems, but it also has a good deal of mineral wealth.

Cuba has the third largest cobalt reserves in the world.

Oh, no.

Yeah, we'll get there.

And it also has some oil.

We'll get there.

It is in the path of hurricanes, as many of these islands are.

And so it gets like, you know, tropical rains and monsoons and all that.

And it is going to be very heavily affected by climate change, which they're aware of.

It has about 11 million people living on it.

And it's a lovely place.

So what was what what did what did Cuba start?

How did it get this way is what we're going to say.

How did it get this way?

Yeah.

So

how did it get to, how did it fall to the depths of one brand of consumer item?

That's right.

To answer this question, we must first go back to the times of zero consumer item.

No, no, these guys, these everything was bespoke, so it was like all different brands.

Oh,

yeah, yeah.

Well, you can see at least three brands there.

You have Tainos Occidentales, you have Tainos Clásicos, and you have Tainos Orientales.

So you have West Tainos.

Diet Tainos.

I mean, literally, it's now all General Mills brands.

It's literally West Tainos, Classic Tainos, and then Eastern Tainos.

So Cuba was largely inhabited in pre-Columbian times by Tainos.

They had large agrarian civilizations based around root crops like cassava

and fishing.

They're very prolific fishers.

They had like four classes in their society.

There were caciques, who are like the chieftains, a noble class called Nitainos, a priestly class called Boiques.

They had a sort of like matrilineal succession,

very high development

ball games.

What you see in the lower left is baseball, totally unchanged, modern rules.

Correct.

That's exactly right.

Just like a pre-Columbian pitch clock.

I mean,

the

archaeological record is not clear on whether they had designated hitters.

Yeah, you have this beautiful village, and it just has a perfect baseball diamond.

We were a little worried about the steroid use, but that's okay.

It's a little known fact, but Fenway was actually moved brick by brick from Cuba to Boston.

The Taino name for Puerto Rico, Borinquin, actually translates to seventh inning stretch.

So

that's the only baseball I know.

So yeah, the lower left are a series of sort of round roundhouses called bollos, which is like the

construction of

their villages.

So what happened to these people?

Well,

genocide.

Italian Americans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So one of the most horrible things that

one of the most horrible things that can happen to your pre-Columbian civilization happened,

which

is Columbus.

Columbus, yes.

It's got, I assume, an art museum.

Yeah, it's got it's one that's ranked the like fifth most wall

city in the United States.

Things of this nature.

Got one very nice Art Deco skyscraper.

I presume there's no kind of rapid transit whatsoever.

Largest city in the United States without Amtrak, I think.

Really?

Seriously?

Yeah.

Yeah, there's no Amtrak train to Columbus.

Oh, that's the fact that, you know, Columbus to, or Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati is the most obvious route out there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I've never been to, I've I've never been to Columbus as a proud Chicagoan.

So I can only assume that that's actually what Columbus looks like.

But if I use Cincinnati, then

fuck you, Ohio.

No, that'll be for that'll be for when we do a Roman Empire episode.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.

All right, so if you can, it should advance it if you hit the

yeah, there we go.

So your pre-Columbian, yeah, your pre-Columbian civilization becomes post-Columbian.

Columbus actually did land on in Cuba, and basically immediately the Spanish began murdering the shit out of people.

The first Spanish settlement was founded in Baracoa, so which is in like the eastern part of the island,

in 1511.

And then, by like the next year, the Spanish were engaged in fighting an indigenous rebellion.

Yeah, I mean, the stuff that like Columbus writes about the shit that he did to these people is also like, yeah,

Bartolomé de la Scasas, if I remember correctly, like, goes through Cuba and is just like, this is horrible.

This is nightmarish.

So there's a rebellion led by this Gacique Hatway, who is burned alive with two other chiefs when the Spanish

finished putting down that rebellion.

And then Havana is founded in 1514, La Havana.

This guy starts a long tradition of where even the ruling class back home is like, oh, gee, this is kind of fucked up.

Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah.

You know, it is, it along with Puerto Rico are basically like the first fronts of Spanish expansion into the Americas.

Puerto Rico, actually, in terms of the native population of Puerto Rico, there were just fewer of them.

So they were wiped out within 50 years.

Thing in Cuba, it took longer, but that's basically, you know, we're talking about mass genocide.

And then a second genocide hits the island of Cuba.

This one genocide we had isn't exploitative enough.

It's not commercially viable.

No, we've got to get gruesome.

We worked all those people to death.

So what is, so on the right is Charles V, by the way.

So that's, I believe.

Oh, that Habsburg jaw, baby.

I think that's young Charles V, if I remember correctly, but I may have used it.

Yeah, when you look 20.

He looks like those, what is the two French brothers who published all those popular science books and then had too much plastic surgery?

And died died of COVID, I believe.

Wow.

So like, this is supposed to be flattering.

That's supposed to be a flattering portrait.

So the Habsburgs,

so the Spanish Empire largely underdevelops the economy of Cuba because it is an extractive colonial economy based around

based around sugar and

sort of agricultural production.

But at the time, I mean, you know, like tobacco and coffee and all that, but like mainly sugar.

Like silver and gold later on but not here you know yeah right so and of course the spanish empire at various times was like oh you're not allowed to have slaves imported yeah just like stop stop it guys

guys we sent we sent one franciscan out here to be like you should stop doing this the old icj approach yes basically yeah and you know this is based around we believe in a kind of like aspirational sense of like franciscan values it's actually ableist to critique uh charles v and the half-story dynasty that's true

um

so uh the spanish are as as i'm sure you the listener know are able to extract insane amounts of wealth from the americas both from like the silver mines in Puerto Sea, where they worked like millions of people to death, but also from the agricultural production of their territories.

And Cuba is underdeveloped in comparison to other Caribbean colonies, like the colony of Santa Bang, about which a little bit later, but

it's still able to extract a lot of sugar.

What you're seeing on the left is you're seeing like an early sort of sugar milling or sugar crushing machine where those little things in the middle turn.

Sugar is a fucking horrible crop to harvest.

Oh, yeah.

Very, very, very bad.

Especially in Sant Domingue.

You know, they created maybe one of the worst human meat grinders in history to run that colony.

Oh, yeah.

I guess we'll talk about that later.

We will.

So

you're telling me that my consumer goods have some brutality attached to it?

Just a little old scale.

Not my consumer goods.

A little sprinkler scale issue.

This process is mechanized now.

Yeah.

And we'll get into that.

I was assuming the comic persona of a like 18th century Spaniard.

Oh, I see.

I see.

I would say it's mechanized now, but in many cases, it's not necessarily better.

So,

so yeah, so basically, like the sugar cane is fed into those little grinder wheels,

and you know, the it's pulped from there.

But we're gonna go to the next slide to sort of get um digress a little bit into how do you make sugar?

How does sugar end up from the cane fields of wherever the sugar came from to my mojito that I'm currently uh doing?

Bro, you can ignore all of this and simply harvest it via the humble beet.

Yes, yes, that is an option It grows in lots of different climates.

But I hope that's why sugar is so cheap right now.

Yeah.

It was invented by the Prussians, the concept of making beet sugar.

But so once again, the Germans are to blame for something

horrible that happens.

But yeah, so just inventing Ersatz stuff, you know, some of it takes, some of it doesn't.

I'm going to be real, like, sugar from sugar cane tastes way better.

Many languages in today's podcast.

Yeah, precisely.

So

this is a graphic from the Sugar Association.

So thank you, Sugar Association.

Sugar.

But the sugar cane is harvested.

On the right, you can see a sugar cane field up top.

And then below...

Yeah, and these are both in Cuba.

And on below, you can see,

I didn't take these, but below you can see some gentlemen hacking at those with machetes.

So you take it, you crush it, you soak it, and you squeeze it because you're trying to separate the juice from the the actual plant material.

You throw the plant material away and use it for other things.

You boil the juice until it thickens and crystallizes.

You spin it in a centrifuge to remove the liquid,

and then you transport it to a refinery.

And it gets like run through a number of filters to make it as white as people want.

And it gets crystallized, dried, and packaged, and then it gets shipped off.

Go to the next slide.

Delicious.

I'm sure no exploitation happens at any point.

Right.

Sorry

so that the thing is at the time that cuba is settled this is a much less like this is a much weirder process so basically like

you have to pour the sugar into these cone-shaped molds um the that phallic object on the left um up top is um a sort of cone-shaped uh a sugar loaf um

and uh that is uh that's what you used to like get sugar from there were like little pincers that you'd like chip little bits off of.

Below,

that is

unprocessed sugar

in a sort of

in a cone.

That's what it looks like.

That's

Mexican unprocessed sugar.

In the middle and on the right, you can see the operation of a sugar processing facility.

So on the bottom, you can see the open kettle where they would boil it

and then the warehouse where you would stock the cones.

On the right, you can see like the

sort of thing that you put the cone.

I don't know what to call that.

The snow where you basically put the sugar into these molds.

So nowadays we have a slightly more industrially

industrially sound method of doing it.

You don't just have like a 30-pound cone of sugar in your kitchen and a fucking saw torture device to like cut bits off of it with.

Yeah, and then, you know, fucking

it kills like 30 people to produce.

Yeah, now it only kills maybe half.

Oh, yeah, it's like half, like one.

Yeah.

I mean, these

sugar mills mangle the people that work on them.

And, you know,

the people who own the SEN thus don't care because they're slaves.

So you go to the next slide.

There is now an industrial process.

On the right, you can see a real

Tropico.

No, it's from On No 1800 because Tropico is a dog shit game series.

It's aesthetically pleasing sometimes, but also functionally very annoying.

Yes, I like it.

Yeah, it also, it's fine.

I mean, I think that number one was probably like where my sweet spot for it.

And then everything after that has been like, eh, okay.

I did like when they added sort of the progress of time.

That was fun.

Yeah.

Like the World War I one.

But you can see like the big kettle, actually.

Ironically, this is a...

completely this is from 1900 so it's not a real building but you can see the big kettle where they're boiling the sugar um and then on the left you can see the the process Those are the rollers.

Like it goes in, it gets shredded.

Those are the rollers.

The bagasse, which is the

plant material, gets separated.

And, you know, tag yourself.

I'm a mixed juice tank.

I was going with clear juice.

I'm bulk storage.

So,

next slide, please.

Oh, one thing that I didn't want to mention.

All of that requires power to function.

So that's keep that in mind.

power and just so many slaves well not necessarily

well

once it's industrialized slavery gets less economical yeah we're about to have a big sort of like industrial dispute happen

yeah speaking of power and slaves the guy on the right uh is tousson devitteur um which yes yeah um uh absolute badass of history who led a slave revolt on the island of santa mang uh which led to the creation of the modern state of haiti um and cut out Dessaline here, either, you know, yeah, yeah, Dessaline

didn't behead all of those white people for no reason, right?

I'm gonna

have that much space on the slot, I'm gonna shout the guy out, right?

He did white genocide, he made it real, like, okay, but but but he did also kind of betray the revolution.

Listen, I mean, you

take the good with the bad, right?

Sometimes you do some white genocide, sometimes you betray the revolution.

Betraying the revolution is bad.

It's a historical tragedy.

It's impossible to say if it's bad or good.

I think it's great, actually, to be clear.

Haitian Revolution, unalloyed, good.

Yeah, of course.

The cause of humanity is advanced by it, you know, and it's been

betrayed by like fucking everyone in the world since.

Yeah, because

they've been making them pay for it ever since.

You know, but Haiti is really where like the sugar plantation system reaches its natural conclusion, right?

Because there's some significance to the idea of banning the international slave trade on a sugar-producing island like this.

Because when you don't, you wind up with a situation like Haiti, where rather than taking even the most basic care of slaves,

they would simply work people to death and then import more people.

And the whole slave population turned over every two years or so.

And there were millions and millions of people dying every year.

It was crazy, it was absurd what was going on down there.

And that's a very good lesson to learn.

But various countries around Latin America will not learn that lesson.

70 years from then.

So, in what will become a sort of recurring historical pattern, the sugar producers of Sundamang, who are almost entirely white,

will,

you know, some,

you know, some sort of Creole in there, but we'll flee to Cuba.

Yeah.

Not just to Cuba, but the Haitian Revolution is a great way of making New Orleans more diverse, right?

A lot of New Orleans Creoles were

Jean de Coula Libre in Haiti,

who fled the Haitian Revolution because they were

found that they were on the wrong side of the white genocide.

Pretty much.

And so

supposedly Stephen Girard absconded with a bunch of stolen wealth from Toussaint Lovicher himself and then brought it up to Philly and founded Gerrard College, notable whites-only school up here.

Hey, so what are we getting?

What are we getting Franklin 13, Roz?

Yeah, Roz, what are we getting Franklin 10?

What are we getting Franklin 12, Roz?

Oh, God.

What are we getting Franklin N, where N is the one that is next?

So they take a lot of the capital, like industrial capital, both financially and also some in some cases, the actual machines, to Cuba.

And so suddenly Cuba becomes extremely productive in terms of sugar.

And also, basically becomes extremely unproductive and has remained like economically handicapped ever since.

Yeah.

Yes.

You're just sort of undercapitalized.

So you can't buy the machinery required to mechanize sugar production, but also you're not going to return to a horrible slave plantation system because, you know, you did just fight a war to end that well thank god the problem of being under mechanized to be able to produce things is never going to come up again this just fully fully like hundreds of years long punishment for daring to insist that the rights of the enlightenment apply to black people is all of that pretty much pretty much essentially

as far as international law considers it they're still being punished for property crimes

well thank god that's not going to again recur in the rest of

this

property being themselves and the enforcers of that are the united states of america who multiple times occupied haiti in order to either install somebody that we liked or depose somebody we didn't so um

again not something that will uh crop up in the rest of the presentation don't look at the the slides that come after this

so um so cuba starts booming um uh as uh haiti is plundered um and the spanish also contribute to this by allowing cuba to that there was a sort of mercantilist system in which you as a colony are allowed to trade with your colonial overlord only, right?

And smugglers go in between, so there's like a black market, but whatever, who cares?

So then Cuba is able to trade freely starting in 1818, which very much benefits the Cuban planter class.

So

they advocate for it.

They get it.

Making money hand over fist.

There's agitation, independentist agitation movements led by sort of Creole elites in the west side of the island.

And of course, sort of like the general enslaved black proletariat keeps rising up.

But Spain tamps down nationalism for about 50 years.

And what I'm going to do here is I'm going to very, I'm going to have to gloss over a lot of stuff because otherwise we'd be here for like four hours.

Because

Cuba has three independence wars.

Sometimes it takes a while for these things to take, you know?

They have the 10 years war, which is kicked off by the guy in the top right who was a slave owner freeing all of his slaves and proclaiming Cuban independence.

So he was the first president of Cuba in arms.

That guy is Carlos Manuel de Cespedes.

And then there's a like the

First Revolutionary War creates a couple of revolutionary heroes as a result of it and creates the Cuban independentist movement.

We'll go over them at the end.

And there's a second independence war, which results in the abolition of slavery in 1886.

Yeah, I mean, it's a slightly different thing.

It's the second longest time to abolish slavery, beaten only by Brazil.

Brazil, not Brazil.

You know, us, us, Malvinas, sobras.

Talk about a fucked-up country.

A lot more people there deserve to be in the lulags, I can tell you that much.

Also,

if you are Brazilian and you want to come on the podcast for the episode Brazil, please,

I will mispronounce every single thing in Portuguese.

Abolished by the monarchy.

Yeah, Pedro II, I think.

It was his daughter.

His daughter Isabella

did

the Leia, if I remember correctly.

It was under his administration, but she was regent at the time.

And then the Pope gave them a golden rose, which is like an Oscar, but for Catholicism.

Yeah, I love the Golden Rose thing.

So, and then there's the Third Independence War, which is what segues into the Spanish-American War.

But over the course of this time, you get actually

this very strong Cuban independentist movement with strong ties in the rest of Latin America and especially in the United States.

And the guy in the middle, the bottom middle, is Jose Martí, who is like the George Washington of Cuba in a lot of ways.

He's a poet, a lawyer, a revolutionary.

He's the father of.

And today,

the day that we record this, January 28th, is his birthday.

Oh.

Which is why it was funny that it worked out that we recorded it today.

So

he was tortured by the Spanish for advocating for Cuban independence.

He was the leader of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano, which also helped agitate for independence in Puerto Rico.

So thank you for that.

We're still not free.

Getting a really, really visions of a really messy Victoria 2.

I played that Victoria 3 game

and

it was good.

But so he is like traveling around the United States trying to raise money to do the revolution.

He is

he is he actually dies in battle in 1895.

The second guy next to him on the right is Antonio Maseo, who is the second in command of the Cuban Revolutionary Forces called Mambices.

A Mambi is a Guerria that is fighting the Spanish in the highlands.

And so he helped popularize the machete as the weapon of the Cuban Revolution.

He is also a Freemason and like an actual real believer.

And lyceum like shit.

Yep.

Incredible political strategist and military planner.

He also dies in 1888.

He dies in 1854.

Didn't help much, though, did it?

Yeah, I mean,

he's killed by the Spanish in battle.

He also has a town named after him in Kentucky, which I found out while researching this episode.

It's called Maseo, Kentucky.

These are, and then finally, there's Maximo Gomez, who is kind of like the Sherman of

this whole saga.

He is the Generalissimo of the army.

He is the highest in command.

He basically started this sabotage campaign.

He blows up passenger trains.

He torches sugar plantations, including American-owned ones.

He finances an unsuccessful revolt in Puerto Rico.

This guy survives due to the power of his mustache and beard combo.

He dies in 1905 on his estate.

But basically, like, you know, there's, I wanted to go over these folks because they're very important to sort of the history of Cuba and this long nationalistic struggle to build an independent Cuba that is free from Spanish control.

And if we go to the next slide, so even after slavery ends, and this is all going on,

the economy is still largely based around agricultural export and sugar extraction.

I half-read the slides and I got to this phrase, even after slavery ends, the economy is based, which

is actually very cringe.

Historians debate about this.

If you look at sort of like the American South and the Antevelum South following Reconstruction and how a lot of the, you know, a lot of black Americans were sort of sharecroppers following the demise of slavery,

that is kind of what happens here.

Chinese contract workers are brought in to Cuba and

just to be like, hey, you know, waves and waves of we need cheap labor we can exploit where can we find them and treat

yeah can we can we figure out a way to pay these guys negative wages yeah um pretty much yeah it's um you can see the i i think those are the um this is a sugar mill you can see the former slave huts on the left um

and then like the rest of the industrial facilities actually cuba is one of the first countries to get the railroad um in 1837 because it is used to transport goods or export.

One of the classic uses of a railroad.

Thankfully,

if we go to the next slide,

19th century 9-11 happens.

I forgot about this.

I forgot about this.

You aren't supposed to do that.

The Spanish-American War, one of the most confected

wars in American military history, which is saying something.

And yeah, the USS Maine explodes.

Oh, now I remember.

Yeah, now

it's the main attraction.

God's sake.

The powder magazine of the USS Maine blows up in the port of Havana,

probably on account of how it's the 19th century.

Everyone is drunk off their ass.

Everyone smokes.

The powder magazine is full of loose gunpowder.

um it's surprising it didn't explode earlier yeah exactly and this is the kind of thing that like your your victoria 3 playthrough has a lot of diplomatic crises like this which would otherwise be resolved sort of

not very interestingly like maybe the spanish have to pay a fine or something um but like there's been revolutionaries who are like hey us why don't you annex us and also a bunch of slave owners prior to the revolution to the um to the civil War who were like, what if we annex Cuba so we have an extra slave state?

Yeah,

there's this idea of the Golden Circle, as you say, the Golden Circle.

You have this new sort of like arc of slavery that goes all the way around the Caribbean and sort of like the northern part of South America.

But

down with the Confederacy Union forever.

That's right.

Although, weirdly, Grant sort of thought about like different sort of non-slave ways of implementing that as well.

Yeah, well, he was an alcoholic, so

sort of like a greater American co-prosperity sphere.

Anyway, my point is,

weren't they about Cuba for a long time?

Yeah.

And William Randolph Hearst wants to sell newspapers, right?

Because he wants to beat Pulitzer.

And so

you have.

Private equity firm buys his newspapers and this newsroom's laid off.

And he has another episode of the death of print media.

Yeah.

Precisely.

And so the USS Maine and its explosion

are used to justify and to harry politicians who are already being lobbied into doing it, into making war against Spain in order to grab particularly Cuba, but also just kind of whatever else is going.

You know,

whatever you got.

Yeah, Spain has a lot of shit.

And so, you know,

and there are a bunch of.

It's had a succession crisis.

I mean, you know, and there's Spaniards.

Yeah, I mean, it's like, who cares?

Yeah, I mean, what the U.S.

gets out of it in the end is,

I mean, we'll talk about Cuba, but incidentally, also Puerto Rico Guam and the Philippines oh I'm very aware of that one

ask me ask me why my grandmother does not have running water and electricity half the half the week

the United States occupation of Puerto Rico as a forward naval base and a coaling base at the same time they also like so in just as a funny historical note the Spanish are like oh fuck the moment that the um that the revolution the Spanish-American War happens and they like contact ramon blanco who's like the the guy in charge of the the spanish forces in cuba um messages um

uh maximum gomeas and is like hey

if whatsapp is in cuba

right they did um it's like it's like what if we kicked out the despicable yankee together and wouldn't that be nice and maximogome is just like fuck you you cow um and so obviously the the cuban revolution continues um and the Spanish are kicked out of Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Cuban independence.

Making a career.

You can tell by the way in which I said that word, the confidence in which I have in Cuban independence at this point.

Independish.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm getting that meme that's like, oh, I wouldn't say freed, more like under new management.

Yeah, exactly.

Again, again with the Victoria 3 thing of the concept of a protectorate, right?

It's not formally so so in Cuba, but like this.

This is the case where the U.S.

is like, okay, this is, we're going to exercise control of this as being within our sphere of influence.

Well, and also, like,

you know,

well, we'll go to the next slide and the next slide.

And also just directly occupy.

Yeah.

So the,

you know,

precisely.

You know, this basically, you know, right.

Yeah.

The

occupation, the military, or the Spanish-American War results in the career of Teddy Roosevelt.

It also results in American military occupation.

The Teller Amendment explicitly banned the United States from directly annexing Cuba, but they directly annexed everything else that they got in the war,

including the Philippines and

Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico.

And so

they were like, okay, we're going to occupy you until you come up with a new constitution.

And they did come up with a new constitution.

It was amended with the Plata Amendment.

You can see that amendment right there in the middle.

The

amendment basically makes Cuba a satellite of the United States.

They can't enter treaties with foreign powers that would, quote, imperil the independence of Cuba at the discretion of the United States to decide.

They can't sell off their territory to anyone other than the United States.

Cuba can't take on foreign debt without interest being covered by revenue.

U.S.

can intervene in Cuba at any time when they think it's necessary to protect the Democratic Republic or whatever.

If we could go back to the,

I don't know if it's too far, but if we could go back to the map of Cuba real quick, if it's too far, don't worry.

Yeah.

Yeah, there we go.

If you look at that little, that little island, you know how there's like turquoise patch and there's that island right under it?

Yeah.

Yeah, so that's called Isa de Huintud now, the island of the youth.

But at the time, it wasn't called that, and I forget what it was called.

But they were like, yeah, you don't, your claim to this is not recognized, so this is just up for debate now.

And also they gave, if we go back to the

military.

There we go.

They also like give the U.S.

land for coaling stations.

Yeah, military base.

Naval base.

United States Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay.

Alice, you want to tell us about Guantanamo Bay?

Yeah, it's where Jack Nicholson eats his breakfast 400 meters from 300 Cubans.

And it's where the United States conducted some of the most atrocious tortures in 21st century history to date.

And it's still there, just kind of sticking around as a weird sort of extrajudicial facility that the Navy kind of uses still for that.

Precisely.

So on the left, you have the it does some naval stuff too but it's not really important to be honest like militarily like this is that's important when you need to coal ships now that you don't need to do that it doesn't really kind of like well we just have it because it's nice to have you know yeah

i mean pretty much and you know

that lease you know i mean that's that's also like why we have one of the reasons that we initially got puerto rico and then it turned out

it is a lease by the way like the u.s government pays cuba

The Cuba's not cash.

And Castro doesn't.

Yeah, he has a.

Well, he had before he died.

He had a whole drawer in his desk that was just all the checks that the U.S.

sends that he doesn't catch.

The Puerto Rico also naval base,

fun fact was where the British fleet was going to be headquartered if you all fell to the Nazis.

So you're welcome

for not letting that happen.

But I'm sorry that you missed out in Puerto Rico.

Fidel Castro, right?

We'll talk about him in a minute, but I will say

that in terms of strength of will, if you just mailed me a check every, I don't know, six months or whatever for rent,

eventually I would cash it out of boredom.

I couldn't have them piling up on my desk.

Right, right.

Yeah.

I want to inbox zero disaster to sell.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

I want to know if there was a circumstance in which Fidel would cash the check.

Like, what does the U.S.

have to do?

I mean, initially, but we'll get there.

We'll get there.

Initially, before there

funds, you know?

Right, exactly.

During one of the idiotic budget standoffs, just cash them all at once and hope you hope you draw them.

The Treasury looks at its balance and is like, what the fuck?

Oh, my God.

They cashed the changes

in the US.

What am I doing?

So what you're saying is that Cuba is charging an economic super weapon against the U.S.

that it can cast in a precipitous moment.

We'll get into this, but I think that actually is illegal due to the embargo, but we'll get to that.

So the guy on the left is john r broook who is the first military governor um and then when the u.s withdraws the cuba elects a president um named domas estrada parma um who is living in the u.s at the time and maybe did some uh election manipulation cool um and

that's crazy That's crazy.

And documents his reign, or his time in office is often referred to as a regime.

So

regimes are always a good sign.

I love to call things regimes.

So when his regime collapses, another thing where humans love to do.

That's right.

We occupy Cuba again.

Just like we're going to be able to do that.

If you're aware of the concept of the Monroe Doctrine, it means that the United States basically had free license to just occupy every single fucking country they wanted.

Cuba abhors a vacuum, right?

And if there's no government, then we have to do it.

Otherwise, the Spanish will show up again, question mark.

Los Españoles.

Los Espanoles.

All right.

Next slide.

God damn it.

It's the first use of that one.

So on this slide, you will see just the development of Havana during that period of time from the early 1900s to the 30s.

On the left.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

No, it's Havana is gorgeous.

You know, on the top right is the Prado.

I'm raising my hand to indicate that I have a question.

When did it stop being La Havana and just how?

It's still La Habana.

Oh, okay.

So Spanish has a weak B V distinction.

If you notice, when I speak in Spanish, it is

there is some sort of distinguishment, distinguishing feature between my B's and my V's, but because I speak English all the time, even though Spanish was my first language,

so there's a weak B V distinction.

So when it goes to English, it just becomes Havana because nobody knows what to do with the

first portion of it.

Yeah, so it's just havana um but the show tom payne is gonna love this segment

yeah exactly uh actually

the the havana much like the ukraine pretty much but you wouldn't say like

no i mean precisely

you wouldn't say like the havana so in english which is what that translates to so they just dropped it and it's havana um but in spanish it is very much la havana uh people from havana are called habaneros which is where the name of the uh pepper comes from

so on the top right, you have the Parado, bottom right, you have the

docks, the Muelle San Francisco.

The United States keeps meddling with Cuba the entire time.

The Liberal Party calls in American troops to brutally suppress the Partido Independiente Color, which is a bunch of

black Cubans agitating for rights.

Because at this time, there's like way

like segregation.

I don't know how to say this other than it's exactly as bad as the United States.

More segregation, yeah.

Muy segregado.

Exactly as bad as the United States, if not worse.

So

and we'll get to that a little bit, but like, you know, the various, they call in American troops to suppress like

yeah, yeah, exactly.

But the whole time, Cuba is very dependent on the U.S.

market because it's right there.

The flight from Miami to Havana took like 45 minutes.

Yeah.

A seaplane in chair, you know?

No, we flew on a we flew on a regular regular plane.

No, you didn't.

Shut up, Noah.

Like that.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Like right now,

then you took the train to Havana.

Well, you could, and we'll get to that.

But also, like,

well, we'll get to the

thing about the plane, but there was something funny about the plane.

So, um,

so there's, like, a.

You may have heard of the Great Depression.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's when people had to, like, line up, and also okies were invented.

Yeah.

Correct.

So there was a

right after the depression happened in 29, they passed something called the Name Alert Smoot Hawley Terror Act.

Which

correct smoot.

Measurement.

Yeah, the smoot.

It's a different smoot.

Smoots around here.

It's like one of those tumbler words for a a part of a cat.

It's like his smoot.

His scrungly smoot.

Yeah.

Stop it.

Don't ever fucking do that again.

Not on this podcast.

Stop that.

I wish I could.

I hate that so much.

But

so part of it includes tariffs on

sugar importation.

So Cuba exports a lot of its sugar to the United States.

This is very bad for Cuba.

Economic crisis happens.

Yeah.

The U.S.

is just like, listen, we need money.

It now costs you money to ship sugar to us.

Yeah.

So if you go to the next thing.

Proton Authors is so cool, dude.

Sure is.

So here's some guys.

Oh, that's an unwise moustache.

You can't have that anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At the time, it was a lot of people.

A couple of years off.

Yeah.

Well, this is 1933.

That dude is clearly aware.

That's in the era of the sort of office space, Michael Bolton.

Why should I change it?

He's the one who sucks years of having a moustache.

Right.

Well, that guy is a that guy is a social democrat, so social fascism is real.

I was about to say, yeah, he's

Hitler brackets tropical.

Tropical?

I think I've heard that theory.

I think he means Senor Hilter, leader of Argentina, Napa.

So if you're not...

If you are Argentinian, come on for the Argentina episode.

We just do a bonus episode.

There's a different Latin American country every month.

You do a bonus episode with like Sabine Mengele Mengele von Eichmann, where she's like, husband's Biden.

My beautiful magic.

Yeah, so a man servant Jurgens with an unexplainable background.

Yes, yes, yes.

Precisely.

So in 1933, there is a sort of like revolt slash coup.

So there's a revolt slash coup called the Sergeant's Revolt that basically is like, you know, what Mug thinks about when they think about the Mug army, where it's like you have the Sergeants.

Sorry, this is a very niche joke that is made specifically for the root beer?

No, the Marxist unique beer.

Okay, so the Rootbeer people.

This is a niche.

This is a niche.

Yeah, exactly.

This is a niche joke I'm making for the one member of the DSA NPC that listens to this podcast.

Maybe for my mom.

I consider the whole DSA to be NPC.

Oh,

So basically, it's a combination of the student youth groups and the army.

Interesting, interesting combination of vibes there.

You seldom see that.

That would not be a fun coalition.

It wasn't a good idea in a couple of ways, but we'll get there.

So the Pentarchy of 1933 comes about,

which

I'm not going to go into it very much because it lasted a year and did some social media.

But I see a name I recognize.

Yeah, want to do you want to read the name out filgencio batista thank you um yep um that that's why i put a pronunciation guide in front of next to all i did not look at it

i know you didn't

but uh that's that's right so he was involved uh as a representative of the armed forces um a bunch of social democratic reforms happen um and then the us is like whoa but no more of that

can't do that Social democracy is for us.

We like the sergeants part of this, but we're not loving the left-wing students group part of this.

Yeah, it's like the social democracy is for us.

Yeah.

Precisely.

So basically, they get Batista

to coup them.

Next slide.

So he runs a military junta until 1940.

That's classic like junta uniforms with the jack boots, gloves.

Just a manlet ass, like five foot tall, like tiny ass dude.

Belt working its ass off to keep the

gut in check.

Big hat.

Yeah.

One of the biggest hats.

Yeah.

One of the biggest hats you can imagine.

So he's got a military junta going until 1940.

Meyerlanski.

I know we're going to talk about that, but is that Maylist?

That is Meyerlanski.

Yep.

So the communists, at the time of the 1940 elections, there's a new constitution, and the constitution is actually pretty good.

And the constitution

gives workers' rights and shit.

It's nice.

So the communists endorsed batista um because their sort of thought is that batista is going to let them run the labor unions um and he runs on something called the democratic socialist coalition logo included i see

which which is why i put um our logo there um but um so he wins and he becomes president and he serves four years and then he is no longer president

cool normal succession of power time yeah you can see by the bottom right photo that this Yeah, this is the democratic succession of power in action, you know.

Yeah, that's correct.

So

then in 1952, he does a coup, which basically

is Altogolpe, you know?

Yeah, well, it's not an altogolpe because he's not in power then.

That's just okay.

He waits until he's out of power and then just regular ass Golpe's the next.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

Yeah, he could have done an Altogolpe or Alto Golpe and he didn't.

But which is he's a very weird dude on a number of levels but um i feel like latin america is a place for dictators to get properly weird with it you know i always appreciate that oh yeah i i think a lot about about herman bush uh the the like disco elysia mass president i think ecuador um who like

like beat up and off uh like a 90-year-old dude in his office for writing an article making fun of him.

Not gonna, you said beat up, right?

Not beat off, because I was very

Bolivia, excuse excuse me, 36th president of Bolivia.

Um, well, I don't want to say critical support, but he was he was listen, he was a weird

Hermann Busch.

Look him up.

Uh, Hermann spelled like German.

Um, well, sure, of course, I got that from the fact that it was uh Bolivia prior to Ebola.

He's like, Again, disco Elysian, he he he sort of like tried to institute this ideology that he had called military socialism, sabotaged his own implementation of it, got so mad he killed himself.

Wait, are you telling me that the country that Klaus Barbie fled to had a German dictator, dude?

Um,

yeah, also, that would be me implementing an ideology, to be honest.

I would fuck it up.

Just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, no, I did Marxism-Letternism wrong.

Um,

so, um, so anyway, so that the Gorpe happens, um, or not, sorry, the regular Gorpe

happens, and um, he suspends the Constitution.

The U.S.

is like, good, this is fine.

Um, and he does a bunch of torture and corruption.

And in the top right, you can see he is having dinner with Meyer Lansky and his wife.

And

tall forehead, by the way.

Yeah.

It was a style at the time.

I don't know.

When will it come back?

I'm wondering, because I

monoxidil is not working that well for me.

Tell me about it.

So he does a bunch of torture.

And at the same time, organized crime is allowed to completely flourish in Havana.

Canalian Americans back again, you know?

Santo trafficante, Jr.

I said that like it was Spanish, but it is Italian, so I should be saying santo trafficante.

So Havana is like Vegas before Vegas really exists.

Like there is prostitution, there is gambling, there is all the drugs you can imagine.

Mafia has their infamous Havana conference there at the Oten Nacional, which you'll see some pictures of later.

And like the thing about this this is this is all fine, but like, you know, all of this is only bringing like this is all fine.

DSO taking a strong pro-mob position.

Sorry, to be clear, it's not fine.

It's fine from their perspective.

Also, none of my legally,

none of my positions represent the positions of DSA at large.

So, except for some, which I'll note when I say that they do.

So, like, you know, he does the crackdown on dissidents and he tries to make this like a whole tourist thing, but it brings in like one-tenth of the income that Cuba gets from sugar production.

They are still getting-can't beat him.

Literally, yes.

They're still getting most of their, you know, most of their money from the production of sugar and tobacco and rum and sugar derivatives, basically, in the case of rum.

So, if you are rich, you are fine.

If you are doing great, you're doing better than the other workers.

You can buy a very cool watch from Cuerva Yisobrinhos, you know?

Yeah.

Actually, if you're rich and white, you're doing great.

And if you are poor,

you are getting fucked.

He has a secret police called the Buro para Represción de las Actividades Comunistas, which is the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities.

And

20,000 people are like tortured and executed.

In the bottom right, you see a firing squad executing a Cuban revolutionary.

Not a good guy, real weird dude, little manlet.

And, you know, god-awful cunt.

So

guy doing as he was told is the impression I get most.

Yeah.

Like, sort of

branch manager, right?

Yes.

Cuba is

feels like I'm getting the same vibes as like, you know, Dubai or like

the

bigger cities in Saudi Arabia.

You know, a lot of this skyscrapers and

all the economic prosperity and the exciting, happy lives people are leading there that they show on Instagram.

All this is superficial to how the economy actually functions.

It's going to be fashion 1950.

Speaking of skyscrapers, yeah, they built La Lida.

If you go to the next slide, you can see here are some skyscrapers that are going to be

look at this thing.

This looks great.

I love it.

Really?

Let's be real.

There's a sharp divide.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I love a good

big white

modernist building adjacent to the seashore.

It's great.

I know

It's always a winner.

I think that's not the Hotel Avana Divre, but one of those hotels was designed by the same guy who did

the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles.

Like, again, really tied into the United States is like what you need to imagine is that this is essentially an appendage of the United States.

And so like American architects are going down here, Hemingway is going down here and hanging out.

Like all these Americans are visiting Havana.

And so just so

what you're looking at in the top left is the Vedalo,

which,

you know, is the name of that neighborhood.

That's also where we stayed on the delegation, but a little bit north.

The Oten Nacional is down there.

You can see it with those two little.

This guy.

Yeah, it's gorgeous.

It's so cool.

And that, you know, it's an incredibly fancy hotel.

You get the views of the seashore.

That street going just on the right,

like all the way, this little highway thing

is called the Manicon,

which is the street that it's like, if you are a Chicagoan, it's Lakeshore Drive.

This is very much a James Bond next location.

Yeah, Alice, is it ever a James Bond next location or did the James Bond?

Si Senor.

Yeah, it's in

Cuba's and Die Another Day.

Day.

Wait, didn't they also do

whichever James Bond movie?

I know they had a mess with it.

Who is Cuban?

Oh,

No Time to Die.

I think so.

Yeah, because No Time to Die.

He is in Cuba.

Yeah, you're right.

He's been to Cuba twice.

Yeah, it was filmed during the Thaw, so that makes sense.

Yeah,

I don't have any drops from this other than a Cuban guy saying, there's a strange clinic.

From Die Another Day, which, okay.

It's in Godfather Part 2, right?

Or is it part 3?

I forget.

I haven't seen a single Godfather movie, so I'm sorry.

I'm just trying not to get 1950s woman dysphoria from the photo on the right here.

I was going to say

both of these women sort of being attended to are objectively insanely evil.

Oh, yeah.

However,

the aesthetic, though.

That countsy little hat.

I know, I know.

And I'm trying to find a way of threading that little hat.

Si Reina words to say.

Yeah, those are rich white people

on the right getting pedicures,

which you can do if you are

a rich white Cuban.

And the middle left, or like at the bottom, that is a still from the film Soi Cuba, which you should absolutely watch.

I am Cuba.

Showing a group party.

To be quite based, actually.

I'm seeing that Liam is raising his hand.

Yeah, you hit the little.

Oh, you hit the hand.

Sorry.

I didn't even know you could do this.

Wow.

Yeah.

Sorry, everybody.

Okay, so next slide.

Ah,

who just took poison damage?

So, yeah, I did just take poison damage, correct?

Look at that big neon sign there.

Mikua.

Yeah.

And

Westinghouse Electric

right there as well.

Is this one of the original baseball stadiums?

It's a casino.

Oh.

I think.

but because it says casino.

But

so one thing I do want to draw attention to is the race of all of these people versus the race of the people in the last slide.

For people who are listening at home, all of these people are Afro-Cubans.

All of them are black.

All of the rich people that we saw earlier were white.

Again,

also,

some of these houses have not advanced at all beyond the slave quarters of plantations.

These are shanty towns, slums, of which there were many.

Hooverville.

Yeah,

exactly.

Batistaville.

Batista yes.

So, like, the whole thing

is that there is this enormous divide,

a divide occasioned by the United States, as we'll talk about in a second, in a lot of ways.

So, next slide.

So, you're going to see some aerial photography here.

I took the one on the right,

and I forget which comrade of mine took the one on the left, but yeah, from the seaplane,

from the Brazilian-made seaplane.

So,

the left photo is a shot of Havana

from the air.

And the right photo is a shot of the sort of like Gampo as you are going into the international airport, which I wish I had taken more photos of because it's like Soviet era and very weird.

You'd love it, Atlas.

I would love to go to Cuba at some point, is the thing.

Yeah, precisely.

You should.

I mean, it's, we'll get to why it's tough, but you actually can go very easily.

Yes, I can.

Apart from the fact of me having to travel internationally from Britain.

Yes.

Well, yeah, that's true, but it's actually the part where you get into Cuba will be fine.

It's just going to, we'll get into that.

So in the 50s, the like with the mode of production is still like large.

You're going from the UK to a country which is a lot less transphobic.

Well, a country that has trans rights in the constitution um

and uh where gender affirming surgery is free um as are like hormones and all of that and there is literally a department of the government specifically built around like hey you all need to be less homophobic

uh we'll get to that later but like that was the interesting part of the trip so In the 50s, the land is still organized in these largest states called Latifundios.

Something like 70% of the arable land in Cuba is owned by foreign interests.

American capital owns manufacturing and utility,

the utility sectors.

So on a per capita basis, the value of American enterprises in Cuba was like three times higher than anywhere else in Latin America.

Americans own 90% of the telecom and electric sector, 50% of the railways, 40% of raw sugar production.

And now that did decline from when Americans used to own like 80% of raw sugar production, but it's still significant.

Cuban branches of U.S.

banks account for a quarter of all deposits.

And this is the RAND Corporation's numbers in 1964.

So, you know, quoting the Commerce Department in 56.

So, you know, those are like rosy numbers at best.

There's a book value of $157 million of direct investment in oil, $111 million in manufacturing, $313 million in public services, which includes like, you know, like utilities, $341 million in mining and agricultural sectors.

59% of Cuba's exports go to the United States.

78% of its imports come from the United States.

So,

the extractive relationship has not stopped, essentially.

Precisely, you have switched out one

pig feeding at the trough with another.

So,

while I was sort of like doing some investigation of the numbers, I came across a quote, and I wish I had attributed it because I can't find where I attributed it.

But that when the U.S.

is at war, the mines work, and when the U.S.

is at peace, there is stagnation.

Because Cuba is a sort of reserve, both of labor and

of natural resources.

When you are in much the same way, if you think about like Puerto Rico, the reason Puerto Ricans are granted citizenship in 1917 is to be drafted in World War I.

So this is an extractive relationship that the U.S.

is mediating.

And if we go to the next slide.

I was just going to say before we move on,

I was looking through Havana on Google street view and came across a giant building that just said banco de nova scotia on it

okay so you know this i guess the other half of this relationship was canada america light

um still the case actually in a weird i mean we'll get to it but like canada actually helps cuba like access foreign capital or has helped cuba access foreign capital by like co-investing on cobalt mine extraction and that sort of thing.

Like Canadian companies have interests in Cuba.

It's because of because of how Fidel fathered the car prime minister.

Yep.

Yeah.

Fidel's like farewell to Nova Scotia.

My home was excuse, but you're wrong.

It's dark and dreamy.

So, all right, so next slide.

Roz, you want to take this one?

Yeah, sure.

So the Cuban railway system we'll talk about very briefly here.

So, okay, Cuba has railroads very early on.

Shown here is uh the Havana special, um, which I'll get to that in one second.

Um,

Cuban railroads develop very early, they develop in a different way than a lot of other railroads in the um in the Caribbean, in Central America, in South America.

Um, they don't run into the big problems of break of gauge, which is when there's two different track gauges.

So, you come to the station, everyone's going to switch to another train, um, and uh, undercapitalization, which is when, you know, maybe you're building the railroad to a specific mine, that specific mine peters out.

You have no money to improve service after that.

So, you know, the railroad just goes bust.

A lot of places in

South America, especially and Central America, they...

The railroads were built so thoroughly around extraction and extraction only that when, you know, when a mine petered out or some other industrial operation, the country just had no railroads.

Cuba sort of avoids this early on because they're able to really tightly integrate the whole system with the United States railroad system.

You know, Cuba is very close to the United States, so you can just load railroad cars onto barges, onto ferries, bring them over to Cuba, and then you can ship them anywhere in the country.

And anywhere in Cuba could ship railroad cars to anywhere in the United States or Canada or even Mexico, right?

Since you had the system of car floats and railroad ferries, you didn't have the normal port problems where, like, okay, I bring the train up to the dock, the stevedores unload the boxcars and put the goods into the ship, but you know, maybe some of that walks away.

Um,

so as a result of this very efficient railroad system, this sort of very efficient, you know,

it worked a lot better than anywhere else.

Cuba winds up with the most railroad miles per capita of any country in the world by 1958.

You know, and some people actively encouraged this, notably Henry Flagler,

who ran the Florida East Coast Railroad.

Flagler.

Yes.

And he was

so, you know, he inaugurates this train called the Havana Special.

It runs from New York City.

to Havana by way of the ferry.

But most notably, he also wanted wanted to intercept brand new Panama Canal traffic, right?

And his idea is: all right, I got a railroad that goes down to Miami.

That's not close enough for me.

What we're going to do is build a railroad 108 miles over open sea to Key West.

Damn, fuck.

Yes.

What is a hurricane?

They aren't real.

Oh, well, you know,

I want to write a lot of things.

The crime change was never going to happen.

So, you know,

it's a perfect investment.

I want to write an episode about this sometime fairly soon, the Overseas Railway.

It does get wiped out in a hurricane in

1833, I believe.

But yeah, so

you would board the Havana special in New York City, I believe, in the evening.

It would go all the way down to Key West.

You would get off ferry like six o'clock that afternoon.

You know, then the following day, and then the ferry went 100 miles to Havana.

You know, so very, very convenient.

It was all one ticket.

It was all an integrated operation.

Yeah,

the result of this, the result of this is Cuba has this extremely highly developed railroad network, which is in contrast to pretty much the rest of the Caribbean at the time.

Puerto Rico was shutting down its railroads right now.

There were some

in the Dominican Republic.

Haiti was still being punished, so they didn't have any railroads.

You know,

a couple of these islands had pretty extensive railroad systems for a while.

Cuba's the only one that really maintains them.

Yeah, I mean, I was talking to my mom, and she was talking about how there used to be like a train that you would take from various

across the coast of Puerto Rico, like through various beaches.

And she remembered like the ads for it, and it just doesn't exist anymore.

And I'm like, oh, great.

Another way that the United States has fucked us.

Nice.

I have a little bit of trivial way around the island.

There's There's a sort of company-branded train for a company that was forced out of Cuba.

It's into Sugar, the Hershey Railway.

We'll talk about that a little bit later when we talk about the Hershey Railway.

Give us back your peppermint patties, you Nazi fuck.

Precisely.

Cuba still has the fourth largest railroad network in North America.

Wow.

And it's not even any contests between like the fifth most, which I don't even know what it is because all the rest are so close to zero miles.

It barely matters.

Great.

Awesome.

Yeah.

No, I mean, and you know, just another example of like Cuba was like developed to some degree, but it's developed in a very strange way.

Okay, next slide.

Yeah.

Yo, you seen this guy?

You seen our boy?

I recognize this man.

Yes.

Yeah.

So

we start getting into the slightly controversial uh portion of this part.

Yeah, the part where we say that the Cuban Revolution was good,

yeah.

The part where that is my opinion, uh, it's also my opinion, so I'm not gonna argue with you, you know.

That's right, um, starkly progressive, genuinely, I think, uh, also my opinion, although I have a few caveats, yeah, I think that's that's where I am with Roz.

Uh, some missteps were made, which we'll talk about.

I'm still Liam, bud.

I'm sorry, just fucking Christ.

I, I am, like, losing my mind today with Liam.

Um,

Yeah, I'm sorry, Liam.

I adore you.

Yeah, I so, yeah, I agree with Liam.

Some missteps were made.

So.

Because my dad says you're going to break a few eggs.

It's fine.

Precisely, yeah.

God, your dad is so cool.

Thank you.

You can't run a historically progressive moment without a few Lulugs.

And who goes in those Lulugs?

Listen, sometimes you make some bad stuff.

Yeah, well, who goes in those?

Well, we'll get there.

But

so

on July 26th, 1953,

a lawyer and baseball enthusiast.

Lawyer, baseball enthusiast,

still did not have a beard at the time, if I remember correctly.

And if this photo is any evidence, named Fidel Castro.

So it's doing my language switching very fast there.

And his often neglected brother, Raul.

Seen him.

Oh, shit, that's Raul.

Yeah, that's Raul.

Did you not know that was Raul?

No, I didn't know who the fuck that was.

Seen there being a twink.

Well, let's not go too far here.

Yeah, okay, he's an otter.

So,

Fidela and Raul stage an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.

After their like change.org petition to unseat Batista doesn't get enough signatures or shares on social media.

I think sometimes you can engage in like electoral politics and local politics and find it very frustrating.

And one alternative to regrouping and doing more like council meetings is immediately moving to Garija Wofa.

It's a natural and it's a natural escalation.

As Liam was saying, this is one of the caveats, which is that a lot of people die.

And

they did do a petition.

It did not get enough signatures.

And so a bunch of them got killed and everybody else got captured.

Fied got 15 years in prison along with Raul.

And they basically, him and Raul got released in 1955 and created the, if you look at the top left, the

Movimiento vendicis de Julio, which is the 26th of July movement.

Again, I would not name my movement after the time I got my ass beat.

Like,

yeah.

It's like the New York, it's like the NYPD counterterrorism unit having 9-11 on their patches, you know?

It's like.

I mean, you know,

it's a cool flag, though.

True.

Like, it's pretty sucky.

We won't get fooled again

flag.

Yeah.

Let's just do our best, you know?

Yeah.

So, okay, so the movement.

The movement kind of fuses with various other

revolutionary movements.

Rafael Garcia Barcenas,

his movement, the Movimiento Nacional de Revolucionario, the National Revolutionary Movement.

Frank Baiz, about whom a little bit more later, had the movement called the Acción Nacional Revolucionaria, the National Revolutionary Action.

So it's a big tent org

that

has a variety of internal caucuses.

Oh boy.

Oh boy.

I'm sorry, Leon.

A variety of internal caucuses,

like Bani Rosas,

Maioría Socialista, Camaría Comunista,

grupo unidad matista.

Yeah, but all those break-like clinics though, man.

Yeah, all those uh uh you know uh uh uh socialists in office.

Um, so they're fighting to overthrow Batista through both like, you know, like demonstrations and military action.

Uh, so they kind of uh get kicked out of Cuba.

If you go to the next slide, what are you gonna do?

Oh, this feels compromisingly erotic.

So, okay, so it's funny you say that because while we were in the hospital, which we're going to talk about later, while we're in the hospital, like the place you go in to the hospital,

which is the main one in Havana, the university hospital, as you go in, there's this big like quote from Che on the like on the right-hand side of where you come in on a vehicle.

And the thing about it was I don't remember what that quote was because the picture was shirtless Che like doing farm work.

Well, Dodd, man who loved taking his shirts off, you know, that is correct, yeah.

Um, so clavicles, Jesus Christ, yeah.

So, um, you can see here, uh, Fidel on the left, a dangerously sexy twink on the right.

Um, in that photo, he is my age, and

both of these men will have sex with you, like that's that's a promise.

Uh, well, they're dead, they're both dead, so uh, ideally not.

That might not stop them.

So, yeah.

So the dangerously sexy twink on the right is everybody's favorite t-shirt photo, Che Guevara.

Che Guevara is

partially Irish, as I found out, but of Argentinian extraction.

So he's in Mexico because he got kicked out of Guatemala

after

Sheikh.

Shea is actually short for Seamus.

Seamus Guevara, hopefully.

Yeah.

Not a lot of people know that.

Did you ever hear about Seamus Guevara standing in solidarity with him, with the people of Ulster?

So, I mean, I don't know how you get like, as a Puerto Rican, I'm really like throwing stones in my glass house, but I don't know how you get Che from Ernesto.

It's an Argentinian thing because it just means like hey, and it's like, it's like Argentinian tick, I guess, you know?

So it's like everybody is like calling him like guy who talks Argentinian style.

I mean, couldn't be me, but yeah, because you don't talk Argentinian style.

I would never talk Argentinian style because I don't have a German accent.

So

thank you, Liam.

I try to be.

So entering Che is an Irish guy with a really thick German accent.

Hasta la Victoria Cientre.

The people of Ulster stand in solidarity for secuman revolution.

So the CIA organized a coup against the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbens after he

committed the cardinal sin of a Latin American leftist president and did land reform against United Fruit.

That'll do it.

That'll do.

One of the classics of the genre there.

United Fruit now chiquita banana.

If you ever want to boycott here.

You're big on your banana history.

It's caused way more human suffering than you think about.

Oh, yeah, pretty much.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You should have a lot of people.

The phrase banana republic is

that because it described the kind of repressive dictatorship that the U.S.

enforced in these places.

Precisely.

So the...

like half or a large portion of the

the 26th of july movement uh their leadership is in mexico now in mexico city so they hang out there for

a dropped from rambo five for that

why

because because i like

james bond podcast and he goes to fucking i need to go to mexico there you go

a woman

so all of monsters just diseased monsters i literally i literally like this is the this is the stuff that I like I listen to this podcast and kill James Bond while I am playing Paradox Grand Strategy video games.

So, like, the amount of my brain,

the amount that my brain get your foreign policy advice here, you know?

The amount that my brain is doing a work

set in the TNO timeline.

Yeah, oh, God.

I don't know how to say it in German.

I don't want to try.

So they put together, they, okay, so you're familiar with the Silver Corp thing that happened in Venezuela.

Yeah, of course.

What do they call it?

Like, fucking Operation Gideon or something?

Yeah, so it was, this is the inverse of that, where they get 82 guys and stick them on a yacht and are like, we're going to take back Cuba.

Party boat time on the Granma.

Yeah, next slide.

The shittiest boat in the fucking world.

So that is the Granma.

It's in the middle of the revolution in Havana right now, isn't it?

Which I wish I could have gone to.

But yeah.

So that's the boat.

They stick 82 guys on on that boat.

I mean, that's crowded.

That's too many guys.

I was about to say, I agree.

That is too many.

It's a short trip.

And okay, so like,

you know, they're basically you get in the fellas together and you're doing the revolution, right?

And so they land and pretty much immediately they get bombed by helicopters and they lose 62 guys.

Oh.

This is video game shit.

You know, you get in the thing, you got to establish like threat very quickly.

So you got to kill.

As Liam says, is as Liam likes to say, it's weight savings.

It's weight savings, yeah, exactly.

Now, now you're down to 20 of your best guys, or best guys at avoiding helicopter bombs.

That which does not kill me only serves to make me stronger.

Exactly.

So, this is

not kill me.

Helicopter bombs serves to make me stronger.

Overthrow the government of Cuba.

I just have a helicopter bomb me with smaller bombs and progressively increase the size until I'm immune.

Just a tiny little matchbox-sized bomb donking off the side of my head.

If you try hard and you believe in yourself, you can like duck and weave.

So you're looking at some beautiful mountains.

You're looking at the Sierra Maestra.

And so they land.

It's a weird route because they basically go from Mexico to like the bottom right,

I guess the southeast

portion of Cuba, like in the little hook, and then land there and then flee into the mountains.

And like they're in the Cuban Appalachians.

Kind of, yeah.

So like they are in the campo, they're like fucked.

They're down to like 20 guys.

And they start building a guerrilla campaign, collaborating with the rest of the movement.

So like Frank Baiz, who was doing urban demonstrations at the time.

And

along the way, like people are generally like, yeah, I'm getting fucked over into this government.

Like, I'm happy to join you.

And they start redistributing land to captured farmers or to

farmers whose land they have

taken from

the Americans or whoever they own, or whoever owns them.

Have you got a little slice of Hershey plantation, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

God, I can't speak today.

So they

started.

We should do it all the time.

You know,

what are you going to do?

Exactly.

It is what it is.

Doing fine, do it.

Thank you.

I try.

Persevere, like Fidel Castro and the Sierra Maestro.

Podcasto Muerte.

Venceremos.

So

they start.

So they start building their sort of their

base in the Sierra Maestra and expand.

So next slide.

Oh, wow.

That's a quick expansion.

Yeah, so we don't need to.

This is not like, this is not like Hearts of Iron podcast, so I'm not going to get into like the actual.

Yeah, no, the important thing is that they win by doing a series of like uh really like cheese encirclements and eliminating infantry divisions.

They win by uh opening the console and deleting their opponent's units.

They definitely found some exploits to make this work.

I will say that.

I mean, to be honest, kind of like the kind of they did kind of go into the console and delete their opponents' units because they had a bunch of people defect from Fungen Sabadisa's army.

Um, so and they like capture tanks.

Um,

and so So, like, tanks are

way easier to operate back then.

If you captured a tank, you could just get on it and fuck around.

That is an American military circle tank.

I think that's a Sherman.

Is that a Sherman?

Liam, is that a Sherman?

Looks like one to me, but don't

look like one to me, although it looks a little narrow.

Okay, listen to Lions Led by Donkeys for more.

I forgot to say, Joe Casabian knows tanks.

Someone's going to say, actually, that's not a tank.

That's mobile artillery.

I don't know.

It's actually a technical, but

so.

I just want to say, for those of you keeping Score at home, like I am, we're an hour and 50 minutes in, and we're on slide 30.

So that's fine.

Some of these are just joke slides.

So

the rebels seize equipment from Batista, including that tank, which gets used in the Bataille Santa Clara later, which we'll get to.

And the US sees the writing of the wall and starts sanctioning Batista because he's murdering more people than Eisenhower is comfortable with.

Yeah, a weird Eisenhower conscience moments.

Something happened to his brain after he won the Second World War.

You know, the whole military-industrial complex and all this.

I, yeah.

I mean, yeah, you can't give him too much credit because of what he does later, but like,

or earlier, there's a bunch of other shit, including art bands.

But, like, that's true.

Yeah,

occasionally he has strange moments, which is more than Joe Biden ever had, you know?

Well, I, to be fair, Eisenhower never got to say something as cool as ooh, Earth Rider.

So next slide, please.

So

the momentum builds.

Yeah, this is where we get to talk about the train.

The momentum builds until

Roz, can you give me on the 28th of December?

On the 28th of December, 1958.

Thank you.

Che Guerra makes his way from the port city of Caibarien

through the town of Camahuani towards Santa Clara.

I'm just showing off at this point, uh, where he intercepts an armored train.

Trend Blendado, hell yes, the trend

blendado.

We talked about this briefly on the armored train episode.

I have a few more interesting details about it, though.

Yes, I'm excited for the interesting details.

So, actually, so the bottom right

is a photo I took of the depot where that train was reinforced and kept

in Havana.

So, that's the depot where it was, according um, to Sara from the from Minitur.

Um, and that's where, like, one of the workers basically, like

working on it, fed the revolution information about the specs on the train that enabled them to derail it.

Um,

uh, so they basically

don't need to know a lot of information about a train to derail it.

Well, I mean, you know, like it's sort of,

yeah,

we'll, we'll, we'll look through that added slide in the train derailers.

Yeah,

they used these 3D printed train derailers they learned about from Twitter.

Reading directly from

the presenter notes on this,

you put the 3D prailer.

You printed a bunch of rails and derailed the train, which could have been a lot easier if you had simply 3D printed a train derailer.

Serves me right for not reading ahead.

No, you're good.

You know,

that's why I own a 3D printer.

But that's a joke.

Legally, that's a joke.

So, okay, so let's hop to the train slide and then we'll.

So,

here's something to point out before we move on to the next slide.

Now, one of the things I mentioned earlier, the Cuban Railway Network is very integrated with the American Railway Network.

Now, what we're looking at here, this is a very strange boxcar.

Now, it's strange only if you know a lot about boxcars.

Otherwise, it looks normal.

This is owned by the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St.

Louis Railroad.

Connor, I wonder why we have a Dixieland boxcar.

Yeah.

Yes.

It says here

to and from Dixieland on the side, right?

It's got three yellow stripes on the side.

It also has a weird feature here.

The end of the boxcar is a good identifying marker.

This is a Hutchinson end, which is a very old type of boxcar end, usually on wooden cars.

This is weird because it's a steel car with a Hutchinson end.

Also, it's 36 feet long.

It's very strange.

It's a very strange car.

This should be a 40-foot-long car that has a different end on it.

So anyway,

these are the cars that made up the Trend Bundado.

Can I just say how much I love working with you?

Yeah, I don't know what Hutchinson end is, but I'm spelled out.

Yeah, exactly.

So what you can sort of,

this is what's on display in Santa Clara here.

You can see the full extent of the modifications that Batista did to these cars, which were hauling men and material, right?

Was painting over through the heart of Dixieland

and, you know,

writing

logistica on there.

Yeah.

So if you go to the actual museum, this is what's on display.

Although, if you look at the pictures, there was an actual armored portion of the train, which appears to be one of the Hershey Electric Railway cars

with

some plates welded over it.

And if this is as early a car as I think it is, this may be made of wood.

Please tell me.

Not a very smart guy in a lot of ways.

Listen, just say what you like about Mao and Maoism, but he understood Korea war against

certain kinds of enemies.

And when you talk about imperialism being a paper tiger, right, this being manifested in the form of a 19th-century wooden train car from a candy company that you bolt and some steel to.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Oh, my God.

So, like, then I added 20 boxcars to.

The boxcars being, I mean, people shot straight through the boxcars is the thing.

The boxcars were full of ammo, too.

Oh, diamonds.

They were explosive.

I want to say

a lot of the folks who are in the boxcars just like came out and surrendered instantly.

Yeah.

And then

just shook hands with the rebels and were like, okay, yeah, we're on your side now.

This sucks.

If I'm hopelessly outgunned in a situation where my enemy is also right, you better believe that's an easy decision for me to surrender instantly.

Yeah, this is the Cuban Revolution is an exercise.

And if you can't beat them, join them.

Yeah.

Well, and and and like this was, I mean, this battle, like they basically rolled in with a tank and then blew up an armored train.

And then we're like,

okay.

And then on like, okay, we're fucked.

And then Batista flees the country on January 1st, 1959.

And that's, it is over for him.

It is.

It's never been more over than it is now.

It's been a

goodbye look.

Actually, it is Eisenhower over.

Thank you.

So

if we go to the next slide, we will see.

That's a really unexpected.

That's a TNO ass photo right there.

We will see the founder of the EPA

shaking hands.

Yeah,

you will see two woke

politicians exchanging pronouns.

And so,

what you see here is you see Fidel meeting with a certain Richard Milhouse Nixon.

The Quaker and Fidel offering the Alps.

I was going to say, yeah.

He's

got a real dump truck going on right there.

I'm just going to say this.

I'm Puerto Rican, so like, I like, it's just, it runs the family, if you will.

So, like, that's just, that's just, have you ever seen J-Lo?

I mean, like, come on.

So,

so basically, what what Fidel tries to do is like, he's not an idiot.

He's like, okay, well, we sell most of our shit to the United States.

We get a lot of shit from the United States.

They're the top dog.

I'm going to be nice to them.

So he does a goodwill tour of the United States in April 1959, where, side note, he gets really into ice cream.

Every communist who visits the U.S., fucking Anastasis McCoy becomes a new person.

Who will come up later?

Ice cream.

What the fuck?

Ice cream's good, Alice.

It is.

Sophie then actually gets so obsessed with ice cream that he's like, Cubans need to have ice cream.

Big cow, he.

Big cow.

Yes.

Right.

So she starts trying to develop like a cow that will, you know, be like well-suited for the highland environment of Cuba.

And they end up with Uber Blanca, who is like a Stachanovite cow.

Massive statue thereof.

They also build.

Her scuffed

body is in a museum.

Like, comrades.

Comrades, we're going to develop a cow.

They have like genetic samples of her to clone her.

That's true.

I love the Cuban Revolution so much.

I agree.

And he also built like a really cool modernist ice cream parlor called Coppelia in Havana.

But that's beside the point.

So Fide is doing a goodwill tour.

He's like, I love baseball

and, you know, apple pie and shit.

And he's trying to be like, hey, you know, we may be on different teams.

You can work with me.

He has not yet been like.

The logo of Copelia is quite horny.

Like, that's a personal, like, fidel intervention.

It's like a ballet dancer's two legs, but with remarkably thick thighs.

Oh, yeah, because Coppelia is a ballet, I think.

It is, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

Sorry, I just Googled it and yeah, it is extremely horny.

Oh, you know what?

I saw this sign.

I don't know why I had to Google it.

Anyway, so next slide, please.

So

one of my favorite tweets, bottom left.

So

he does a wrong move, which is to advocate for land reform.

Yeah, so remember, it keeps happening.

It keeps happening.

So in May 1959, he passes the first agricultural reform law, which implements an upper limit of 1,000 acres for land ownership and bans foreigners from owning land, which is good.

Based.

on the uh, the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria, the in the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, is formed to sort of draft this law and does a census of land in Cuba.

And it would theoretically allow the Cuban government to seize almost 40 million acres of land, but they only seize about 30 million over the course of four years because they're like, if we do this too quickly, like, you know, they will murder us.

Um, that's uh, it's still three-quarters of the goal fairly quickly, right exactly so uh at the time and so like this is a period of increasing tension between the cubans uh and the united states uh a second ship explosion has impacted the podcast the french ship la cubre uh blows up in the havana harbor i'm sorry about my pronunciation i don't care about french um

remember la cube to hell with cuba

that doesn't roll off the tongue as well and yeah it kind of it's nearly there it's i bet it would work made in french but i don't care what the French have to think.

Gotta

workshop it, you know?

So, souvenir le coupe.

So, um, uh, more languages tonight.

Well, there's your polyglot.

Yeah, precisely.

So, um, the so there's an arms embargo already in place from the Batista administration, um, where the America's like, you cannot buy guns from us.

So, they're like, okay, well, thank God we're still in sort of like a multipolar world.

We're going to go to the other superpower and buy the best guns ever made.

Licing my

factory and warehouse.

Yes, Liam, we are doing big Kalashnikov and we are doing it.

Actually, while I was in Cuba, I saw like people with AK-74s and

with like the sort of when we went by a military installation, I saw like AK-74s and I saw MP-5s.

And I was like, wow, this is a crazy, there's a weird assortment of shit here.

Yeah, some of them had like fouls as well in the Cuban military.

Oh, yeah.

It's like wild.

It is wild.

So the Americans react from by

that you made me play that, but they did have a quote from Advisu Campos right off the bat.

So I was okay with that, but just the rest of it sucked.

Anyway, reinstating it right now.

I want you to know that the series has gone downhill since Tale.

Yeah, exactly.

They reduce the importation.

The Americans reduce the importation of sugar.

So then the Cubans go to the Soviets and are like, okay, we have all this sugar.

And the Soviets are like, sure, I'll take that.

And then the Americans go, we're not going to give you any oil.

So in November of 1960,

the

Cubans make a deal with the aforementioned Anastas Mikoyan ice cream lover for 5 million tons of Cuban sugar to be shipped to Soviet Union.

International Alliance of Treats.

Exactly.

And the Soviets are...

Is there anything that tastes as sweet as socialist brotherhood?

Possibly socialist ice cream, ice cream.

Yeah,

so the Soviets too.

Damn it,

it's so well for us.

Listen, Mac.

Don't mess with the Cuban.

You mess with the Cuban women, you get the benefit, you know.

So

DSA should do the next national convention in Havana.

That's one of my favorite tweets.

I would re-up my dues at that point.

You should be re-upping your dues, and you should be re-upping your solidarity dues.

And also, anyone listening to this should re-up that solidarity dues.

That is my favorite tweet: the get fiscal one, where it's like, DSA should do the next national convention in Havana.

Wonderful romantic setting.

What's that?

Maria has invited you into the hills for a glass of wine.

You can look it up.

It's great.

So we were all talking about this while we were in Cuba.

So the Soviets give the Cubans in exchange for this sugar, grain, oil, and credit, which they desperately need.

Now you're in the camp.

And you accidentally have created...

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

Well, not yet, but close.

Because then the thing...

Let me know when we're in the camp because I have two social media.

All those things about.

I have two slides where you could say we're in the camp, but the second one is funnier.

So you'll know it when it happens.

But

so uh, the thing is, the Soviets are shipping crude, right?

So, that has to be refined, and Cuba has refineries, they are owned by Royal Dutch Shell, Texaco, and Standard Oil.

Um, and they hate this.

We're not refining this fucking communist,

yeah, it's it's Russian crude, the desinformacia,

um,

you know, that's coming from this Russian crude and the Mueller report and things of that nature.

Prudence crude, yeah.

So, that they nationalize those refineries.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

The oil companies don't like it when you do that.

That is the second thing you shouldn't do.

Also, they abolish the Cubans abolish income tax while they're at this.

So

score.

And they take control of the TV and radio stations.

and build up the army and the CDR, which is the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution and all that sort of stuff.

Next slide, please.

Wow.

He did all this and lowered taxes.

Incredible.

We can't even do it.

Yeah, exactly.

This guy was cool five minutes ago.

Yeah.

So you're going to have to retract that.

Turns out when you do cool things for your citizens, the United States hates that shit.

So six months after the revolution, I think like basically contemporaneously with the rising tensions, but also like right after Fidel was like, we pose no threat to you.

Eisenhower is having the CIA arm Guerrias to get rid of him.

He's jealous of how much he's lowered tax.

He's like, wait, you guys don't have a military industrial complex?

Fuck you all.

The reviled Angloids cancel a sale of whatever the fuck a Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft is.

It is a beautiful British jet fighter

that we exported to a lot of places around the world and which did some interesting counterinsurgency stuff.

Thank you.

I have in the notes Alice for question marks help.

And so

the whole NATP apparatus is gathered to figure out how to do a regime change.

And

so they sever relations in 61 and then move on to an embargo.

So next slide.

So what you're looking at is a memo written in 1960 from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Malator Mallory to Assistor.

I don't know.

What are you going to do?

Lester Mallory

to Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.

Name alert, Roy Rhubottom.

Rhubottom.

Rhubottum.

Yeah, that's a fuck even.

Okay, sure.

Rhubottom is like half of the people who compete on RuPaul's drag race.

Thank you.

I was searching for a RuPaul joke there.

Thank you for getting that for me.

I love how the sort of thrust of this memo is point by point.

Here's all the ways in which we're fucked.

Where it's like, they love Castro.

Everybody loves Castro.

And try not to.

Yeah, trying to do a coup would probably not work and would make people like Castro more.

Oh my God, we had to be friends.

You see where it basically says that, like, if you

do really overt

government action by the U.S.

against Cuba, it only causes more support.

I do.

And I see the final point here.

The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.

And do you notice how points five and six are kind of in contradiction?

I do.

Okay, please keep that in your brain.

And

it's like, you know, the biggest scare, which is socialists are going to raise your taxes, is completely irrelevant.

They're going to lower your taxes.

They're going to get rid of concept.

Yeah, it's because they already, it's because they take it out of your salary before it even gets to you.

But that's what Social Security is.

So what are you going to do?

So you can see here.

Sorry?

Nothing.

Hey, what's up?

You're just doing like tax evasion.

Liam, you were saying how much you love paying Social Security.

I do pay Social Security.

Don't worry about it.

I pay taxes.

everything gets more difficult when you own a business.

Correct.

Um, so a small business like the Cuban government.

Um, so they go on to say that the main thing here is that they need, if you look, flexible authority in sugar legislation, um, and that they need to seek this urgently because they see, um, if you're familiar with the economic concept of Dutch disease, I believe that's the right one.

Does it just be Dutch?

It's just when your entire economy is like specialized into this one thing.

No, it's when you can't stop doing blackface.

Your entire economy is based around shoe polish.

It's why MBS is trying desperately to make the line a thing so that you can be an app developer in Saudi Arabia instead of like a guy who gets rich off of petrodollars.

Oh, yeah.

It could be like America where the entire economy is based around apps.

I have a co-worker who lived in Duriza where she was telling me how nice it was.

And I'm just like, that is a place I have zero interest in going to.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

I'll listen to you.

So Cuba pre-revolutionary, brackets pre-revolutionary, had both the Dutch disease

sugar problem and also, as Liam just said, Dutch disease brackets can't stop doing blackface and racism problem.

So you see that like they got that.

flexible authorization on sugar.

They got the authorization to lower the sugar quota, which is what we talked about earlier.

If you go to the next slide.

are we in the camp yet?

Yeah, we're in the camp.

Oh, fuck.

I forgot that it shows up on black.

Would you mind fixing my horrible mistakes?

So, yeah.

Thank you.

I love you.

You have to get your shit from somewhere, and somewhere is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I'm not going to blast the theme song because it's too long.

Oh, come on, please, flying.

Them song album.

Now my brain's melting as well.

If I play the fucking entrance in you,

Nikita Khrushchev fan cam.

Scrolling up, scrolling up, scrolling up.

Oh,

I did see a Che fan cam.

We do it for the hogs.

We do.

We do.

That's why we're alive.

Damn, Jesus.

Are you serious?

I'm going to push you in the

face.

A third.

What the fuck do you have on me?

The sneeze came up quickly on me.

What was that?

Jesus Christ.

That wasn't a sneeze.

That was like your kidney coming out of your of your

larynx.

Oh my God.

You got to get in the tendency.

You got to get in the camp.

You got to get in the club with the Soviet Union.

So you can sneeze that last.

The Soviet Union wants three things from you.

The third one is on the next slide after this, but

it wants to build a huge brutalist embassy in the shape of a sword plunged into the middle of Havana.

That's so cool.

Yeah.

So good.

Which is sick.

Good.

Yes.

I want this.

I saw it in person.

It's exactly as cool as you think it is.

It wants submarine bases.

Yes, I want that as well.

And this means we have a submarine base.

Cuba exists in the mind of a generation of Soviets who did their national service in the Navy as the place that you had sure leave, saw black people for the first time ever, and possibly had an intriguing, mind-opening sexual experience that you then took back to your depressive, shitty country and just masturbated about for the rest of your life.

So easy.

Slavs of the gooch, yeah.

It is so easy to find like Soviet, like retro-Soviet Cuba-themed porn, right?

The whole country got a complex about Cuban women off of this shit.

Like, I'm not going to be able to do that.

I'm going to be real with you, Alice.

We were at the civil defense

department

and there was like a sub-lieutenant whose name was like Yvonne and looked extremely Slavic and that was my first thought.

I prefer Dom lieutenants, but yeah, so sort of a sort of a

sort of an underground Soviet submarine base goon cave

There are a bunch of like Russo-Cubans running around who were born in like the you know 60s 70s 80s often speaking of warm uh speaking of warm Soviet-Cuban relationships I mean this is like the thing like if if you are in the Soviet military right most of the places you will get sent, you can go to Afghanistan and get shot at.

You can go to like Siberia and shut up.

Oh,

or you can go to fucking Cuba.

where everybody

yeah on vacation uh sort of beach episode of being in national service uh where everyone keeps giving you like socialist fraternal kisses uh

yeah you show up uh maria invites you out to the hills

um uh i i do also want to say like speaking of warm

Cuban and Soviet relationships, like, initially, the Soviets are like, yeah, these people are fucking clowns.

And like, they're never going to win.

They're never going to succeed.

And they don't want to support the revolution at all until it wins.

And then

they realize that they're sort of hating from outside the club in Latin America.

And that if Cuba goes down because of American intervention, it's going to look bad for the Soviets.

So they're like, fuck, okay.

Like, they literally are like, oh, okay, this is a corruption of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which it's like, no, have you even read Marxist-Leninist ideology technically, even the way you slam it against the door as fascist?

Yeah, um, also, one thing I wanted to say about the submarines, really quickly, is that that's why Soikuba is shot the way it is shot.

If you watch it, it looks that way because they used Soviet naval infrared film that they had from the submarines being there.

So, nice, that's cool.

Also, very cool.

You should watch it.

It's so good.

It's got like so many unbroken, like, one-take shots that are fucking impossible.

to do.

I take some like still photography on.

I have a little cache of Soviet infrared film actually.

Yeah, so you're just like fucking what was this film?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, they have a really great shot of like a student protester has been shot and killed by the Batista regime.

And so his coffin is being pulled through the crowd.

And then the camera goes up the side of a building.

uh in through a cigar factory that's on the top floor of that building as a man in that factory pulls out a um a cuban flag and then drapes it off the side of the building and lets it go.

And we follow that flag again at the third floor going out over the crowd.

That's all in one take.

Like they had to like strap a guy to a crane.

It was incredible.

Watch the movie.

So the thing is.

They did 10,000 other shots that didn't make it in, I assume.

I hope so.

So

serious film with just some guy saying, well, fix it and post over this poor young man.

Oh, and also they have like in that in that rooftop party scene that was in the earlier slide, they have like guys who are doing like Americans.

And obviously, the whitest person you can find is going to be like the Russian guys who are there.

So they have like, I am big capitalist guy from New York City.

Do you want to ride the baby?

I love to be hiring prostitutes or whatever.

So the third thing is Asuka,

which is the Khrushchev is happy to like give you shit as long as the you are exporting sugar and tobacco and uh all sorts of shit to be

a new export boss, yes.

Um, and uh not to be like Maoist about this, but like

same as the old export boss,

uh, cultural uh Soviet imperialism um is uh is uh sort of evident here in some ways.

Um, so that's just that's Seria Krus, by the way, way.

That's our catchphrase.

It's a super.

But anyway,

so that's where we're at.

The Cuba is like, okay, well, fuck the US.

We're going to export to the Soviet Union.

They're going to give us shit.

We're going to be really happy.

And nothing is going to go wrong.

Next slide.

We're going to get Russian Dutch disease.

Shout out.

Don't mess with the

unless you want to get the movie

to have more Barbados.

Ryder.

Thank you for the great.

Please don't ask what happened to Rose Kennedy.

Our other Catholic president.

So a tranked-up Irishman is the partner.

This fucking guy.

And let me be clear:

the tranked-up Irishman is the bane of the Cuban people.

So on the left.

William Randolph Hearst.

Yeah.

John F.

Kennedy.

We're going to start with John F.

Kennedy as the first tranked up Irishman to really come along and fuck everything up.

So there he is.

By the way, when I say tranked up, that's a matter of historical record that that man was on more painkillers than like...

Oh, I know.

I know.

He was

running a clitic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

CRPD.

It's just like if you took Kennedy and got rid of the fun vices.

Yeah, Yeah, that's true.

Or the charisma or the hair.

What's really funny is that

both the US and the Soviet Union are very worried about Cuba.

And part of the reason why the Cuban missile crisis develops the way that it does is obviously, I think most people, especially most people on the left, are aware of the fact that the CIA conducted like...

years or decades of like terrorism and assassination and sabotage, both within Cuba and without Cuba, aimed at Cuba.

And JFK sort of like inherited this from Eisenhower and like double and triple that.

I thought it was a great idea, right?

Yeah, but

we weren't going too far enough.

But also, the USSR was scared that the Cubans were going to turn Maoists.

And so the whole time they're sort of like concerned about like, you know, Fidel sort of eyeing China and being like, listen, no, we're your guys.

We're your guys on this.

You should have been worried about Peru.

Gonzalo thought.

I mean, you know, on the right, by the way, speaking of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

so on the right,

that is a photo that I want to say my comrade Mina took

that is of the memorial for the Cuban Missile Crisis or like the open-air museum, rather.

Did they let him keep one?

Those are like the rockets.

They just have like,

I mean, they don't have a warhead in them, but like they have, that's a plane on the left.

There's a couple of ICBMs, and they're just sitting out there.

This is on the way to the environmental ministry, by the way.

I will say, so

that's fun.

They let him keep one.

Yes.

I will say that

as far as these things go,

Fidel did later say that, like, had the Soviets given him launch authority, and he was telling them this at the time too,

he would have just launched on the US

first and let Cuba Maoists.

Yeah, and let Cuba be a sort of like, you know, just take the hit for removing the hated Americans from the face of the earth.

He was striking at settler colonial America.

He had read Jay Sakai's settlers and was determined to sort of like

put an end to the greater Satan.

The J stands for Jose.

Jose Sakai.

So, yeah, the Cuban missile crisis happens.

The Bay of Pigs is.

Well, Alice,

I'm going to

refresh my Mojito while you, because

you're going to do this way better than me.

I'm really not.

So the Americans are trying to station nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy

in order to

have more convincing first-strike capability against the Soviets,

which leads Khrushchev to put nuclear weapons on Cuba,

since both of these are sort of like geographically in the backyard for short and medium-range ballistic missiles.

And, you know,

since even more than submarines, this is a situation where like you have zero warning before the White House is simply vaporized.

Kennedy does not appreciate this.

And in particular, the U.S.

military really do not appreciate this.

Only we can do that.

You can't do that.

Only we can do that.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff almost throws a lovely coup over it.

Yes, genuinely, because they want to go in and disarm

the missile sites in Cuba ahead of time.

To be fair, what would we have lost if they launched?

Miami.

I mean...

All Cubans already.

Possibly Washington.

Possibly

so much the better for it.

It fucking sucks.

I'm reminded of a Mao quote here where a guy from the Italian Communist Party said,

are you aware that in a nuclear war,

you know, every Italian would be killed, every Italian communist.

And Mao says, well, what makes you think Italians are so important to the revolution?

Mamma, mia, that's a spicy meat of all.

Yeah, so this is ultimately resolved by means of.

All Italian culture is derived from Chinese culture anyway.

Spaghetti.

true a spaghetti

a struggle gunpowder a stricter blockade on soviet ships that are gonna be bringing the the weapons and the technicians uh by the way there are at this point on cuba uh like Soviet guys driving the like TELs, the like launches around, and people are noticing the fact that there are these massive missile launches getting stuck and lost and like snapping the edges off of buildings and like tiny villages where they're driving them around.

Like the big ones with like a million wheels.

There's just so cool.

Yeah, genuinely.

genuinely going out to like Cien Fuegos or whatever.

Exactly in the woods, there's just an active nuclear weapon

trying to go through a McDonald's drive-through, you know.

Yeah, so uh, yeah, the way this ultimately resolves is there is a negotiated settlement where the U.S.

pulls its missiles out, and the Soviets do too.

Um, and Castro doesn't get to launch on Kennedy, but he does get to kill him.

Um,

listen, listen to our episode on the JFK assassination to find out why that's a joke on my part, but I'm not sure anyone else on this podcast will agree with me that it was.

Well, also, like, to be clear, it is because Fidel, like my dad,

is a staunch advocate for Texas-style barbecue, whereas JFK openly praised

North Carolina-style barbecue.

And that's why he was assassinated.

I mean, if you want to link his death to Cuba, the most plausible version of it is the Bay of Pigs, where he like, the CIA armed and trained a bunch of weird fascist Cuban exiles, but I repeat myself.

And then

went, you know, slapped them all in the ass and went, okay, guys, go and overthrow Castro.

They landed and then immediately fucked it.

and weren't able to demonstrate the sort of perseverance that Fidel had by fleeing into the mountains, but instead went and cried to the Americans for air support, which they didn't get,

and were all massacred or thrown back into the ocean.

Bay of pigs.

What do you do with pigs?

You barbecue them.

What do you put on barbecue?

Barbecue sauce.

It's all coming together.

It's all connected.

It's all connected.

Oh my God.

And North Carolina barbecue, according to my dad, is primarily pork and mustard-based.

Yeah.

And

North Carolina has a big bay.

On which you might barbecue the pigs.

Oh, my God.

Okay, my hyoid bone is intact.

I am not having dark thoughts because I take a medication

through the looking glass here, people.

I was googling the Falklands and real estate in the Falklands, but not because I want to move there really that much.

So,

so this embargo on Cuba that, like the new stricter embargo that like prevented any Soviet weapons from getting in, that persists beyond the missile crisis in a less sort of

overtly patrolled form.

Next slide, please.

So, what you see here is you see the Hotel Nacional.

These are photos that I took when we went into the lobby just to check it out.

Big wooden beams here.

These are news.

Oh, dude, it's so sick.

And then also, like on the on the top floor,

there is a Capablanca, a Raul Capablanca-themed bar that has like live music.

So you can just go up and you can listen to the live music.

It would be so funny for us to do our first live show outside the U.S.

in Cuba.

Yeah, my dad.

That'd be really fun.

My dad wants wants to see us do it.

I can tell you that right now.

You maybe could.

Well, we'll get into maybe you could, but yeah, that's possible.

I think, I think, you know, national convention in Havana.

But

so that's the hotel where Meyer Lansky and

that's that's the hotel where Meyer Lansky would stay.

That's the hotel that Santo Traficante ran his empire out of.

And it's the hotel where the Havana conference was.

Yeah.

Every single person who has been anywhere near this hotel all assassinated JFK individually.

It is also state-owned.

You know, we have these like fraud, uh, these, these fraught

positions of international conflict.

The nice hotel always stays.

It's like this and like the hotel in

Kabul.

Yeah, the international.

There's a bunch of really interesting long reads about that.

Well, the thing is, like, the Cubans, the Cubans are still happy to do tourism shit.

And so, like, I mean, after the revolution and now, so these hotels are just nationalized.

And the casinos are like shut down, but, you know, they're converted to hotels where possible.

And this hotel is nationalized.

So we could not stay there.

And what we're going to go into is we're going to talk about the mechanic of the embargo.

Because after 1962, the US Congress passed the Cuban Asset Control Regulations.

And basically, what that means is that the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control gets jurisdiction to enforce and amend that at the direction of the President and apply whatever new restrictions the president deems necessary and allows the Office of Foreign Asset Control to start implementing penalties for U.S.

nationals who are,

you know, who are dealing in any real capacity in Cuba.

The embargo works like this.

If you are a subject to U.S.

jurisdiction, so if you're a U.S.

national, you can't deal in any property in which Cuba or a Cuban national has an interest.

You can't make payments, transfers, withdrawals with any such entities without a Treasury Department license.

And it can apply to individuals doing travel-related expenditures.

Applying for a license for podcast live show.

Yeah, right.

Oh, you know the State Department dweebs get their hands on this one.

Okay, so Nora Jones recently did, or recently was going to do like a live show in Cuba.

a four-day like series of shows in Cuba.

And then like that was canceled because of interference from the Treasury, I think.

I don't know.

It was weird.

But we'll get into how she's able to do that in a second.

But

travel-related expenditures are also included in this sometimes.

So it can make it

near impossible to go to Cuba.

We'll get into how I was able to do that and how DSA was able to do that later.

But Kennedy did actually make it illegal for you to go to Cuba for a while.

And there was activism among sort of left-wing Cuban Americans in the Brigada Antonio Maseo.

and various other orgs about like being allowed to return to Cuba.

There was a group of 55 who wanted to return and

did activism around that.

So

the thing about that is that that means that you, as an American, cannot exchange money in order to stay at this hotel, right?

Because it is owned by the Cuban government, even though it's very nice and also much cheaper than the hotel that we stayed at, which is still pretty cheap, even for the hotel that it was.

What if you exchange the currency for a different currency?

Well,

you have to do that entirely in cash because the

thing.

Like Cuba is essentially statutorily prohibited from dealing in any sort of like US credit, right?

Like, no, you can't be, we'll get into this a little bit later, but like they cannot buy agricultural goods with credit the way that every single other country, except for like Iran and North Korea, et cetera, can.

They have to buy it in cash, which does not have to be just US dollars, but it includes like pounds and Euros and all that.

And so a large portion of like the Cuban tourist economy is based around extracting foreign currencies and exchanging them for worthless pesos, which are very cool.

And I got a bunch of because they look nice.

So we'll get into that in a second, but or later in the slide.

There's also restrictions on purchasing Cuban goods if the initial raw product was made in Cuba and then processed elsewhere.

So if the like Cubans ship sugar to Mexico and it's refined in Mexico and then that sugar is sold as a product, it can't be sold in the United States.

Or for example, if like they sell molasses to be distilled as rum in elsewhere, it can't then be sold to like Puerto Rico or some shit like that, which is a part of the United States nominally.

And so that also replies in reverse.

So if a product is more than 10% U.S.

made, it can't be sent to Cuba.

And that's why the plane thing was funny, because on the plane, they announced that it was 100% Brazilian-made.

And

once again,

the proletarian airliner.

Yeah, thank you.

Well, I mean, we flew American.

We flew American.

Yeah.

We flew American.

Sorry.

Or at least I flew American.

Some people flew.

But like, so the

doesn't Cubana de Aviation still roster a bunch of the big Soviet wide bodies?

Yeah, they have a bunch of Ilyutian.

They also have a big Soviet wide body.

Actually, if you go to the, if you go to the hotel, not the hotel, the airport, you can see all the Kubana planes and they're like running like ilyutions with like the weird four engine arrangement in the back.

Yeah, it's it's pretty sick.

But so like they

during COVID, and we were told this by, you know, government officials, so, you know, grain of salt, but like during COVID, the Chinese, Chairman Xi, was going to send

COVID aid to Cuba, which had an enormous shortage of oxygen.

Cuba's always having shortages due to the embargo, but like especially during COVID, there was a shortage of oxygen.

And

so the Chinese loaded up like 10 747s full of just COVID supplies.

And then the U.S.

government was like, you cannot land those planes in Cuba.

Should have had embrace, you know?

Well, right.

But like, you're not allowed to do that.

Fuck you.

And so those sat grounded in Beijing.

I mean,

you know, you could just fly them over there, and then, you know, we haven't left one up there yet.

Much like the international humanitarian law stuff, you around with this, and there's uh weird consequences in places, you know.

Well, and people died, like that's the thing, people died

because they didn't have they weren't able to access.

And we'll get into more people dying from various other things, but like the embargo is a disaster of political engineering, right?

It is a disaster of trying to engineer a particular situation in the

governing of an island, of trying to engineer a particular process, of trying to have control over Latin America, and also fundamentally a disaster of resource allocation and economic function.

So the Cuban government has a lot of difficulty importing basic goods.

And while we were in Cuba, there was a tanker offshore for three days that we could see from the hotel.

And we were like, what the fuck is up with this tanker?

And they're like, yeah, so that's waiting for a transaction to clear.

And that's got oil on it.

And it's stuck there until that transaction clears.

And when it does, we'll be able to, you know, but that transaction has to be made in cash or like for like and resources.

And various other countries are subject to these restrictions, and we'll get into why.

But like, for example, Iran or North Korea or various other countries, they have a neighbor, right?

They have like a various neighbors who are not within the U.S.

sphere of influence and who share a land border.

So they are able to get things from Turkey, where Iran can like use gold and oil to like buy things, or China, which will just fund North Korea.

Cuba has nothing.

There is nothing around for many, many miles.

And it's so expensive to get things shipped in from China, where you know that is one of the places that you can get things shipped in from.

So next slide.

As a bit of a palette cleanser, that's also what leads to like the 50s car situation.

This is a photo I took of some cars outside our hotel.

Sorry, this one's cool.

Sorry.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, no, it's six fuck.

Got the white walls.

You got cars that are two colors.

Amazing.

You can do that.

All of a sudden, the color is black now.

You get the floating roof thing that the car manufacturers insist on giving us.

Yeah.

Precisely.

So

why am I saying precisely so much?

Limiting factor.

Yeah.

All of the internal parts have basically...

I believe my mom said, so blame my mom if this is wrong.

Don't blame her mom.

Never blame your mom for anything.

I love my mom so much.

My parents are great.

Hi, parents, who will inevitably listen to this podcast?

Hi, Dad.

Hi, mom.

They're called on Mendras.

I mean, almonds, so they've got like a streamlined, because they've got that streamlined shape to them.

The entire interior has been replaced with East German or Czech or Korean or Japanese, Chinese parts.

So some of this stuff isn't made of car parts.

Some of this is made out of like weird thrown together stuff too.

Like some of the repairs that you see done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just literally you can keep these things running with like string and like baggies and shit.

Yeah.

And also like these were back when cars were like easy to repair because they made sense.

Yeah.

But they're also designed to last for one year at most.

It goes out

steel, you know,

but that's the thing I want to highlight: that, like, the overall story here is of a nation and a people who are just incredibly fucking resourceful and who have made,

who have been able to do so much with so little, and have been able to carve out a life for themselves in spite of unending horrors inflicted upon them by

the United States and its cronies.

I was

very moved by what the sort of the dedication and the, you know, the spirit and et cetera that I saw there.

And we'll get into that when we get into the hospital.

But

so

I know everyone's looking at the cars here.

I'm looking at this apartment building on the Piloti.

You got the fun colored blocks.

You got the good window air, non-window air conditioners.

You got the mini split system.

Yeah, that's actually a very tall building, too.

It's just, you know, prefab housing,

soviet style all over havana we don't we don't have the technology to do this in the united states

well and okay so you want to talk about differences

you know yeah we want to talk about differences

i didn't see i did not see homelessness i live in los angeles okay i did not see homelessness in havana because even though the houses can be shitty because they're not well maintained because you don't have the resources you don't literally you have a paint shortage they make an effort to ensure that you are housed.

And my friend Tal, who also listens to this podcast, hi, Tal,

was in Cuba recently.

And his guide was like, the dirty secret is that some people have alcoholism and we take them to the state rehab and they run through the program, but then they go back to their families and they relapse and they're back out on the street.

And she said this like it was like, oh, well, in America, that wouldn't happen.

Tall, who also listened to LA, was like, haha, yeah.

Because like,

you know, there's still like at least like a base level acknowledgement of like people need a place to live, but anyway, um, next slide, please.

Hey, this is what I was talking about with the cool fouls, and yeah, that's a that's a that's an incredible mix of so you've got like a K pattern rifle and an M16 with like the old handguard, not the old old handguard, but like the sort of uh uh middle one and and a foul.

That's it amazing, incredible.

So we're talking about we're talking about getting um uh, you know, we're talking about sort of like 1960s and 1970s women.

Yeah, I have 1970s women dysphoria and that I need an assault rifle.

Oh, here you are.

I just needed an assault rifle.

In the notes,

left Sandinista in Nicaragua, placed there specifically to make Alice say, I think I hove COVID.

Taingo COVID.

So Cuba has a second layer of economic sanctions imposed.

So the first layer are sort of under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917.

Cool.

Which was World War I, German Empire.

The naked sphere of influence stuff.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So the second round is under something called the State Sponsors of Terror List, which is the second naked sphere of influence ship.

Because,

because glorious episodes in Cuban military history,

sending fighters to Angola to fight against the apartheid South Africans.

And also to help the MPLA, the left-wing and now ruling party of Angola fight UNITA, which was backed by the sort of by NATO and that whole establishment.

And then, so the Sandinistas as well on the left,

very critical support.

And the topic.

The redenum, though.

Oh, yeah.

No, I mean, that woman's like, she's serving tons.

And the.

Sorry.

That's, I'm gay.

I'm allowed to say that.

No, my mom's going to ask me what that means.

And mom, I'm not going to explain it.

Look it up on Twitter.

Liam's mom, serving cunt is when somebody's like, got a really cool little outfit and they're like owning it and they look really like cool and like hot.

It derives from drag balls.

You should watch Paris is burning.

Also, hi, Liam's mom.

I hope you're doing well.

So top right is Fark, which is even critical.

Even more.

Yeah, the support's getting more and more critical as the number of dead dogs is rising.

Also, it's the number of like cocaine trafficking.

Listen, is it illegal to both liberate your country from capitalism and help the Gringos have a little party?

And the answer is yes, extremely.

It is so illegal for you to do that.

It is also illegal to kill babies and children.

So you can't make an international cocaine trafficking empire without breaking a few eggs, right?

So at the time, FARC was not that way.

So it changed a little bit.

So yeah, so bottom right is.

You know, I think we can optimize your processes here.

Somebody should hire me to do that.

But bottom right is Cuban fighters in Angola.

Cuba has always viewed itself in a sort of internationalist lens,

hence tensions of the Soviet Union, and

would basically like provide financial aid and soldiers or insurgent movements that aligned with Cuba's values.

They did really well at times, particularly in Angola, Battle of Cuita.

Canaval.

Exactly, because they are experienced

jungle guerrilla fighters.

So,

you know, and you know, I think largely this is a legacy of real

good.

in a lot of ways, but it has also put Cuba on the state sponsors of terror lists.

So what does that mean?

Okay, so you can't get weapons at all.

You can't get any dual-use exports.

So anything that could be used for a military

stuff is fucking intense, by the way.

There's a lot of just regular ass stuff that it turns out you can't export from the U.S.

because it's on arms control lists.

Yeah, I mean, the thing about dual use where one of the uses is military is that's basically everything.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can't have a truck because technicals.

You can't have a truck.

You can't have like, I don't don't know, maybe you can have like a bale of cardboard for recycling.

I can throw it.

Oh, wait, no, no, no, you know what?

Throw that at someone.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

You know what has military usage?

Ammonia fertilizer.

Not like you need any of that for your

large-scale industrial agriculture.

Yeah.

Yes.

Prohibition on economic assistance by the United States.

Who cares?

Fuck the gringos, fuck the Yankees, et cetera.

Sure, we'ren't getting that.

But prohibition on getting World Bank loans or any international financial institutional help because it requires

the U.S.

to oppose that in any sense.

So

not good.

Again, fuck the Yankee, fuck the gringo.

Ban on financial transactions without a license from the treasury.

You are not allowed to have visa waivers of any kind, and you get a revocation of diplomatic immunity.

So for like your leaders, which allows people to bring suits against

various governments on that list.

So, it is hugely impactful to Cuba.

This is also true of various other countries.

Hear me out.

Take all of those off of Cuba, put them all on Israel.

Thanks for coming.

I agree 100%.

But also, like, currently, I think it's Cuba, Iran, and North Korea are on that list.

Syria, oh, Yemen just got added to that list.

Oh, cool.

because of their principled

actions to stop the genocide in Gaza.

So, again, fuck Joe Biden.

Oh man, the comments on this are going to be great.

But I simply don't care.

I know.

But so

it's immensely destabilizing.

I think also Syria was on there for a little bit, and it may not be anymore.

But

it's, thankfully, they have their friends in the Soviet Union.

I've heard of that.

Next slide, please.

Slide.

Ustedo de este nuevo video juego trabajadoresi vecursos república sovietica.

And I have in the notes.

O no, mi economía.

I said that Italianly.

Ono, mi economía.

Estoy su friendo de lo cura cerebral les pueste como 5as de PowerPoint.

So

I did actually genuinely spent three hours in Workers and Resources Soviet Republic and the Steam Workshop making the shot.

So I hope you all appreciate it.

I did.

I really did.

I'm just, I'm just, I'm on my first playthrough in realistic mode where I haven't had to cheat in money.

Oh, wow.

It only took about a billion hours of gameplay to get good at the game.

I'm fucking up on like the easiest possible mode.

Like, this is all for show because all of these people are unemployed.

Look,

you have to assign them jobs from their housing, and it's so unintuitive that I don't.

Yeah,

you don't always have to do that.

The trick, what you want to do to start out with is everyone works in a sweatshop.

Build the clothing factory.

A lot of good men died in those sweatshops.

And then once you're making money from that, you build the fabric sweatshop where they make the fabric that goes into the clothing sweatshop.

Oh,

fuck.

Okay, but that's going to produce extra fabric.

So you export that and the clothing.

Both those are pretty high-value goods that run, you know, they're made from like crops and like chemicals.

You're still going to have to import chemicals, which is the first thing I did was build a coal power plant and a university so that I could get prefab housing for this shot because a lot of what's in this shot is prefab housing.

And then I built 30 different tourist locations and this is a East Cuba map.

So thank you to the moder who made that and also all of these beautiful Latin American buildings.

So

Dev for Workers and Resources Soviet Republic, please add more options for Cuba and San Francisco.

They have talked about it.

That's one of the things that they want to do is like DLC is like what

a tropical map.

Yeah.

Well,

yeah, they're going to have one that's Cuba and they're going to have one that's Iran.

I'm so happy with that.

Please, I need that.

Cover every single part of the sanctions list.

I want my North Korean map.

Yeah, actually, I need a North Korean map.

I would love to see like a Chinese map

Afghanistan map.

Actually, someone just uploaded an Afghanistan map.

Fuck yeah.

It's fun.

The idea is you only have one small customs station.

That's it.

Yeah, and almost no resources.

Okay.

What is an important thing?

Speaking of resources.

Speaking of having one customs station and not that many resources, Fidel has a problem,

which is that Cuba is an economy based around sugar exports and tourism.

And the thing that that creates is a whole class of peasant farmers.

And Fidel went around the United States and he's like, damn, what what if we have that shit?

And it commences what's called an import-subsidized industrialization plan, where you are trying to build domestic industry by you go to the Soviets and you're like, make us more like you.

Yeah, you go to the Soviets and you're like, give me the shit that I need to make a car, to make like car factories.

And the Soviets are like, easy.

We will teach you how to make these snow factories that we have.

Yeah.

So

it's largely dependent on the

achieve blood alcohol content of 0.999.

This will be easy for you because you make incredible rum.

It's called Kavina Club.

It's very smooth.

Costs $2 USD for a double.

It's unfortunate this happened so early because now you can look on YouTube and an Indian man will teach you how to do it.

Looking up the how to balance my country's economy tutorial.

Yeah.

Number one, cash all those checks from the United States to give you the currency part.

So it's dependent on the Soviet Union, as you might imagine, and the rest of the economic bloc being able to provide industrial capital, which doesn't really work in some ways.

So Cuba gets billions of dollars in subsidies from the Soviets to build like concrete prefab housing.

Some of that is similar to what you will see here.

And also

Cuba engages in things like large-scale literacy campaigns.

So Cuba actually has one of the highest literacy rates in the entire world because it takes, like, it does strong education and it does all sorts of, like, it did

la campaign,

fucking Christ, I can't say it, alphabetización, tough word,

the literacy campaign to like teach people out in the campo and whatnot,

and as well as industrial development.

So they're building like, you know, factories and shit, as well as a biotech sector that even now is incredibly incredible.

You're going to learn to read and you're going to work on cloning this cow.

And you're going to build university.

You're going to have these universities.

You're going to nationalize them and and you're going to turn out like 86 doctors per 100,000 people.

We're going to skip the food factory and go straight to ice cream factory.

Yeah.

I mean, literally, the ice cream factory is a really good example of doing this because the Cuban government invested in dairy farms and

the industrial machines.

Wow.

Refrigerate.

That's an IWW slogan.

I want the IWW one big cow patch very badly.

Yeah, I think that would be

really good.

Refrigerated trucks, all that, and then like the parlors themselves.

So they built an extremely educated middle class, a doctor corps, which they have one of the highest doctor to person ratios of any country, and they send doctors abroad.

I know doctor to person is like a thing, but it implies that they are distinct classes, which I appreciate.

Doctors are a different species of aliens.

I believe this to be true.

You cut them up with their syringes there

instead of organs.

So income inequality goes down.

And a thing that's really important to point out is that it goes down really strongly in favor of black Cubans.

Black Cubans benefit really heavily from this revolution because

there's an active attempt to eliminate racism and to eliminate sort of the economic situation that puts black Cubans in this position.

And at the same time, they're still doing exports, right?

And we'll get to that in a second, but they start providing foreign aid and military support to other countries like Angola and Nicaragua, which you talked about.

Cuba joins Comic-Con, which is the not the one that happens in San Diego, but rather the council for fucking whatever.

It's the Soviet economic sphere.

And his class is a developing country within it.

So that means that they get oil at a preferential rate.

And they don't need all the oil they get.

So what do they do?

They refine it and then they sell it elsewhere

because they got it at such a good rate.

They're able to generate a profit on that.

Those refineries they nationalized earlier, too.

And they're still getting sugar and rum and tobacco and minerals and all that, and exporting them.

And I have here, unfortunately, this is the Maoist sector of the episode.

So,

next slide, please.

Okay, incredible, incredible dudes here.

I was about to say all the outfits I would wear.

You got the new Soviet men and women here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, Cuba still, like, tourism is is very strong.

And, like, if you look at where this is, this is not far from where that photo is.

This is in that photo.

This is like in the Vedado.

I see this guy has a powerful stash on this man.

Yeah.

Incredible headline on the guy in white pants.

Oh, yeah.

You go to Cuba, you have rum, you have cigar, you have a good time.

You go back to the city.

See what I mean about Cuba existing in the sort of Soviet imagination.

Sure.

So it's good for a lot of people.

It's good for Soviet Unions, tourists.

It's especially good for black Cubans.

It's not so good for gay Cubans at the time.

Because if you are gay or you are a sort of like

a hippie or any other sort of weird

subculture.

No rights.

You literally get put in a

like work camp situation.

Now, dudes do not love a work camp situation.

Now, to be clear, they send you to the gay steel mill.

I mean, kind of.

They send you to the gay sugar plantation.

Ah, not so good.

I do want to be like even-handed here to be like, yeah, that fucking sucks.

But also, like, I think it's 30,000 people total were subjected to that.

And it wasn't like a sort of like, you know, gulag situation.

Like, you were allowed to leave and visit your family after a certain amount of time.

But, like, it's not great.

And Cuba recognizes this as a sort of historic error.

Pideo said as much.

The Constitution currently guarantees gay marriage, gay rights to adoption, trans rights, etc., as a result of the work of Mariela Castro, who is Fidel's niece and Raul's daughter, who we met while we were there.

Really, really cool stuff.

And she wrote a book that I am reading at the moment about how she managed to sort of like build this campaign for trans rights that led to that being included in the Constitution.

Things have changed, but at the time...

Fidel kind of thinks that you can move straight to the communist phase because he's like, we're ready.

We're there.

It's based on vibes.

You know, things are going well.

We got all these guys with big mustaches walking around.

Right.

So, next slide, please.

Bigger the mustache, the more communist it is.

That's right.

I agree.

So, okay, so the Soviets are like, we're going to motivate workers through monetary means.

And Cuba is like, we're going to motivate.

The guy who wins first prize in this gets a vacation to Cuba.

And Cuba's like, we're going to motivate workers with revolutionary fervor.

So in 1968, the government takes steps to nationalize the remaining private businesses in Cuba, of which there are a few, and reorganize some sectors of the economy into like brigades.

And I have here in the notes an inside joke that I have with Alice that I'm not going to read out on the pod, but Alice, dude.

Thank you.

Yes, very good.

Yep.

Comrades, your efforts are an inspiration.

The export-related nature of Cuba.

You received the order of Lenin for this, Caps.

Yeah, posadism.

The export-related nature of Cuba's economy is important here when they start encouraging people, especially youths, to go out to the countryside, the Campo, to do agricultural work.

And they decide that they're going to do what's called a safra de los dies millones.

So the safra is like the heart, big harvest, and dies miones means 10 million because they're going to make 10 million tons of sugar in 1970.

I love the great taste of Maoism, you know?

Yes.

Right.

And again, again, like, you know, this is not necessarily unachievable, but it's a huge goal.

And so they are like, we're going to bring everybody out to the campo you're gonna harvest sugar and so students for a democratic society

sds sends um a what's called the venceremos brigade um of youths out to the countryside to help with this so that's the left poster here todos a saludar a las brigadas vinceduras everyone will salute the uh the victorious brigades um and uh the middle uh one says where will we be on the second of january in the the cane fields,

and the one on the right says, Everyone in the revolutionary offensive with Fidel.

SDS is also like buried via a series of sort of descending things, the precursor org to DSA.

So there was like a, I want to say a Maoist or a Trotskyite split or something, and then we got the normal people.

But

they turn into,

yeah, yeah, Liam.

Liam probably knows

this than I do because I just read the charts that tell me which caucus is to send from where.

So they're going to do this big Safra and they're going to export all this sugar.

And also like Cuba is such a big sugar producer that the embargo on Cuba did actually cause a rise in sugar prices globally.

So this is not necessarily out of the realm of

imagination.

So they make.

This does kind of sound like it sucks.

It's like, all right, every socialist project is, you're going to become a farmhand.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It does.

And what's our job after the revolution?

I'm going to be real.

A farmhound.

Yeah.

No, no, give me coal miner.

I want a coal miner.

This does suck.

I'm actually.

I'm not going to lie.

This does kind of suck, especially because it doesn't work.

It makes 8.5 million tons of sugar, which is good.

I mean, that's way more tons of sugar than I can organize a nation to produce.

But like,

the all-time record is 7.2, right?

So it's, it does that, but it also causes a 20% decrease in economic activity in non-agricultural sectors.

Well, that's bad.

Yeah, it's so like this is the early.

What if instead of Dutch disease, we gave ourselves Dutch disease too?

Yeah, sugar.

And so they're like, okay, so a bunch of people get fired.

I think a guy commits suicide over this, just out of shame.

Sort of like Japanese video game executive route out.

And the state kind of like moves to something closer to the Soviet Union's Kosygin reforms, which is like decentralization and who gives a shit.

But it's all fine because this will keep working forever.

Because the Soviet Union is an adherent of Marxist-Leninist, the immortal science, and Marxist-Leninist

ideology.

And it's all going to be fine.

And, you know, it's all going to.

Next slide.

This movie.

Ah, shit.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

Oh, oh, shit.

Fuck.

It all.

Oh, no.

It's bad.

It's all come tumbling down.

Yeah.

So, on the 26th of December, 1991, the Soviet Union is dissolved in one of the greatest world historical crimes ever committed,

putting us on the bad timeline.

And forever.

I still believe the bad timeline was when we didn't get the German Revolution, but like

this is a sort of close-run thing to, yeah.

I'm gonna ask you to

get worse.

No, I'm gonna ask you this seriously.

Would you want to live in a world where the Germans get to be extremely smug about having done the right thing?

I do live in a world where the Germans get to be extremely smug.

It's about to say.

Fair.

Okay.

Also, they're on the international stage saying that only they know how to do a genocide properly.

Well, and I mean,

you know, I guess.

Also, Roz, just FYI, I got an error that it can't save the local backup of my audio, but I have the local backup of my audio.

Yeah, on account of the the local backup of your audio is now 15,000 gigabytes because we've got a lot of money.

Well, I've got nine.

I've got three gigabytes free on one drive.

I've got 584 free on another

and then 81 on the next.

Anyway, so we're on the bad timeline.

And so the problem with this is that the entire economy is kind of dependent on aid from the Soviet Union.

You have to invent one of the all-time euphemisms, right?

Yes.

So next slide.

The special period.

It's not just that.

It's el periodo especial en diempos de paz, which is the special period in peacetime.

It's like, hey, consider yourselves lucky.

There could be nukes flying around.

He's basically doing war communism, right?

So, like, the Cubans had been prepared for something like this to happen

because they had seen that the Soviets were pulling back.

While we met with Mariela, she alluded to the fact that they were basically faking military drills to keep Reagan thinking that the Soviets were going to intervene.

Yes.

So Cuba hyper-specializes in the export of various goods still, and it uses that money to buy like other things that everybody can have a middle-class life on.

But now all their buyers are dirt fucking poor because the entire Eastern Bloc was privatized thanks to the Shock Doctrine Brigade.

And they have no subsidies.

And all of the country, the people that they can normally trade with are now conducting business in USD because there's not a fucking ruble that's worth anything anymore, which Cuba can't really deal in because it alone is under special restrictions.

And to top it all off, there's no fucking oil.

Oh, you need that to run the stuff.

To run the combine harvesters and the tractors and all that other shit.

And then, Roz, there's other things that you use oil for in agriculture.

Oh,

I mean fertilizer for one thing.

That's true.

Yep.

Yep.

Liam, there's oil things that you you use for military purposes uh fuel let's see

drives the tanks yeah

yeah lubricants have gas lubricants is a good one maintenance uh yeah so all that goes away um

the driest least lubricated military in the western hemisphere yeah wow it's just like when i was in college but anyway

used uh sealed bearings

um

yeah well and and so like you are in the situation where you still have a little bit of oil, very tiny amount, but you have to ration it.

And, you know, famine hits the country to a degree that you basically have only seen in one well, I mean, until recently, thanks to the,

you know, the aggression of the Zionist state, you had pretty much really only seen in like the Dust Bowl or some shit like that.

Like, North Korea also gets hit really hard by a famine at the same period for the same reasons.

But

you

so there are riots, there's famine, there's starvation.

People try and leave on little barges.

The oft-quoted statement is that people were eating cats.

And I don't want to repeat that like it's, you know, like it's completely true or it's

but like that's the kind of level of desperation that we're at here.

And the sort of the offer from the United States here is all you got to do is overthrow your government.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, that's that's that's what they always do.

It doesn't seem to really work.

Yeah.

Mind you, it probably doesn't help the fact that you see in Eastern Europe at this point what it looks like when the US government overthrows your government or helps to, which is you get shock doctrines.

Yeah, which is that Bulgaria goes from being 12th in the world in every leading indicator to being like 80 somethingeth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so you get riots on the Malikon.

They go back to horse-drawn carts, which I think I have a picture of somewhere.

Do some more repression, you know, less riots.

People get very into bikes.

So that's bottom left.

Or sorry, bottom right.

Well, that's like eco-friendly, though.

It is.

We're doing eco-socialism Green New Deal.

Bottom left is

a raft going to Florida.

Top left is a camel.

Yes.

So I have some photos of this on the next slide, but I figured Roz would be really interested in this.

Do you want to?

So this is interesting.

So a camel here, and this is not the only place this sort of bus existed because the Soviets actually built them brand new in a few areas, but a camel is essentially you have a semi-truck and instead of a trailer on it that carries freight, you have a trailer on it that carries people.

You know, it's got windows, it's got everything.

And this is one of these, they're a little bit cheaper to build than a real bus.

I mean, you can see here, this is some kind of Tatra, I would assume,

articulated bus here with guys hanging off the side.

Public transit in Havana was very, very crowded up until like the, in, in, up to and including the late 80s and early 90s.

And one of the things about the Soviet Union collapsing is that very late in the 80s, they actually sent over a delegation of Soviet engineers to build Havana a good Soviet metro, right?

They were going to build a proper, good Soviet metro system for Havana, you know, with the three lines and the Soviet triangle and everything.

And the Soviet Union collapsed and they couldn't even bring them back.

So upset about that because Havana Metro exile.

I genuinely

real.

Like, I like Havana could so use a metro.

Right now, they're having the same sort of fuel shortages, and people are like dozens deep waiting for the bus, and the bus is incredibly crowded.

It's not quite the top right photo, which is the other.

But like, it's that's another thing is like, uh, as opposed to a lot of communist countries, which sort of had a deep focus on electrification early, like you go to like Russia, or you go to Ukraine, or you go to all these Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, even, you know, it's like we installed trolley bus systems.

We run on, we have trams, we have metros, we have, uh, well, the trolleybus system in Kabul is long gone, but uh, you know, this does this does not happen in Cuba in the same way.

It never electrifies.

It's still dependent on fossil fuels in a way that other, these other post-Soviet countries are not.

Well, and also, like,

I mean, why would you be when you get oil at such a preferential rate and like you then sell it?

You're in a surplus, right?

It's never going to come down.

So

why would you have cheap electricity in the same way?

Because it's like no hydropower.

There's, you know, you're going to have to, you're going to have to like,

you're not getting cheap electricity any which way because there's just not like the sort of

resources.

Nuclear.

You are getting it through nuclear.

I think Cuba has a couple of nuclear power plants.

That's the only way you could do it then.

Yeah.

Precise.

Yeah.

And so, why am I saying precisely?

Some beautiful RMBK reactors.

Well,

so, like, you know,

the

effect of this is to starve people

for basically no reason other than peak from the United States.

80% of Cuba's trade was lost, right?

And Clinton intentionally made it worse to see if he could make Cuba collapse.

Overthrow your government.

Overthrow your government.

And why don't people overthrow their government when we sort of like starve them and stuff?

A question which is still salient today.

And the answer, it turns out, is mostly that they're kind of starving too much.

And also, maybe they don't want to to because they see you starving them and go, maybe my government are not the biggest assholes here.

Yeah, I'm just going to go back to points.

I'm going to go back to points five and six from the memo for Mr.

Root Bottom, which is that militant opposition to Castro from without Cuba would only serve his and the communist cause.

And then six, the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.

Ah, well, thank God we're not going going to make any weird mistakes on that level.

I mean, you just,

these, these sanctions ideas all seem to rely on the idea that people are as stupid as Americans in other countries.

Yeah, exactly.

And they're genuinely much smarter, though, so I'm going to be real.

We'll get into it later, but I asked, like, the later.

Oh, God, there's like 20 more slides.

These are quick.

Okay.

So

we'll go to the next one.

Next slide.

This is the camel buses.

And on the right are other cars that we, oops, that I photographed while you were in Cuba.

I want to point out something.

Yeah.

It says two humps.

This is a dromedary bus.

And many of them are.

Cool, legally not a car, which I bet exists for the fact that it's not a car.

And so therefore, you can't

plan it for

car imports.

There's a lot of

isn't as funny as this thing has a lower section.

This is probably more ADA accessible than a lot of older buses in the United States.

But also, like, yeah, the top right cars, like, there's a lot of like Chinese-made cars and shit.

Um, it's it's wild.

You, you do not see like the kind of cars that you see in the United States.

You see a bunch of really weird and cool models.

Next slide, please.

They just refit a bunch of their long-distance passenger trains with Chinese-made passenger cars.

Oh, that's so funny.

Um, the bus we were on was Chinese-made, and it was like awesome.

Um, so um,

the thing that that kind of gets them out of this is that a certain Ugo Chavez

and Chavismo, um, one of our NPC members is a Chavista, and she's great.

Um, the uh, he does a uh revolution, um, and he's like, we love Cuba, and then gives Cuba oil.

Um,

and then the guy on the right, um, uh, who is seen emerging from a sort of bond villain.

The point at which the critical support wraps back around to its more critical than support, and you just dislike the guy.

Yeah.

That's how I feel.

So Putin.

Active Genesee there, you know?

Well, the Russian Federation

in this period gives them a lot of...

Like, initially, under Yeltsin, they're like,

we're not going to

honor any of our existing contracts with you.

Fuck you.

And hence the oil.

But Putin re-establishes some diplomatic relations and sends some aid and whatnot.

This is part of his broader peripheral, like, fucking around thing, which

is why, like, so much of Putin's ideology is just insane imperialist, like, Soviet boomer nostalgia.

So, of course, Cuba, because again, the like weird happy memories thing.

So, and and so it that actually does help significantly.

It's actually him coming out from his uh Soviet subroutine-based schoon cave.

I wish you wouldn't.

This is my schoon cave.

What are you going to do?

So

there's a generally positive view of the Russian Federation there.

So next slide, please.

So the economy reorients and has to move to tourism.

On the right, you will see some fucking twonk.

Sorry, that's being generous.

All I'm saying is, I have a drop that you're going to have to bleep in a second, Devon, because

you open the slide and

okay.

So

that's also, I have that photo on my hinge.

Anyway,

so that's that's me.

That's the outfit that I met the president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz Canadi Bermulez, in, because I was, it switched days and I didn't have my outfit that I wanted to meet the president in, which is a full suit with the anyway.

It doesn't matter.

On the left, top left, you will see Mintur, which is the

human tourism ministry.

They even do Soviet acronyms.

Yeah, they're really into that.

It's not quite an acronym because it's like just the beginning syllable.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

That's the way the Soviets do stuff too, or did stuff.

Oh, I don't.

I don't know about that.

It's the reason why in 1984 it's like Mini True, Mini Lovers, deliberately, because the Soviet.

Yeah, it's because the Soviet, well, the Russian way of doing an acronym is syllables rather than letters, typically.

Wow.

I'm learning things, and I hope you listener are learning things too.

So, Mintur, they also have like Mini Dex, which is the Ministerio de Ederaciones.

The only one I know is Minint, the Interior Minister.

Yeah.

So they do the cops.

They moved to.

We didn't see any cops.

It was great.

So they moved to tourism.

No, I mean, genuinely, like, we didn't see any cops.

I saw cops once.

No cops in Havana.

It felt so safe.

because they have the CDR, which is like a neighborhood, if the neighborhood watch was the KGB.

Um,

so uh,

I could expand on that, but I'm not going to.

Um, so they legalize the dollar, um, which previously been banned, um, and also contact with foreigners have been banned, but they're like, oh, fuck, we need tourist money.

So they open up what they're what they call dollar stores, and that's when the dual economy starts happening.

So the dollar stores operate based on the East German vibe.

Yep, yeah, you got that.

That's actually, I was about to recognize that.

You gotta go to the inter shop, yeah.

Yes, yeah,

listener.

If you uh uh listen to the east journal the berlin wall episode of um of well there's your problem you will hear a description of this and that's basically how it works in my voice in fact that's right so there's the and and also ros and liam's um you will also hear me put an umlaut on uh platin bow for some reason i'm still doing that about it i don't know the dollar stores the dollar stores operate based on the dollar the peso stores operate based on the peso and as a cuban citizen you're entitled to like a basket of commodities at fixed prices in the peso, right?

The dollar store is where all the scarce goods go.

So you have an issue there that like people who are trading in dollars, because they operate in the tourism industry or in like pounds or, you know, other weird, unuseful fake currencies,

they have this cash that they can put back into the store.

This gets eventually reorganized as the two currency system, where there was like the CUC, which is the convertible peso, and the regular peso, which is abolished very recently.

But it also causes Cuba to seek out foreign direct investment and public-private partnerships.

So it does help the situation a little bit.

But the thing that actually fixes things is next slide.

Wow.

Let me be clear.

Why is Obama?

Why are they standing like that?

That's a great question.

So on the right is Raul Castro,

and then on the left is

Barack Obama,

noted betrayer of the revolution.

So next one.

Community organizer, former Marxists to get laid in college.

Yeah, ironically, Barack Obama and I are going to have had the same job title in about two weeks.

This is my new job.

This is my problem is I only became Marxist after college.

I was

the same.

It was like the last year of college, so it helped a little bit.

But

now let me be clear.

History will vindicate me um

so here's barack obama swearing undial undying loyalty to the principles of uh socialism with cuban characteristics or fiderismo um he initiates the cuban thaw in 2014 yeah this is the thing as president you get like one or two freebies where you can just do one thing that's kind of good um it's it's weird as presidents like to do this even the like really atrocious ones.

It's like George W.

Bush in the Prison Rape Elimination Act, where it's just like, Or like Nixon and the EPA.

Yeah, exactly.

You can do like two good things if you want.

China.

Yeah, so he normalizes relations between Cuba and the United States.

So the embassy in Havana gets moved back into.

I would have had a photo of the embassy in Havana for you, but when I went up to take a photo of the embassy in Havana, the guard yelled at me and it was like, I don't know, it was like 11 at night and I'd had two doubles of rum.

It was very good.

And I said, I yelled back, I paid taxes for this shit, so I better be able to take a fucking photo.

And then I moved on anyway, because he was still yelling at me and he took guns.

So what are you going to do?

Grab a service weapon, you fucking pussy.

Yeah,

my taxes pay for that.

I would have if I weren't on the I'm kidding, I wouldn't have.

Do not bleep that.

Yeah, we're going to have to bleep that.

So do not bleep that.

Yeah, please do not.

Yeah, grab that

as an organizer.

Yes.

So

we move back into the Embassy of Havana, where you can get the titular syndrome.

And I also want to point out that I'm the only person that's ever really had Havana syndrome because my tummy hurt when I got back.

It's real bad.

But so this is actually largely mediated by the Pope.

Okay.

Again, you just fuck around with these things.

It's fine.

Woke Pope.

I'm a big fan of Woke Pope, to be honest.

One Poke, one Pope, two Pope.

Some other Christian leaders are doing half as much as the Pope is.

Come on.

One Pope, two Pope, Chud Pope, Woke Pope.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, we had Nazi Pope, then Woke Pope.

I was calling Donald Chud Pope.

Yeah.

Because one Pope is the John Paul 1, John Paul 2.

John Paul 2, I think, qualifies as

woke Pope.

I really don't.

A lot of child sexual abuse.

This user is getting yelled at in foolish in the comments.

Look, it's a big institution.

It takes a long time to steer.

Yeah.

What is the sorry?

What does the Vatican steering committee look like?

Is it a left-handed?

We believe the word is.

It's called the College of Cardinals.

Vatican Groundwork killed Vatican mug.

Hi again, Amy from Mug.

Again, the priests changing your brake lights.

Yeah, so, okay, so Obama takes Cuba off the state sponsors of terror list.

So finally they can use, like, they can like do shit, right?

And so, like, hotels start to be built.

The Rolling Stones come through.

You know, Obama makes a visit to the island.

You know, Cuba, I genuinely, like, we were, when we were talking to just random Cubans, they were like, yeah, I love Obama so so much.

And I'm just like,

Yeah.

Well, you know, you gotta, you gotta acknowledge what little good happened.

Critical support to Comrade Obama.

Um, we were we were in a market in Havana, and there was one store that was just like communist memorabilia, and so the DSA delegation was cleaning this woman out.

I mean, like spending like insane stuff.

I mean, genuinely, like, um, we talked to her, and we were like, oh, like, how much do you generally make on this and she's like you know i mean it varies from day to day but today's a really good day

um

alice the package that i'm sending you contains one thing from that store um

so the the and she was like yeah obama really changed things and made things a lot better um there was a spy swap so the cuban five who were infiltrating right-wing cuban uh terror groups in miami and were eventually captured were repatriated uh carnival opened cruise lines to Havana.

You know, things look really good.

So, next slide, please.

So, you start legalizing sort of this public-private ownership thing.

This is a photo I took.

I know, I know.

I know.

Yep.

So, this is a photo I took in Havana.

If you look on the left, those fancy new towers, Roz, if you could circle that, that'd be great.

They got diagonal windows.

That means they're cool.

Yeah, so that's the Grand Aston La Havana, which is where we were staying because it's the only one of the only hotels you're legally allowed to stay in now um

and i will say incredible fucking hotel uh very cheap nice pool um so this was built um you know there were if you look in the bottom right you will see like kias and hyundai's and like modern cars um

So like stuff starts coming back to Cuba.

And you know, this thing right here.

Oh, my God.

Look at that.

Oh, that pre-fab, yeah, yeah.

What's bad about that?

Weird, it's got it's got like weird every third floor is a corridor.

I was going to talk about that later, but um, on the other side of that, you can see that being right next to the to the sea has caused it because it doesn't have paint and it doesn't have any sort of sealant, has caused it to decay in large portions.

So, like, you know, it's it's there's portions of it that are falling apart.

Um, and that is because of the embargo.

But like, it was going to get better for a little bit.

And things look like they're turning around because you can deal in dollars now and you can bring tourists now.

And it's easier to go to Cuba.

Next slide, please.

This motherfucker ruins

Donnie from Queens.

Donnie from Queens, whose own businesses improperly violated the embargo to give money to the Cuban government at the time when that was illegal,

called this one of the worst deals and terrible and misguided.

I see Marco Rubio's ass behind him, though.

Marco Rubio,

one of the worst little cunts to ever do it.

And this guy, right?

I always forget all what these guys look like.

Yeah, little Marco.

Little Marco, his parents,

they were very wealthy, very wealthy Cubans.

They had slaves.

Do we eat?

And folks, do we know that he had slaves?

I mean, he calls them mates, but I think the rest of us can call them slaves because people are getting paid very little.

Very little.

so his family comes here and what do we do we let them in we let them in and suddenly is a senator from Florida fake state give it back to the Spanish

thank you so Donald Trump is a horrible cunt

and he as we all know and he puts Cuba back on the very funny though puts Cuba back on the state sponsors of terror list in 2017 and reverses a lot of those gains so he makes it very difficult to go to Cuba um the way that we were able to was through the support for the Cuban people visa, which basically is like, go to Cuba and spend money and talk to them about capitalism, which

wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

So you did a socialist fact-finding trip to Cuba as under the auspices of a capitalist EU.

It's not actually, it's not actually talk to them about capitalism.

It's literally just like, you're supposed to go and talk to like average Cubans.

And we did.

Cool.

So

I mean, like, we got the visas there.

The fucking you know, I got my visa done.

I got pulled aside at the airport in Cuba, but then they were fine and they let me through.

So

fuck this guy.

Anyway,

this would be fine if it weren't for the fact that we had El Covid.

Yes, yes.

En Cuba.

They have three vaccines for that, by the way, and all of them you can give to children.

And it caused huge economic problems, as it did everywhere else, because you like the aforementioned oxygen shortage, people died.

and imports and exports, and you had to do the lockdowns and all that shit.

And the Cubans were actually on top of that, they did biotech and they did all sorts of stuff to make sure that, like, oh, okay, well, you know, this is um, you know, this is uh, we're managing this.

And then the 2021 protests occurred because

primarily,

I remember photos of like five guys in the street, uh, with SOS Cuba, yeah, SOS Cuba.

I remember the um, uh, like breathless foreign policy articles that's like the Cuban teens are sharing unauthorized USB drives of hip-hop.

Is this going to destroy the regime?

Absolutely.

Listen, you know me.

I love any regime.

I will always support any regime against the hated teens.

And so my assumption was, no, this will not collapse the regime.

And it did not.

It did not, no.

To date.

Maybe it will collapse the regime.

I don't know.

Maybe Snapchat or something will.

Yeah.

You know, the 2019 constitutional reform was.

no, the teens are all addicted to tick tock, which is Chinese and therefore pro-Cube and

yeah, also, like, uh, the CIA did participate in this agitation.

It's nice to go back to the classics once in a while, you know.

Like,

you go back to the bathroom.

I gotta run to the bathroom recipe.

I gotta run to the bathroom very quickly, and then we'll polish off the rest of this, huh?

Please, God.

I mean, there's one second, there's slide 54 ending on

71.

So I thought

I said it.

I want to be clear.

And I have the slideshow in one monitor and the NFC championship at the other.

I give this.

Interception!

Oh, yes, let's go, Lions.

I give this my whole attention because I feel guilty and I don't consider it a real job.

And I'm terrified constantly that people will stop listening to podcasts overnight and I will go back to the time when I had zero money.

So what I do is I work on this very intently and I stay up until like five in the morning working on these things.

And, you know,

it's fine.

I, you know, there are lots worse jobs out here.

But

I want you all to know that when I make the content, the content is suffused with like a suffurating psychic anxiety about that.

And I am willing to kind of torture myself over it.

So just enjoy it on that basis.

Please enjoy this comedy podcast, knowing that I am out here clawing my fingernails through the top of my thigh, thinking about how my job is fake.

You know?

Here's an amusing story about Cuba.

Well, I did a minimal amount of

research for this podcast.

One of the things I did is I went to seat61.com, which is a website maintained by the man in Seat61

about international train travel.

It's very good.

If you want to go take a train in a weird place, that's where you go.

I like reading it, yeah.

Yeah.

So I looked up Cuba, and one of the things is if you want to take the Hershey Electric Railway, which still runs seven trains a day,

you have to take a ferry

from Havana,

the center city of Havana.

The ferry goes across the bay, right?

And this is like, this is about,

okay, so I'm measuring it on the map right now.

It's about half a mile, but it has airport-style security.

Why is that?

Okay, somebody reason is

well, so it goes, it goes half a mile across the bay, but sometime in the recent past, some folks decided to hijack it and sail it to Florida.

What?

I hate that so much.

Have you been to Florida?

It sucks.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So now they have security.

I tried to figure out the specific incident on the news earlier.

I'm not sure if it's the same one.

It does seem like those guys all got shot, which is fine, whatever.

I'm going to be real.

Sorry, Liam, go ahead.

No, no, no, no.

I just said, oh, I mean,

of all the ways to get shot by your government, I feel like hijacking a mode of transport is one of the least surprising.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, when they ran out of gas like 30 miles offshore, like they tried to cause a Gilligans Island situation.

First, take this ferry to Cuba.

Yeah.

Also, like, I'm gonna be real.

I'm gonna be real.

Like, the plane hijackings, I think they balance it out, like, karmically.

You know what I mean?

Here's the thing: a ferry hijacking is just funny.

I agree.

It's not gonna fathom.

I would have said, all right, don't do it again.

But yeah, that's why I would have loved speed to cruise control if it were about a ferry.

On the other hand,

what's the actually existing socialism that still exists?

Cuba.

So maybe I'm too lenient.

And may I say, again, critical support.

So to return to

our previously scheduled podcast, next slide, please.

We're done talking about Orange Man Bab.

Orange Man, real bad.

So on the left, you will see some fucking dumbass twink that they let into the

twink at that.

We have to bleep that.

Yo, yeah.

This is the thing is, right?

She said it, not me.

I did.

This is going to be like a five and a half hour episode that's going to require a lot of editing.

Sorry.

Yeah.

I do apologize for that.

No, so, okay.

So the 2019 constitutional reform adds some recognition for private property.

So we are doing some...

Oh,

I don't, I don't, I don't like the government should take your toothbrush.

You shouldn't have your own toothbrush.

But Alice also.

Sideshow Bob mumble there.

But also, Alice, family code, legalization of gay marriage, trans rights.

So trans rights, yeah.

I'm pro-trans rights.

I'm just very anti-private property.

Okay, fair.

I'm very pro-trans rights, but I'm very anti-trans rights.

So contain multitudes.

Second, you're going to hate it.

It depends what tweets I've seen most recently.

I see some of you fuckers post, and I become very anti-trans rights.

You're going to hate the next thing, which is that it also recognized some foreign direct investment.

So

it's a marketization of what was previously kind of like more of a command economy.

And so Mariela talked about a moment where they kind of got rid of the ration books that have Ibrahitas.

and guaranteed minimum goods.

And then popular demand caused them to reinstate it because it's like I would love my guaranteed basket of goods.

So,

the recognition of some private property, brackets betraying the revolution, is intended largely to bring in like the desperately needed foreign investment that you need for capital.

I genuinely did not have a really good

photo for the section.

So, please enjoy me on the left explaining to the

deputy secretary or whatever of the Cuban National Assembly that DSA is a big tent org without a line and we all have 10 million opinions.

And

how do you solve issues?

And he goes, Bueno, la primera cosa es que tenemos centralismo democrático.

And then

top right is another view of the National Assembly room, and then bottom right is the hall when you walk in.

This is the National Assembly of Cuba.

Next slide, please.

Oh, you mentioned some bits on this notes about rights, by the way, also, because

I did want to mention.

Do we want to go back?

Yeah,

I was alluding occasionally to the no rights situation attendant to

these forms of communism and how maybe sometimes you should have some rights, not only trans rights, but also for cis people.

And they have rights.

Oh, yes.

Sorry, I forgot about that.

Yeah, they also reinstate the prime minister and they add legal representation when you're accused of a crime and presumption of innocence and habeas corpus and presidential term limits and the rework of legislative government.

So like it's a good constitution.

It's really good.

It also relies heavily on like consensus making because there's only one like actually legal party in Cuba.

So a lot of it is like consensus about what candidate that party puts up.

So it's like if the whole thing was primaries.

So it's like if you live in any city, living in city.

Yeah, it's like living in any city in the United States.

Hold on.

You could also vote for Andrew Cuomo on a working families party ticket.

God awful concept.

Voting for the Godly Escanel on like a working families party ticket.

I would love to see the freak that voted for Andrew Cuomo on the working families.

So, okay.

So we're on the slide where a second tranked

Irish man.

Viva la revolution.

So a second tranked up Irish American is at the podcast.

So Biden not only kept most, like, Biden kept most of these restrictions in place, which he has the unilateral executive authority to remove,

because of the 2021 protests and because he's an old racist dude with nothing better to do.

Next slide.

And because Democrats keep tricking themselves into thinking they can win Florida.

Well, we'll get there.

Sink and do it.

Sink it.

Don't even bother.

Yeah, it's going to sink itself.

So this is a photo I took of Havana from the Grand Austin.

What is the current state?

It's bad.

If you look at some of these buildings, you can see just general like decay and mold and some other stuff.

Roz can probably kind of explain a little bit more about the.

So I've been looking at,

again, all I can do is look at, you know, Google Maps.

And the main thing I can say is, you know, Cuba has an excess of doctors, but what they really need is roofers.

You know, because a lot of these buildings are not in great shape.

I mean, not just aesthetic.

I mean, some of the problems are mostly aesthetic, but a lot of of them is kind of like, okay, you got these old stucco buildings, they got masonry, you know, structures.

They got all this stuff.

You know,

they're relatively high maintenance, especially the older ones.

And, you know, you can't get the materials to really fix them.

Theoretically, you could locally produce them, but it is apparently not happening.

Well, a lot of buildings, a lot of these buildings also, all they really need to be is washed.

Yeah.

I also have a kind of internationalism where Cuba sends a sort of brigade of revolutionary roofers to assist you in your moment of crisis.

Well, and also like, you know, they're still operating off of like imperial era plumbing.

So a lot of

like establishments you go into, when you go to the bathroom, there's a little bin next to the next to the toilet, and that's where you put all of the your toilet paper.

This is not uncommon in Latin America.

This is, you know, there's more modern plumbing on the more modern buildings, but this is not uncommon anywhere in Latin America.

Older Soviet cities also have that problem.

Yeah, exactly.

A lot of sewer systems that were not built for toilet paper.

That is not relatively modern, but it is, I mean, you know, sort of that expectation is surprisingly confined to like what we call the West.

Right.

Plumbing doesn't work as good everywhere as it does.

Bidet supremacy.

You got to institute the kind of South Asian thing of just washing your asshole, you know?

no the bidets are very nice bidets are very nice and should be standard you don't even have to get a bidet you can just get a like a lotium you just get a jug you know of water and you just yeah

no it's even a mud and i sprayed directly on my asshole

um okay so also if you look here you will see sort of like newer buildings are kind of getting built uh in little tower blocks so there's something huge happening here yeah it looks like any building that you would see in chicago and like downtown that's new it's just you know i think that's supposed to be a hotel but i don't know who can say it might be an office building but yeah and then also next to it i think on the left a little bit farther that's the i believe that's the hotel avana libre but i don't know honestly from this vantage point so how's the how's the embargo going bad um Next slide.

These slides, we got through quick.

So

why am I here?

So the DSA sent a delegation, the Democratic Socialists of America uh sent a delegation to cuba uh pictured here on the left meeting with the committees for the defense of the revolution um

where we it was a fact-finding mission and a mission to sort of in 2019 we voted to add sort of the end of the embargo to our platform and this is part of the international committee's work is to agitate for that so we're there to create links between us and Cuba and sort of you know see what was going on we also experienced some of the effects of the embargo like menus change daily because they can't guarantee that they have shit, right?

Like the, you know, we were insulated as much as it's possible to be insulated from this because they obviously wanted us to come away with this being very like pro-Cuba, but like, you know, we can see, oh, the bus that we're all on, we all have to be on that bus because there's only so much oil or there's only so much gas.

to run that bus.

And even though it's a high efficiency Chinese model, it's like, well, we don't want to run out of it, right?

So, you know, we experienced many of the effects of the embargo.

You will see also on the right, this is kind of like the state of like rural Havana.

There is a building that the CDR,

or the series of buildings that the CDR built, because the CDR is Neighborhood Watch, KGB, and also Neighborhood Improvements,

which is a fun combination.

That doesn't happen with Neighborhood Watch in the United States.

Yeah, the Neighborhood Watch in the United States is very normal and not at all full of weird freaks.

And I tell you what, the roof looks good.

Yeah, no, actually, it was a really nice building.

All the people from the CDR were really nice and really cool.

Those three people there.

The guy in the middle is, I think, the chief of the CDR for this section.

The guy on the left is, I want to say the regional representative.

The guy on the right is the national head and also one of the Cuban five.

I want to say it's

Hernandez, but I'm not sure.

He's like,

I quit.

That's like basically meeting the head of the KGB.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing is, right, it could go this way, or you could have the like Juwei thing where that, you know, that has, it has done in China, where it's designed that you have like a, you know, a residence committee or village committee that works along these lines.

And then

betraying the revolution happens, and you end up with a kind of neighborhood watch that forgets that it's supposed to be the KGB

and can be the KGB when it feels like it, but mostly is just not, you know?

Yeah, so that's not what this is.

There's still,

they're basically like, there's two levels of law enforcement.

This is the level that's like, if you have like neighbors stealing from each other or like petty disputes, they settle it, as opposed to calling in the cops.

Or somebody's having a mental health crisis, they settle it.

Yeah, because that cops are still like based on the like Soviet militia system.

You know, it's quite militarized.

So, but the point is, they were telling us, oh, like, you know, we're seeing the embargo, the effects of the embargo out here.

And like, yeah, they're the government, but also it's pretty plain to see that you just can't get the materials you need.

Next slide, please.

So the point of this was to do a sort of exchange that the Cubans agitate for an end to the embargo, and the Cuban government was like, Yeah, sure.

So, they were honestly pretty frank about a lot of the failures of the current government and the revolution.

So,

you know, this was the international committee.

We're part of a big tent org.

The international committee was like, okay, you're going to go and you're going to make up your mind.

We don't have a line on this.

So, you can see all of us here.

If you want to circle me in the Guaya, because my mom got me that.

Middle row, sort of two from the left.

Left.

Left is this side, right?

White shirt.

Oh, there you are.

Okay.

You wanted to explain what the gay battery was?

Oh, no, I wasn't.

I mean, I can.

It's like a.

I was making fun of you for doing that.

Well, okay, I don't know.

Maybe a bunch of your listeners are fucking like, I don't know, like San Francisco tech guys who grew up in Massachusetts.

You know, what are you going to do?

I think if they've listened to three hours and 44 minutes of this, you can't tell them.

I actually know that for a fact,

one of our listeners is exactly that.

I know that listener.

Precisely.

Well, that listener, Aguaya Vera, is like a form of

fancy shirt that you wear that's technically a dress wear.

So I'm technically informal wearing that photo.

Anyway,

so to return to the hospital from the beginning, we're going to go full circle.

That is the

Calixto Garcia.

And the current state of the the embargo is that Cuba cannot access most international finance because it's difficult for them to operate in dollars.

There are shortages of many things, but primarily fuel.

We saw huge lines of people waiting for rationed gas, as well as just public transit that was extremely packed.

And there are tremendous impacts on the healthcare sector, which is why this is here.

This is the University Hospital in Havana.

We were given a tour of this hospital by its staff.

Next slide, please.

This is a photo of us in the dialysis ward.

And when we walked through, they were very, they were like, look,

we're showing you what a normal day here looks like.

And it was very clear that it had not been staged and these were just random people who were there to receive dialysis.

And I will tell you this, the Cuban healthcare system is committed to providing healthcare free for everybody who lives in Cuba.

You are guaranteed that right by the Constitution.

And it operates very effectively in that regard as much as it can.

One of our members of our delegation was concussed as a result of a fight with a union buster, or rather a union buster attacking her and hitting her against the wall, but she got that concussion checked out in Cuba.

And they x-rayed her.

They had her bring over a photo of that x-ray on the phone.

The doctor looked it over and was like, here are things that you need to do to ensure that you stop having concussion symptoms.

And she did that and she was fine.

But what you're seeing in this photo is my reaction to this doctor here, whose name I unfortunately unfortunately forget.

I'm so sorry to that doctor, but

telling us that they have to reuse single-use dialysis filters because the company that they used to buy them from, which is Swedish, was bought by an American manufacturer.

So what that means is Cuba is no longer able to access that.

And what that means is that there's a guy whose job it is to be in a room and clean these filters.

They're reused.

on a patient-by-patient basis, but you know,

they have no other choice than to do this, despite the fact that this could cause, you know, they're blood-borne diseases.

That's why you don't reuse these filters, but there's literally no other way for them to obtain them.

And there's people that will die if they don't get the dialysis.

And then he told us that they had to reuse pacemakers because most pacemakers are manufactured in the United States.

And I will leave it to your imagination how pacemakers are reused.

So this is what I mean when I say that this is going to be a depressing episode in the sense that like this is the real impact that it has on actual people who could very well receive top of the line medical care and are simply not able to because of the peak of the United States, because the United States government decides that that's not something that we want to allow for no fucking reason other than we are salty that we can't control their politics.

So we allow people to starve and we allow people to die.

And we'll get to another example of this later, but like it is a, there is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.

And there's a failure here that topples all of our our successes, to quote Steinbeck.

Yes.

Slide, please.

The oranges are having kerosene poured on them.

Exactly.

And another thing is that,

you know, you are

the Constitution and also liberalizing reforms of the 90s allowed for some degree of private businesses in the form of paladares, which are like restaurants that you run out of your house.

And a lot of times those restaurants are having to grow their own produce.

In the top left, you're seeing

there's a restaurant that we went to.

It's El Jaradin de los Milagros, which is very, very good.

I had a lambrapegaja there that was incredible.

So they grow their produce in these beds on the roof.

You see it down there on the left.

See the entrance on the right.

And so they've accidentally kind of gone into doing like local organic agriculture because they don't have the fertilizers or the, you know, the

ability to

do mass scale industrial agriculture like the united states does so there's a lot of um you know uh local organic stuff and urban farming and that sort of thing next slide please so

the currencies were synchronized and put back on the dollar because that's kind of what you have to do the exchange rate is about one ten uh 110 basis to the dollar it changes based on where you're at Some restaurants will give you a better exchange rate, some restaurants will give you a worse exchange rate, etc.

But it's pegged officially at that rate by the Cuban government.

And the economy relies heavily on the exchange of these for dollars, as we covered, like in East Germany, because they need to be able to have a liquid currency, because otherwise you can't buy food,

right?

Sure.

So these are all, these are all bills that I got.

Um, the I would, the Che bill, a guy scammed me, um, and I was like, okay, like, that's fine.

Um, he was like, it's my birthday, give me $20, and I'll give you this Che bill.

I'm like, you know what?

This is not a lot of money for me, but this is a lot of money.

That's very funny to be like, if you give me $20, I will give you three pesos.

Yeah, I mean, like, he also tried to give me a cigar, and I was like, this is the last day I'm here.

I can't take it through customs because it's illegal to take tobacco or liquor products through customs.

Is the three peso bill as uncommon as like the $2 bill?

No, because like three pesos is how much it costs to take public transit.

So it's,

yeah, it's like a

$5.

Just like the Soviet Metro, it was three Kopex.

Yeah, and so like there's a three peso coin that also has Che on it.

And if you see that I have have it on a necklace because I drilled a hole in it and put a chain through it.

Next slide.

So blackouts are very frequent.

The top left photo, by the way, taken by Danny, who has an my comrade Danny, who has a really good series about this that you should check out.

In the top right photo, we were

eating dinner at a

like

this a rooftop restaurant technically, but like a big skyscraper in Havana.

There was a blackout while we were there

because you can't get oil for the power plants.

And there's significant damage to a lot of buildings because there's a lack of structural maintenance and upkeep because you cannot get paint.

Like literally, there's a paint shortage.

So you have to use boat paint, which is why everything's in big pastel colors.

Boat paint is also not appropriate for stucco.

Yes.

Right.

So

the United States makes this worse by the embargo, but also by encouraging brain drain.

There's something called the Cuban Adjustment Act, which makes it much easier for Cubans to immigrate to the United States than anybody else.

And they use it to encourage people to leave the island, especially young people.

Next slide, please.

From a civil defense standpoint, this is us in the Civil Defense Bureau.

That's the guy from the Civil Defense Bureau who's always on the news talking about hurricanes or whatever.

This is DSA planning an invasion of Florida to depose

Governor Ron DeSantis and restore trans rights.

That's right.

So

Christ, I wish.

So

this is where they, like, we were in the situation room where they do like the hurricane planning and whatnot.

But they can't replace transformers if they fail, right?

So they have to basically orient their entire infrastructure around getting engineers there before the hurricane hits and make sure that they're like in place to fix anything.

They have to actively relocate people.

It's a huge pain in the ass.

And climate change is causing problems by creating, the destruction of low-lying coastal settlements.

So they have to rehouse those people.

And they don't have resources to do that in a lot of ways.

So next slide.

All right.

So how does it work?

That's the neat part.

It doesn't.

It's meant not to.

It's meant not to be a functional homepot that it does.

Well, it's not even that.

It's that the embargo itself does not

accomplish its aims.

Because sanctions have never done that, right?

We've sanctioned the Iraqis.

And how did that turn out, right?

Like, we've sanctioned 30 billion different things, and what that does is that it actually makes people be like, oh, the government is

excused from doing X, Fines.

I mean, that's not the general sentiment, but like it relies entirely on people being unable to identify the source of the economic hardship.

Exactly.

And also vastly overstates how likely people are to overthrow their own government.

I don't like my government.

I'm not going to overthrow it because this is a lot of work you know yeah as i'd probably get killed or thrown in jail you know and because i can barely get up in the morning at like eight o'clock you know yeah and like and like additionally it validates everything that the cuban government says about the united states there's like a siege mentality in that sense right like and it's a siege mentality because they are literally under siege and so politics in cuba cannot progress while the embargo still exists But it also, it sucks because it also causes damage to us in a lot of ways

because like it causes about $1.5 to $4.5 billion of damage a year to the United States economy.

And it has caused since its inception about $753 billion of damages to Cuba total.

But the United States is still the fifth largest exporter to Cuba because you get licenses as a treachery and you export agricultural products.

So Cuba still has to buy all those things in fucking cash.

But there's actually more costs.

If you go to the next slide, you may know this, but Cuba has three COVID vaccine.

I said this earlier: three COVID vaccines.

It's got a bunch of weird shit, too.

It's like a whole lung cancer vaccine.

You cannot have it.

They have a treatment for melanoma that you can't have, and a diabetic ulcer treatment that regrows affected skin that you also can't have.

And

by the way, as a result of the embargo, and this gentleman here who is

the head of the biotech

department,

or like the state-owned firm, the biotech firm, he was talking to us about how he would treat people who are diabetic with this treatment, and they would get better.

And then the embargo hit, and they have to be in the hospital like three times a week.

And you can't do that if you can't get to the hospital because there's no oil for the buses.

They have free gender-affirming surgeries.

They have free healthcare.

They have all sorts of shit that you can't have.

have they have rum and cigars which are you know like smaller percentage of this but so good the rum i don't care for the cigars but all of that is illegal for you to have because of the united states government i can i can go out and buy a bottle of havana club and get my gender affirming surgery right now if i want I welcome you to do that.

I think that would be great.

Also, you know, definitely do not mail me anything.

Presidente Diaz Canyon,

please tell me that you do do not have a sort of BMI restriction on your gender-affirming surgeries.

I am a very fat woman.

I'm not even very, I'm only slightly fat.

Whatever.

That's right.

No, I mean, like, literally, like American citizens can't have access to this.

You can do whatever the fuck you want.

Although there are still restrictions, I think, from the UK in some regard, but not nearly as bad.

I can't hear you over the fact that I'm smoking two cigars at the same time.

Well, dog, shut up.

Oh, yeah.

Rub it in that I had to drink Bacardi and not mojito because like I couldn't find donku, which is the better rum.

I'm treating the fuck out of my diabetic ulcers right now.

You have no idea.

Spearing your ulcers.

So

there is the lung cancer vaccine is sort of in trials in Minnesota with a, I think it's in Minnesota, with a, because a private equity firm has funded it in collaboration with the Cuban government.

And that's the only way you can do it in the United States.

But like because of the embargo, now the Cuban government won't see any money from that collaboration which sucks

a lung cancer vaccine does that just mean you can smoke all the cigars you want yes kind of now I mean that's that's called synergy right yeah I was about to say you know this is

this is the reverse

yeah it's sort of um I'm not clear on the sort of biological technology aspects of it.

So somebody who's smart will have to answer that.

So why do we do this?

Well, have you heard of Florida?

Oh, my God.

Yes, I have.

So, all the exiles went to Miami, and

it's actually kind of like, how do I put this?

It's kind of like Zionism

in that there are a lot of people who are progressive except for this one issue,

which completely flies in the face of the values they claim to have, and which the Democrats treat as a winnable constituency, despite the fact that Democrats consistently lose Florida.

And

the Democratic Party in Florida is fucking dog shit.

It doesn't do its job.

Generally, not something you can win anymore.

I think once they established the villages, it was over.

Cast it off.

Cast it off.

Cast it into the fire.

That's one reason.

And then also remember that threat about property crimes and the Haitian Revolution.

The United States still holds Cuba responsible for millions and millions of dollars in

property theft internationally.

Right.

So corporations.

Always comes down to property crimes.

Exactly.

And then Bob Menendez specifically is a Cuban exile

or his family is Cuban exiles.

So he has an insane right-wing view on Cuba and has single-handedly made sure that our policy on Cuba is weird as shit with the help of tranked up Irishman Joe Biden.

Cool.

On the other side, you got Marco Rubio.

By the way, way,

if I remember correctly, his family actually immigrated under Batista.

Like they left under Batista.

That is for sure true of Ted Cruz.

But

his parents left under Batista because of repression.

They faced under Batista, which is very funny.

Okay.

Next slide.

This is the last slide.

What do we do?

Okay, so the conclusion.

This is a humanitarian disaster that is solely caused by the United States.

Solely, I mean, there's some mismanagement on the other side, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad without the United States.

There is no reason for us to continue this embargo.

We need to agitate to end it.

It is an enormous crime that has been perpetuated for years with no benefit to us and no benefit to the Cubans, obviously.

So call your senator.

Get involved with the DSA International Committee and its work on Cuba,

as well as its other international work.

But do do something because genuinely there are people who are suffering who don't need to be, and it's all because of us.

Hey, what a surprise!

Great.

Cuban embargo, bad.

I think we've learned this over the past four hours.

I deny it.

15 hours later.

Tenemos una part of this podcast that's Italian.

De esta podcast,

please

shake hands with danger.

All right, I'm gonna try and do this quick because I gotta use the restroom.

I can read this if you want it.

I can just blast through it, and that way.

Yeah, sure.

I'm gonna use the restroom.

I'll be right back.

Best of luck.

Safety third.

Hello, Justin.

Alice.

Hi.

Yay, Liam.

Fuck off.

And Schrodinger's guest.

No, don't say hello.

Hey,

you guys seem to like my last safety third.

And while I do have other prison stories, I thought I'd mix it up.

Oh, it's the Forklift prison guy.

Okay.

Hi, how are you doing?

The attached image is of the worst place I ever worked at, Subway.

And while not the same subway, the external facade is almost identical.

This is a story that ended well, but easily could have ended with several dead bodies.

Awesome.

For context, this particular subway was run by one Indian family that owned like half the subways in Indiana.

The previous owner had bailed after maybe, possibly, allegedly defrauding some or several three-letter agencies and forging passports for migrants from India.

And the new owner was a cousin or nephew of the big boss of this massive family-run franchise.

He stayed for maybe a week and then fucked off to India to inherit some land, promptly telling none of his family stateside and all of us employees a different time as to when he'd be back.

Due to all of this, and the fact that about a month before had this place been, this place had been robbed at gunpoint.

A day I was there, pro tip, if robbed at your job, stay calm and do exactly what they ask.

Don't die over someone else's register.

Which is true.

Staff retention was extremely low, and I often had to work the whole closing shift solo, 3 to 9pm Monday to Friday.

I was maybe 17 at the time, doing school from home due to being a dipshit and getting expelled, and thus had a real stupid need to be a good worker and impress my parents by sticking with this shitty job before finding a new one.

Because of this, I would make deals with my friends that if they came and helped me close, I would give them like four free sandwiches.

And it sounds like pretty good.

That's praxis.

It is.

With that background, let's get to the story.

Now, this particular subway was in a strip mall with large parking.

From time to time, people would park in the lot to sober up, either from what they were already on before getting there, or from whatever they consumed in the two bars that also inhabited the strip mall.

This day, there happened to be a grey Honda minivan with two people doing exactly that.

They had pulled up at least an hour before I started and had been there for about three hours by the time of the incident.

I'm back.

Welcome back.

This guy, it's our prison friend again.

He worked in a subway.

Yes, I know.

I put it in the slides.

I was making this guy a rotisserie chicken wrap on tomato basil.

basically a red tortilla when suddenly a dark grey chevy suv screeches into the spot next to the minivan and several guys jump out one of whom racks a Glock and shoves it in the driver's window the guy whose rap I'm making asks if I can hurry up so he can leave to which I would say I would stay where the cover is as I walk out

and begin spamming the 911 button keep that in the back of your mind for later at this point I believe I'm about to watch everyone in this van get executed just like the movie heat just like these guys ready to rock and roll the drop the hat.

After doing that about 20 times, I go back, finish making the guys rap, and then we both sit there and kind of just watch what's going on.

The other guys who got out of the SUV have at this point posted up around it in the minivan, while the guy who shoved the Glock through the window now has the driver by the shirt and is clearly threatening him.

This goes on for another 10 to 15 minutes, with the Glock guy seemingly calming down before the guy who ordered the wrap decides to leave.

I'm out of here.

I'm done.

Look at his rap.

I just sit back and casually observe until one of my friends who was going to help me close that night pulls up.

I immediately go outside and tell him to get the fuck inside and bring him up to speed.

We sit and chat for another 15 minutes or so watching the situation before the two gentlemen seem to come to an agreement and start walking towards my store.

I tell my friend to get in the back.

The two walk in, and the guy with the Glock, now shoved loosely in a pocket, stands in front of the door with his hands in front of him.

The minivan guy, who couldn't have been more than a buck ten soaking wet, asks if I have changed.

Quink!

Asks if I have change for 100.

Preparing mentally to get robbed again, I say yes.

Me filling out text.

And he walks over to the cooler, grabs a blue Gatorade, pulls out a hundred, and says, sorry for the inconvenience.

I, mostly on autopilot at this point, do the whole check to see if it's real with the light and the pen.

Why?

You

know, this is called a death wish.

That is literally like me in Cuba.

Give me a change.

It is.

So I punch in the Gatorade, open the register, and give him his change.

He thanks me, and the two walk out.

My friend comes out from the back and asks what happened, and then we go back to just casually observing.

We see some bills and a bag change hands, and then the Glock guy and his friends get back in their car and drive off, followed by the minivan a few minutes later.

We both sit there and make jokes about the events and catch up.

This goes on for about 30 minutes.

Remember how I said I kept spamming the 911 button in the back of your mind?

As we're sitting there...

People are always spamming the 911 button in the back of my mind.

It's called an anxiety disorder.

As we're sitting there, our adrenaline having gone down, Suddenly, a lone IMPD cop in full kit swings around the outside corner of the subway and sweeps the whole dining and food prep area with an AR.

Oh yeah, this is Indiana, isn't it?

My friend and I both immediately throw our hands up and we spend the next two minutes in a weird standoff where this cop is loosely holding us at gunpoint and trying to shout questions through the window covering the dining area.

Eventually he comes in and asks where the robbers are and I explain the situation.

After giving vehicle descriptions, etc., he tells me that the button is only for if we're being immediately robbed robbed and to just call 911 next time.

Now, this event did occur a few years ago, so the lengths of time between certain actions may be off, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that it was at least 10 minutes between the guys leaving and the cop showing up, not to even mention the time between that and me slamming the panic button.

This, along with the actual robbery that took place there a month or so prior, started my long journey towards radicalism.

Anyhow, I ended up leaving that job a few weeks later, and the subway is now a Mexican restaurant.

Love the show as always.

Keep it up.

Thank you.

Wow.

An incredible interaction.

Real slice of life there.

And it's a real Indiana

moment.

Chicago.

Indiana moment.

Indiana moment.

Precisely.

Should have worked for

Penn Station Subs, I think it is out there.

Oh, God.

Implies the existence of Penn Station Dobs.

Thank you.

Hello.

This has been Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Estrecha La Mano.

The next episode will be about Chernobyl.

Does anyone have commercials before we go?

I think it's probably just going to be to join DSA, right?

I mean, that's always my commercial.

Get involved with the Democratic Socialists of America, wherever you are.

We

want more people and more.

Good time to pay more dues to DSA right now.

Not going to go into detail, but you know,

it's always good to have a little bit more money

around money, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, not going to go into detail unless you want to scroll through my Twitter and see me quote dunking on people, which again, sorry, Amy from Mug.

Yeah,

join DSA, get involved, do some activism.

Do some activism on Cuba if this episode has made you angry that we're starving people.

What if you helped us not starve people?

That's all I've got.

Oh, actually, wait a minute.

Sorry, coming up.

the uh,

how much do we love film industry unions?

Somebody's an I asked.

Yeah, we, I, I, I watched a bunch of Euro spy movies for them specifically so as not to break a picket line I wasn't subject to because my co-workers are paranoid about that.

Yes, so uh, and you know what?

Thank you, Dev, for um supporting the revolution and also for having to edit this very long episode.

I love you so much.

Yes, thank you, Dev.

Um, uh, platonically.

Um, so the uh,

the

film industry is going through some contraction right now, which is why I'm changing careers.

But there is

an IATSI contract renegotiation that is going to be happening.

This may lead to another strike because IATSI's contract

is

very...

It's a stinker.

I can't say that.

Yeah, but it is lacking.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Liam.

Thank you for saying what I can't.

It is lacking in many respects versus what

SAG and the WGA currently have.

So there may be some

things to plug into

in DSA where we are going to be doing strike support like we did for the WGA and SAG.

We raised $92,000.

You won't have to watch any.

No, no, no.

Unlike...

So SAG was the only union that had that stipulation.

So I honestly will probably not have that.

for a number of reasons, including that they're more of a business union.

But

there may be a campaign for people to plug into through DSA.

We raised $92,000 and did 500 drops of food and water to picket lines.

We may be doing a similar thing, but nationally if IASI goes on strike, so please do get involved with that.

DSA is good.

That's the end of.

And I'll fight you on Twitter if you think it isn't.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for coming.

We have a Patreon.

We have a Patreon where you, you know, as many hours of content you got today, we have more on the Patreon.

I thought this was gonna be a bonus episode because I was like, oh, this is gonna be like a lot of stuff to get through.

But

I love to be on the free feed.

There's a bonus episode.

I don't even know.

Yeah.

But I'd love to be on the free feed.

Fine.

We did news already.

Fine.

Yeah,

there's a public service to knowing about the Cuban embargo that says go on a free feed.

Can we wrap this shit, please?