James Smith critiques the U.S. "empire mentality," arguing that sanctions and covert operations since Fidel Castro's 1959 rise have prolonged Cuban suffering rather than fostering democracy. He rejects both Republican crippling sanctions and Democratic sympathy for the regime, citing historical failures like the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis as evidence that American intervention forced Cuba toward the USSR. While acknowledging current protests amidst severe food insecurity and blackouts, Smith emphasizes that libertarians must oppose all foreign interventions to secure freedom domestically first, rejecting the false choice between anti-communist aggression and socialist complicity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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America's Real Enemy00:09:34
Fill her up!
You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am flying solo for this one.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein is a little under the weather.
A little bit of the COVIDs hitting him right in the chops.
So, yeah, just me.
I haven't done a solo episode in a little bit.
So, let's have some fun.
Let's get ranty.
So, I thought for today's episode, I was just going to talk Cuba.
And I just, it was on my mind with the big protests and everything going on there.
And I thought it would be fun to just kind of give my perspective on what's going on there and kind of the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, which is something that I find really, really fascinating.
Cuba is a Cuba is a, that's a tough one.
They're a very interesting country.
They're a very interesting country and a very interesting little piece of particularly the 20th century.
And of course, they're evil, really evil government.
But again, just like our government doesn't represent our people, you know, their government shouldn't represent their people.
And in fact, much like with our country, we're the biggest victims of our government.
Or I should say, we're victimized the most by our own government.
We have other countries that are far more victimized by our government.
Not the case for Cuba, but their people certainly are victimized by their government.
They're truly awful.
But there's also, you know, as you see these protests sparking up, you already see the attempts of kind of the left and the boomer cons to force you into these one of two options that are both terrible.
So the options are either like, you know, we have to do something.
We have to, you know, we should, I don't know, increase sanctions on the Cubans because of how terrible their government is.
Or you have the left-wing thing where it's kind of like this apologizing for the Cuban government and blaming everything on, you know, the embargo and stuff like that.
And the only common sense, obvious, libertarian position, which is just the correct position, is that their government is evil and also that we shouldn't have embargoes and sanctions and all of this stuff on Cuba.
So that's, you know, to me, that's just the obvious position.
But one of the things that's so interesting about Cuba is that they are, if you look at things from the perspective of the, you know, the empire mentality that the United States of America has, which is the only angle where all of these things start to become clear.
It's the only way to look at these things where they start making sense.
And we've talked about this a lot with other countries.
You know, like you look at Iran, you know, as a threat to America.
Well, that doesn't make any sense if you think of Iran being a threat to America as normal people would think of those terms.
Like, obviously, Iran is not going to come over here and hurt America at all either.
Compare to us, a tiny little country, a puny little economy.
They don't have the, you know, they don't have nuclear weapons.
Even if they did, they don't have an air force that can deliver nuclear weapons over here.
This is a little oil-rich country that struggles to provide its own people with gasoline.
And yet somehow you're supposed to believe that this is a threat to America.
But if you actually understand what Hillary Clinton and the John McCain's and Mike Pompeos of the world are saying, I mean, they may not say it, but what they mean is that it's a threat to the American Empire's dominance over the Middle East.
And if you look at things like that, it actually makes sense.
You're like, oh, yeah, Iran actually is a threat.
Iran actually is a threat to the American Empire's ability to control Iran.
Right?
So that's what this whole thing boils down to.
And that's why you hear so much about the human rights abuses in the countries that aren't dominated by the American Empire, but not much about the ones that are.
And so it's easy to just, you have to look at things through the empire lens if you want to understand any of this shit.
So this is why it's like, you know, oh my God, China's human rights abuses or how is China treating the Uyghurs or whatever, right?
But how much do you hear about what Saudi Arabia is doing?
I mean, besides from, you know, us constantly talking about what they're doing to the people in Yemen.
But you don't hear like, you know, Mike Pompeo or Hillary Clinton or any of those people being very concerned about Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses because they're on the side of the empire.
So they're, you know, that's just not an issue.
We don't really care about democracy.
We don't really care about human rights issues for sure.
But controlling the world, taking over the world, that's the goal.
And it was going pretty good for a long time, but not so much anymore.
But so this, if you look at it this way, now you'll understand why Cuba is such an enemy of the state and has been for so long.
It's also what makes them such an interesting country.
Cuba is this tiny little island country that gave the finger to the most powerful empire in the history of the world and survived.
That in itself is just really fascinating.
Like Castro just straight up gave the finger to the United States of America when it was freshly, newly the world empire.
So what is it, 1960 that they started having all this beef?
You know, just a few years, 15 years-ish after we've dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and declared ourselves the world empire.
And they were just like, no, fuck you.
Just a few miles off our shores, gave a big middle finger and survived.
And that is just infuriating to the empire.
And that's a terrible, if you look at things through that lens.
And I understand, by the way, they don't, none of them call this the American Empire.
I mean, they'll call it like the liberal world order or hegemony or like, you know, some other word like that.
But what it is, is America dominating the world.
But if you are an empire and you're trying to take over the world, that is a real threat, right?
In a sense.
Because you can't let these other countries see that someone could do that to you and not pay a price for it.
So they have to pay in some way or another.
And the obvious answer would be, you know, well, we're going to have a regime change there.
And America attempted many times.
I think like a dozen times or something like that.
Maybe like eight or nine times.
They tried to assassinate Fidel Castro.
And they just, he was really good at not getting assassinated.
I think that was an old Fidel Castro quote that he said something like, if avoiding assassinations were an Olympic sport, I would take gold medal, something like that.
So anyway, you know, Fidel Castro is a really evil guy.
I mean, he's a, you know, he's a communist dictator, comes along with everything you would expect a communist dictator to have.
You know, just did awful things to his people.
brutally put down political dissonance and put his people into grinding, you know, awful poverty for, you know, his entire reign.
But you can acknowledge that and also be like, it's pretty crazy that he gave a big middle finger to Dwight Eisenhower, right?
He gave a big middle finger to Dwight Eisenhower, the general who just won World War II.
And he ruled Cuba into like Obama's presidency.
I mean, he like outlasted all of these guys, all of these guys who he had tensions with.
You know, John F. Kennedy was taken out, you know, within a few years of their beef.
And Castro went on to rule for decades.
And really, I mean, he only, it's not even like he was overthrown.
He just got sick at the end of his life and decided to let his brother, you know, take over for the next like eight years or whatever until he died.
I think he died in 2016.
And so anyway, that in itself is an interesting story.
And there's all types of like lessons and things that you can, you know, think about from the history of the Cuban-U.S. relations.
Stop Visiting Post Offices00:02:08
Anyway, I just, you know, for this episode, I'm not, as usual, I'm not the expert in any of this shit.
I'm not a historian.
I'm just a shit talking comedian.
But I think there's, you know, like my, my goal is always is just to kind of like introduce some of these ideas, maybe encourage you to go read some of the experts on it and try to give, you know, my take on it, which is like a little bit of a different way to think about it.
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The False Cold War Choice00:12:20
So starting with what's going on right now, I don't know, and I don't know that any of us know the exact details, the exact extent of how bad this is for or how good this is, how bad it is for the Cuban government, how good it is for the Cuban people.
Is this really the crumbling of the regime?
Is there outside influence in some of these protests?
It's hard to say.
That certainly is the MO of a lot of secret three-letter organizations that go around and kind of create these yellow revolution type things and have people set up protests and stuff like that.
I'm not sure that's what's going on here.
This might be the real deal.
I don't know.
But you'll see a lot of times, like, I don't know if you guys remember, it was like a few years ago, maybe it was like five years ago, where there are these protests in Iran and they try to make it out like the Iranian regime is about to collapse.
But these are just small little protests.
That regime was never really in danger of crumbling.
I think this might be a little bit different.
This might be the real deal.
You know, if you could imagine, right, you could show footage of a crazy protest.
But to draw a conclusion from that, that the regime is crumbling.
I mean, it's like if someone were to show footage of Occupy Wall Street, you know, like you're living in Japan or something like that, and someone's showing you footage of Occupy Wall Street, and you're like, look, the American regime is coming down.
Well, anyone who lives here knows like, yeah, there was never even a thought that these little protests in New York were going to bring down the federal government in Washington, D.C. or, you know, think about like the Black Lives Matter protest last year.
Like, was anyone ever really concerned that this could, you know, bring down the government?
Only at the Capitol Hill riot.
That was the only one that really almost brought down the government and installed a dictatorship.
But so these things happen all over.
But the thing I will say is that, you know, with Fidel Castro now being dead since 2016 or whenever he died, and he really was the guy who was their leader for all of these decades.
And the fact that the situation is so bad in Cuba right now, and the fact that the protest looked so big, like I saw some aerial, you know, shots of it, and you're like, ooh, there's a lot of people out there protesting.
So that does, to me, kind of indicate that this could be a real thing.
Like this maybe could be a real threat to the regime.
Who knows?
We'll see.
But regardless of that, I think what's important for Americans to understand about all this is that while we can oppose the communist government of Cuba, and you can root for people to get their freedom or more freedom or a higher standard of living or whatever, we really need to reject the empire mentality.
And this is something I talked about in our China episode.
We really need to learn how to reject the empire mentality and the mentality that we should be doing something.
And by doing something, that always means either military action, some type of sanction regime, or some type of covert three-letter organization shenanigans, which is a completely false choice.
And it's a false choice that has plagued Americans for a long time, really since the Cold War.
The choice that was put forward was like, you can be a communist sympathizer, which there really were a lot of, or a flat-out communist, or you can be the anti-communist who wants to build up the national, you know, security apparatus and the military-industrial complex and go around the world fighting in Vietnam and in Korea and all these places to fight communism.
And it's just obviously a false choice.
And in fact, not only is it a false choice, but those Cold Warriors ended up giving tremendous cover to the commies.
And if anything, really just prolonged the issue.
You know, it's not just that you should be against sanctions because they're insane and evil.
But even leaving that aside, if you're really against communism, then you should understand that this just gives cover to the commies because you can sit there and say, well, look, I mean, communism is a disaster and it's impoverishing your country.
And look, it doesn't work.
It's like economically, this just doesn't work.
But then they turn around and go, oh, well, the reason we're poor is because of the U.S. embargo.
And so that's, and, and there's both of them technically are right.
Like they're poor for both of those reasons, but you just gave them an out.
So if you really believe that this fucking, you know, communist experiment is doomed to fail, then don't give them the excuse and let them, you know, put them in a situation where they can't blame their failure on anything else.
But more important to me is just the empire mentality that I think so many people, even some, you know, supposed like libertarian leaning people fall right into, particularly when it's a communist country, you know, Venezuela or something like that.
Which, you know, Venezuela is not quite as commie as Cuba is.
They're certainly socialist, but they're, you know, Cuba really is a throwback.
I mean, like the, you know, the whole communist worldview has basically been abandoned.
You know, like they'll, they'll say kind of like in the official history TM is like, well, there was the Second World War was between the fascists versus the capitalists and the communists.
And the capitalists and the communists won.
And then we had the Cold War between the capitalists and the communists and the capitalists won.
So capitalism won out.
That's kind of like the official history.
But really what happened, like at least in terms of like the intellectual class and the governments of the world, like the real, what is actually existing in real life, not just theories in people's heads, is that the whole socialism basically was abandoned for corporatism.
And that basically everyone figured out that this whole dream of the model being state ownership of the means of production just doesn't really work out.
And doesn't really, not just that it doesn't work out for the people, but it doesn't work out for the ruling class any better.
And that corporatism, these kind of partnerships between big private companies and centralized nation states is the way to go.
It's more sustainable and it's easier for it's easier to rule people in that manner.
So that's really what ended up happening.
I mean, if you really look at it, right?
Like you could say, oh, America was capitalist and Germany was fascist and Russia was communist.
Well, what are we all right now?
What are all of those countries?
All just corporatists.
I mean, that's, you know, I mean, you can call that fascist too, but it's the modern, you know, version of it.
So anyway, so that's kind of the real, but Cuba's like this throwback.
They're like, no, we're still really doing government ownership of the means of production.
And so in actuality, you never really, you know, it's all just levels of intervention and how much the government intervenes in a nation's affairs.
I mean, their own government intervenes in their affairs.
So there is, you know, on one hand, you have anarchy, which is like the ideal, the best state you could be in where you don't have this violent monopoly existing or interfering at all.
And then on the other hand, you have kind of like communism, which is, you know, like complete ownership of everything by the government.
The reality is neither ever really exist because there's always some shades of gray.
Like even in an anarcho-capitalist society, like the anarcho-capitalist like view is basically that, you know, if you don't want a group of people ruling violently over another group of people, and you want, if people are going to, you know, if there is a hierarchy, it should be as voluntary as possible and all of that stuff.
If that is your view, then our position is like, well, so you shouldn't institutionalize the initiation of violence.
Like that's just, it's just common sense.
Like if what you want to get away from is the initiation of violence against peaceful people or the threat of it, then you don't institutionalize it.
It's just kind of common sense.
So, but even in an anarcho-capitalist society, there would always be, and any human society, there will always be some group of people who initiate violence against other people or threats of violence, right?
Like that's short of some miracle utopian, like we fix the genetic coding in humans or something like that, that's always going to happen.
There will be crime of one level or another.
The ANCAP position is you just, you don't institutionalize that to try to get rid of the problem because that just makes it much worse.
But so if you think about it, like even that state in the anarchist state, you never have a completely free, non-interventionist, non-violent society.
It's just kind of this is the best we can do.
And even in the communist model, where the government owns everything, government owns all the means of production, all the property, everything.
There's a black market.
There's people who are trading shit in secret, right?
So it's never like 100% of either.
It's always some level of, you know, intervening or violence or whatever.
But basically what, you know, in other words, what these nation states figured out is just like pull it back a little bit.
We can't own everything.
We got to like, we can own a lot of shit and then basically boss around all the people who own shit, but we can't own everything because there's just, there's too many problems associated with it.
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Building Cuban Resentment00:10:48
Okay, anyway, as was the case in Murray Rothbard, the great Murray Rothbard, called this shit out right in the middle of the Cold War, was that the Cold Warriors not only aided, not only aided the communists, but that they were building up right on that scale,
on that sliding scale, they were pushing us further and further and further toward communism essentially at home by building up this huge military-industrial complex, building up the centralized power of our federal government in the name of fighting communism.
This is just not, you know, like I think the line Murray Rothbard had was that he criticized Buckley for was what it was like building up a draconian bureaucracy here at home to avoid a draconian bureaucracy from abroad.
Like that's it's not very smart, right?
Like it's if you're worried about getting stabbed, you don't just start stabbing yourself.
So you'll do it first before that guy can stab you because that kind of defeats the whole purpose.
And you can see this over and over again where this is at least what their stated goals are, what they're trying to accomplish completely undermines them.
Now, if you look at it through the empire lens, then it makes a lot more sense that that's just the goal is actually just to take over the world.
In which case, then you do want to be a cold warrior.
You got to go fight the fucking Soviets because they're the only other superpower in the world at the time.
So, okay, now it starts to make a little bit of sense.
But the rise, so the rise of Castro was a perfect example of this, where the U.S. foreign policy pushed this situation to be what it became.
And then ultimately, I mean, it can't be overstated just how psychotic these people are and how dangerous the game they're playing is.
I remember talking about that.
And it's no matter how much you're aware of this, which I like to think I'm pretty aware of it, it's still shocking.
It's still shocking how high stakes the game is and how much they're willing to risk.
I remember talking about this when Trump was trying to work out that peace negotiation with Kim Jong-un, and you would have all these people in the media just trashing it, doing everything they could to undermine it.
And then, of course, John Bolton, who Trump, the idiot, put as his national security advisor, he goes in and just undermines the whole thing.
And it's almost like you have to take a step back and really appreciate just how insane these sociopathic monsters are.
This isn't a fucking game, and they're risking their own safety.
It's not just like, oh, innocent people could die.
Obviously, they don't care about that.
But you have this nuclear-armed madman in North Korea who can drop nukes in Seoul tomorrow and kill millions and millions of people.
And they're talking.
They're going to the negotiation table.
But because of your own worldview or politics, you're like, oh, I'm going to try, I'm going to fuck with this situation if I can.
Like, what are you doing?
This is not a joke.
And you see that with Trump trying to talk to Russia too, like the two countries that own 90% of the nuclear weaponry in the world.
And they're trying to have a conversation.
And you're just, for your own little reasons, going to start trying to undermine it.
Like, these are really, really dangerous people.
So.
America was intervening in South America for basically as long as we've had the slightest ability to throughout the 1800s and stuff like that.
And we actually fought a war with the Spanish in the Spanish-American War that was largely over Cuba.
So it's not as if there hadn't been American, you know, an American presence in Cuba.
Keep in mind, you know, Cuba is very, very close to America.
And so people boat from Florida or from Cuba to Florida to escape raft even.
So then when Batista took over and he was the dictator there for a while, or I guess he was elected and then ultimately just like became a dictator, like which was like elected once, you know, like what Trump was about to do.
He was elected and then was basically just like, we're not having any more elections.
I'm your fucking dictator.
And it was a very corrupt leader.
And he was, I think, largely seen as being propped up by America.
There's probably a lot of truth to that.
And American business, there were a lot of American business interests in Cuba, like American businesses that went there and built all types of different businesses.
Anyway, so this is something that builds up resentment.
And it's an issue with trying to be the world empire.
Pat Buchanan said, he said this after 9-11, a great Pat Buchanan quote, he said, that terrorism is the price of empire.
And it always has been, and it always will be.
And that is just, that's what you get.
If you're going to try to dominate another group of people, they're not going to like it.
By the nature of dominating, you dominate someone because they don't want to be dominated.
And if they did, then you wouldn't have to.
So just like in Iran, where you had this situation with Mosadaik, Mossadaik, am I saying that right?
The guy, the dictator before the Shah, or actually he was democratically elected, I should say.
So the leader right before we installed the Shah there, you have this situation where we go over there, we overthrow a democratically elected dictator in a CIA coup.
We install, excuse me, I'm sorry, a democratically elected leader.
We install a dictator.
We may like it better that way, but this breeds tremendous resentment.
And it's the reason why you have the revolution in 1979 in Iran and the reason why they're still under that government today and still hate America and still are burning American flags and shit like that.
Because people don't like to be dominated and people especially don't like to be dominated by foreigners.
It's just, it's part of the game.
It's part of how we're hardwired.
Human beings are tribal creatures.
That's why there's sectarian violence all throughout the world because human beings, it's just the way we are.
We're pack animals.
And we, you know, like if you could imagine, right, right now, you know, think about like the lockdowns in 2020.
Now, we're pissed off about it.
We're all pissed off about it.
A lot of Americans are upset about it, right?
But if you just imagine, think that we were living our normal lives like up to 2019, and then the Chinese invaded and they put lockdowns on the American people.
Do you think you might see a little bit more of what the Chinese government would call terrorism?
Do you think that might increase a little bit more?
I mean, can you imagine?
Like, what would like right-wingers in Texas be doing if the Chinese government invaded, took over our federal government, and said, we're locking you in your house?
You know, I mean, they're just the level of resistance that you would get would be a thousand times what it is now.
And that's just because that's the way human beings are.
You know, it's one thing if we're going to rule over, you know, our own, but for some foreigner to come in and do it.
So there's tremendous resentment is built up.
And it leads a lot of times to these countries embracing the shit that you're completely against.
So in other words, if you don't want a radical Islamist group to lead a country, then what you really don't want to do is impose your will on them because at that point, they're like, yeah, fuck you.
I'm with that guy.
In the same sense that like, you know, you may not be like, like, you might be a fucking atheist or maybe you're just not that religious.
And there'd be like some fundamental Christian who you're like, I really don't want to have anything to do with them.
But if, you know, the Chinese invaded and put us under lockdowns and that fundamentalist Christian was like, we're about to go fucking kill these Chinese people.
All of a sudden, you might be a little bit more open to working with those guys or falling in line behind them.
So a lot of it is that, is that type of situation.
And that's pretty much what happened with Castro.
Now, he maybe would have gone communist either way and partnered up with the Soviet Union.
I don't know.
I'm not going to say that that's entirely the fault of American foreign policy, but we definitely pushed him in that direction and made that an easier or in some ways the only option that he had.
So when the resistance in Cuba broke out, and a lot of this was because there was tremendous resentment against Batista because he was seen as being like an American puppet.
Like he's just here letting these American businesses come in and rip off our people and blah, blah, blah, all that shit.
Now I say, just pausing on that note, I don't know, you know, again, I'm just not the expert in it.
I don't know how much the businesses really were ripping off the Cuban people.
Like, I don't know.
You know, with Mossadegh in Iran, you know, you had these like these British companies who, these oil companies, who were coming in and doing the oil refining.
And his big complaint was that they were ripping off the people.
Like they were taking too much of the oil profits that was underground in Iran.
But they were coming and refining it.
And the truth is, so he booted them all out and was like, you're like, no, we're kicking you all out.
You're not refining our oil anymore.
We're keeping it for our own people.
And then our response is to, you know, the CIA lead a coup to overthrow him because we need our fucking oil companies to be in there making tons of money.
Now, what happens there, right, is that you make him like a folk hero.
He was trying to do the right thing for his people.
And you are the big, bad, evil, you know, West coming in just trying to rip us off for profits, right?
The reality of the situation is really that those big corporations were a lot better at refining the oil than the fucking Iranian government would have been.
And so the kind of natural, the kind of almost market response to this naturally would be that you guys should make a deal.
Free HR Audit Offer00:02:18
You should make a deal.
You should ask for a little bit more of the profits to be, you know, left here for the Iranian people.
And then, you know, like, okay, but you guys can also take a little bit because there'll be more overall.
It's not a fixed pie.
There'll be more, you know, energy in general if you guys are here doing it.
So that's probably what naturally would have happened if we didn't go the CIA coup, you know, route.
Anyway, so with Castro, he rises up and they're fighting this guerrilla war against Batista, like him and Raul and Sheik Aveira and those guys.
And I've seen it reported.
I don't know if this is true or not, but it has been reported that the CIA was giving them money.
I don't know.
I don't know if that's true or not, but I think it was in the LA Times they had one report about it or something.
And who knows?
It wouldn't be that unusual if the CIA was directly funding both sides of the conflict.
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Failed Invasion and Deals00:07:41
They also, the official U.S. government position was that we won't sell arms to either side, which really hurt Batista a lot more than it hurt the guerrilla fighters.
So they, you know, if that's true, he was getting, you know, help from the CIA.
He was certainly getting help from the fact that we wouldn't sell weapons to Batista's government.
And he was certainly getting some backing from the corporate press in America.
So, you know, that's kind of what was going on at the time.
Now, anyway, he ends up winning and taking power in 1959, I believe.
And he's at this point, when he comes into power, their thing was that they're like, at least what he was saying to the world, this may not have been true, but what he was saying was like, I'm not a communist.
I'm not a Marxist communist.
I just like, I don't want my people to be ripped off.
We don't like this corrupt government, but we're not like fucking commies.
That's, you know, that was kind of like his take on the thing, or at least what he was saying publicly.
And then once he took over, immediately there started being all types of conflicts with him and at the time, Eisenhower's government.
And just keep in mind, right, that this is just after the creation of the empire, right?
Like we win World War II in 1945.
This is like 1959.
You're less than 15 years out of this new world order at the time, where it's the commies and the capitalists, as they would call them.
And so he comes to power.
There's a lot of concern about it.
And the Americans are still don't want to sell him weapons.
So you want weapons, right?
I imagine if you just violently overthrew a government and took control of a country, you're going to need some weapons.
And so if you can't get them from America, where's the other place to get them, right?
And so the other place to get them was the Soviet Union.
They were more than happy, right?
So all what's going on here is that in the same sense, like if the CIA did give Castro money, well, the reason they're giving him money is like, well, just in case these guys win, maybe we'll buy a little bit of favor with them, right?
So that's part of the reason why you would fund both sides of these conflicts, right?
And then the same thing for the Soviets, giving them a bunch of weapons, is it's like, oh, I don't know, a little island off of America.
There's this new leader there.
Maybe we'll buy a little bit of favor with him.
So then this whole conflict breaks out.
And instead of being, you know, like sane, which would be to, you know, obviously, ideally, all these governments wouldn't exist at all.
But the more sane response, given that they do, is that, you know, the Eisenhower government's bring Castro into the fold with us, make him an ally.
But instead, they just start, you know, you're trying to dominate these other countries now.
So instead, they're like, no, no, no, we fucking run the world.
And you're a tiny little shit country and we're the United States of America.
So they responded by cutting back the amount of sugar that they would buy.
So we cut way back on what we were buying from them.
And then at a certain point, they stopped selling energy at all to Castro, who needed it.
And so where does he go to get it now?
Well, he goes to get it from the Soviet Union.
And then the response to that, right?
So at the time, there's still all these American companies in Cuba.
And at the time, you know, that was just how it was going.
Like they had been companies there under Batista.
These were American-owned companies that were in Cuba.
And their oil refining companies were like, we're not refining any more of your oil.
Even if you get it from Russia, we're not refining it here.
And so Castro's response to that was simply to fucking seize all of them.
And he was like, okay, well, guess what?
You're in my fucking country and I got a military here.
This is my company now.
And just straight up took them.
Zero compensation.
This is my shit now.
Which, you know, I'm not for government seizing any type of companies, but it is, you have to admit, it's pretty fucking badass when you're doing it to the most powerful government in the world that's a few miles off your shore.
So he just took all of them.
I was like, zero compensation.
It's all this.
And then he declared that he was a Marxist communist and he's allied with the Soviet Union.
So just saying, I don't know, maybe he would have done that the whole time anyway.
Maybe that would have been the plan.
They were rough dudes.
I mean, they were like guerrilla fucking fighters.
So maybe they would have done that anyway.
But that is how it went down, more or less.
Again, check with a historian who's a real expert.
But that's more or less how the whole thing went down.
That we took this hardline stance and pushed him right into the arms of another, just like we do with all of these fucking countries around the world.
You either fall in line with us or you don't.
And if you don't, what are your options?
Well, let me ally up with the toughest motherfuckers who aren't in line with you.
And at the time, that was clearly the Soviet Union.
So then in response to that, we fucking invaded the country in the Bay of Pigs.
But Kennedy wasn't really on board with it.
I think he signed off on it, but after he was kind of like his arm was twisted into it.
So they invade and the invasion fails.
The invasion fails and Castro fucks up the people who invaded.
I don't know.
It was like a couple thousand people or something like that.
But Castro fucks him up.
It kills all of them and imprisons the rest.
Gets every last one of them.
And then from there, it was like, that's, well, this is where we are now.
You know, if someone tries to kill you, it's hard to, you know, go back to being friends with them.
So this then, right, basically sealed the fate of the Cuban-U.S. relations and sadly of the Cuban people.
And they just had to live under this brutal communist regime since then, essentially.
Since then, this was in 1960, 1961.
Since then, they've been living under this regime.
It's been horrible for them.
So like, if you actually care.
So like, here's the problem, right?
It's like, if you actually care about the people there and you want more people to have freedom and you're anti-communist, then what you don't want is this fucking interventionist foreign policy.
Because this is what sealed, you know, their fate.
Not to say, look, it could have gone bad without it, but this certainly, having run this experiment, it went very bad with it.
And so, and then, yeah, you had the Cuban Missile Crisis right after that.
That was Castro's response to the failed Bay of Pigs, was like, he asked Russia to fucking send him a bunch of fucking nuclear missiles and point them at America.
And Russia was like, absolutely, we will do that.
And then, you know, Kennedy and Khrushchev were able to fucking, you know, through some.
And if you, if you look into that shit, it was like little things that really could have gone bad and this whole thing would have been like, you know, humanity might have been extinct.
But they were able to work out a deal where they were like, okay, basically the official deal that was put out to the world was like, if you move these missiles and there's no missiles in, you know, our region facing our country, then we will agree to not invade Cuba again.
Castro's Nuclear Response00:02:15
That was kind of the deal.
And I think the unofficial deal was like we'd get rid of some missiles in Poland and shit like that.
But basically that was like, okay, yeah, you caught us.
We tried to fucking invade this country.
Promise not to do it again if you don't send them fucking nukes to point at us.
So that ended up being the deal, although it was declassified later, I think, in a Senate intelligence report that the CIA tried to assassinate Castro, you know, a bunch of times after that.
Failed every single time, which in itself is really interesting.
It's really interesting that there's, you know, the CIA is able to have these, you know, these coups all over the world, but just couldn't with this little country that's right there.
You know, it's anyway, to me, a fucking interesting, an interesting little bit of history.
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Diverting Attention Tactics00:14:50
So Castro goes on to rule for decades and decades and do what communist dictators do, just, you know, starve his people, you know, brutally crack down on all of their liberties and all of this shit and just awful, you know, because communism doesn't work and it's an evil, you know, it's an evil system.
You know, in many ways, the most evil system that a government could have.
And yeah, it was terrible.
And then, of course, he kind of became a folk hero to the left in America because they kind of, you know, sympathize with communists and they sympathize with anti-Americanism.
So there is where you see the Shea Guevara t-shirts and, you know, all this kind of, I don't know, like even just like the soft praise of what is good about Cuba.
Yeah, well, you know, like that's what you get a lot from the left.
It's like, well, you know, he's really, you know, he's a little bit too authoritarian and I think he should have elections, but I mean, the literacy rate, you know, is really great or something.
You're like, oh, wow, they have a high literacy rate, which I don't even fucking believe.
But even aside from that, like, who brags about a literacy rate when there's, when like anti-government books are banned?
Like, what?
It's like, oh, great.
You can read the government propaganda, which, by the way, is why they had the literacy campaign so that they could propagandize their own people.
It's a real sick, twisted view when you think that's something to brag about.
But even just like, what was it, maybe like 15 years ago or whatever, Michael Moore made that documentary, Sicko, and they went to Cuba and were like, look at this wonderful medical care that you're getting here in Cuba.
Of course, they're at the hospital that, you know, the Castros would allow you to bring cameras into, like the one.
You're not like fucking going into some dirt poor village and seeing what medical care they get.
Because believe me, it wouldn't be quite as good as what you get at your local ER here in America.
But so that's, you know, anyway, it's funny because now what these protests are really sparked over seems to be the, at least seems to be very related to the medical, you know, level of medical care in Cuba.
And so anyway, so it just becomes this whole thing where there's the people who, there's like the sanction regime, Republicans, and then the sympathetic lefties, and then the Democrats who compromise in the middle and say, hey, we'll be kind of sympathetic and also, you know, support the sanction regime.
So the worst of all worlds, as usual.
And it's, of course, the logic of it is all just like literally schizophrenic.
I mean, like, if you think that a regime is so brutal to their own people and that's your issue, right?
Like if you're the, the Marco Rubio position is like, we need to put crippling sanctions on Cuba until they hold elections, which first off just doesn't even make any sense at all.
Like, so what?
If they held elections and they were able, he was able to propagandize 51% of the people, then he can keep doing everything he's doing.
Like, what difference does an election even mean?
But the idea that you're like, well, you don't let your people vote.
You don't, you know, they don't have a say in their government.
So this government is just forced on them.
So our solution to that is to impoverish those people even more.
That's the logic of the sanction regimes.
And not just in Cuba and everywhere in Venezuela and Iran, all over the world.
That will impoverish the people there in order to make it clear that this whole system just doesn't work.
And so maybe you'll overthrow your government.
But of course, all that does is give them an excuse for why the system isn't working and make America the bad guys.
And so what are you going to embrace if you hate America?
Well, probably not capitalism, right?
Probably something closer to communism.
So anyway, the whole thing is just insane.
And it was one of the few good things Obama did.
I mean, Obama was a terrible president, just absolutely terrible.
And he certainly didn't have to go to Cuba and say nice things about the regime.
That was just fucking awful to watch.
But trying to open up, you know, relations with them, that was good.
That was that part of it was a good move.
You didn't have to fucking go praise socialism and all that shit.
But and then Pompeo came in and listed them as like a terrorist organization or something, a terrorist government or something like that.
Some stupid ass shit like that.
But I guess the real, like my thing, my takeaway, excuse me.
My takeaway from all of this, right?
Is like what the correct position when something like this is going on in Cuba.
And I think this is a little bit frustrating to some people, but I really do think it's because we still live with this empire mentality.
Even a lot of good people still have it.
It's like, I root for the Cuban people.
I root for them.
And I hope they get more freedom.
And I hope they defeat their government.
And I hope that their standard of living increases.
But that's it.
That's the extent of it.
I root for you.
It's just not my issue to, you know what I mean, go fix the world.
It's stupid.
It's not your place.
It's utopian.
And it's not achievable.
Now, if you can find a way to like fucking, you know, get some charity to some of those people or help get some food to them or something like that, like, okay, yeah, that's, that's great.
If you came to me with a plan for that, maybe I'd contribute to it.
I don't know.
That, you know, if there was like something that could be done, okay.
But the empire mentality has really got to stop.
The idea that somehow the U.S. government's got to do the right thing in one of these places is just so ridiculous.
And this is what I was talking about in the China episode, but it's the same thing with Cuba, even though they're a lot closer than China.
And it's a lot more practical to think that we could enforce our will on Cuba than China.
But, you know, it's kind of like if there's like a fight between your neighbors, like your neighbors are a married couple and they're fighting about something.
And you think one of them's right and the other one's wrong.
Do you have this feeling of like, well, I got to go do something?
I got to make sure the people who are the one who's right, you know, I think the wife's right about this, so I got to go do something and make sure she wins this argument.
It's like, no, because that's not your fucking place.
And in the case of America, in the case of this crumbling empire, it's like worrying about that while your own marriage is falling apart.
That's the level of what you're doing right now.
I got to go get involved in my neighbor's marital disputes while your marriage is falling apart.
But fix your own marriage first.
And then still don't do anything about your neighbor's marriage.
And if you did something, it would be like, I don't know, giving some advice.
Certainly wouldn't be breaking into their house and dictating who wins the argument.
That's why it's all so ridiculous when these things, particularly with China was the better example because they're just like, you know, across the world and they have a whole bunch of H-bombs.
And we're like, we can't let them take Hong Kong.
We can't let them take Taiwan.
Well, okay.
What do you want to do?
You want to have a species-ending war where the end result of it will be, you know, hundreds of millions of people dying and them still taking Hong Kong?
Because even after it, even if we could win the war, which we would, we still wouldn't be able to enforce our will on fucking Taiwan or Hong Kong or something like that.
But so that whole mentality just has to go.
The whole mentality that this is our thing.
You know, I saw Mike Pompeo was on, I think, with Laura Ingram yesterday.
It was on with someone at Fox News.
I'm with a blonde at Fox News.
I think it was Laura Ingram.
I can't remember.
And he's sitting there, you know, and he's like, this is why we were so tough on Cuba.
And this is communism falling apart.
And that's what they're protesting against.
And that's why we have to go, you know, whatever he wants to do.
We have to be on the side of the freedom of the Cuban people.
And you're sitting there like, dude, Americans were locked in their homes.
Like for months.
Americans were locked in their homes, forcibly, you know, kicked out of their businesses by the government, deemed unessential by their own government.
And you're telling me, like, you were the Secretary of State and you couldn't even fucking lift a finger.
Like, you couldn't do nothing to help that situation.
Your administration couldn't do anything for those people, but you're going to go bring freedom to Cuba.
As I was saying in the China episode, it's like these politicians in Washington, D.C. talking about violence in China and how evil it is.
And you're like, you can't even solve the violence in Washington, D.C. Like, where do you even get the mentality that you're going to go solve these problems for other people?
And who the hell even knows, right?
Who even knows what they would vote for if they could get who knows what those people want?
It's just not your job.
It's not your role.
And to me, one of the things that you want to pay attention to, right?
Like what you have to get hip to is that this is also a tactic of people to divert attention from the evil shit that their government's doing or the evil shit that they, if they're in government, are a part of doing and focus on the evil shit over there.
You know, it's real.
This is, there was like an old thing Noam Chomsky said, but I think he's completely right on this, that it's very easy to, you know, like if you were, and you see this all the time, right?
If you're like, like the Nazis love to talk about the crimes of the commies.
And what do the commies love to talk about?
Oh, the crimes of the Nazis.
Or they love to talk about the crimes of the Americans, right?
Stalin used to talk all day long about the evils of segregation.
Now, he's not wrong.
You know what I mean?
Like he is, boy, he's like, America's fucking racist.
Look at how they treat these blacks in Alabama.
Okay, yeah, he's technically right.
That was fucked up.
But at the same time, like, if you're Stalin and you're talking about how fucked up America is to their blacks, you're like, dude, you're running gulags.
Like, what, you know what I mean?
So it becomes this very convenient thing to talk about the evil of other societies.
It's again, it's the person whose marriage is falling apart who's talking about someone else's marriage falling apart.
So like, you know, just an analogy or whatever.
Obviously, it's a little different with governments.
But like, so the role of us, of American freedom-loving people, is to first and foremost oppose our government.
Let's try to make our country free and not focus on what other countries are doing.
It's just not like, it's not practical.
It's not where your starting place would be.
You don't start helping someone else clean their house when your house is a mess.
And you certainly don't start forcing someone else to clean their house when your house is a mess.
So first and foremost, what freedom-loving, you know, Americans should insist is that our government doesn't intervene in Cuba.
That should be our first priority.
Same with Venezuela, same with any of these other countries.
I don't care if they're right-wing authoritarians or left-wing authoritarians or whatever the hell they are.
That's our first obligation: we don't want our military, we don't want the intervening, we don't want the sanctions regime, and we certainly don't want any fucking covert three-letter organization bullshit going on either.
That should be our mentality with Cuba.
And then, aside from that, root for them, root for freedom to win.
That's it.
I know that's not that satisfactory to a lot of people, but that's actually the best thing.
And it's really the only thing, it's the only practical thing that we can do.
It's just like the idea that our government, our totalitarian government, is going to go solve their totalitarian government's shortcomings is not only counterproductive.
It would probably only help stabilize their awful government.
And, you know, anyway, it's not what you want to be giving aid or even like tacit, you know, consent to.
What actually led to the protests in Cuba is kind of unclear, but it looks like, you know, basically that there's, I mean, the state of the country is really a mess.
There's like crazy blackouts that are going on.
They can't get their fucking energy together.
And so there are a whole bunch of people living without power for long stretches.
Medical supplies have really been running short.
Like people can't get like basic shit.
People are food insecure, as people on the left would call it.
It's very hard to fucking get food, get medicine, basic fucking shit.
And they know after being through this for decades that there's really no hope for the next generation.
And so that creates a situation where people are ready to rise up.
But the other thing I guess that I would say from it is you can also be somewhat inspired by it.
It takes a lot of courage to protest your government in Cuba.
You know, it's something that a lot of us who vocally protest our government here don't really confront.
I mean, we have our own fears and you can be silenced online and bad things can happen to you.
I mean, our government will do some real fucked up shit to dissidents at times, but not like in Cuba, where you're taking your life in your hands by protesting the government.
And so there is something inspiring about people under those situations, under those circumstances, having the balls to fucking go out there and protest.
So I fucking I root, I root for freedom in Cuba, but I root a lot harder for freedom in America because that's where I live and that's what I really care about.
So, all right, that was it.
That was my rant on Cuba for today.
And we'll be back.
Hopefully, Robbie the Fire will be back with us on the next episode.