True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 532: Cuba 1
Aired: 2026-03-24
Duration: 01:46:28


=== U.S. Sanctions on Cuba (14:04) ===

[00:00:00]  Ala, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Brace Belden.
[00:00:05]  And I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[00:00:07]  And welcome to the Truan On podcast.
[00:00:10]  We are recording from my husband's hotel room.
[00:00:15]  He got quite uncomfortable when I said to the desk clerk that we were married, but didn't bother me at all.
[00:00:22]  Running, I think, on very little sleep.
[00:00:24]  But we just got back from the island of Cuba, 90 miles south of the greatest city in the world, Key West.
[00:00:31]  And there's a few things that we want to talk about.
[00:00:35]  We're going on a kind of a long journey over not just today and tomorrow, but this next week.
[00:00:42]  So just to get some things out of the way, some context, I guess.
[00:00:48]  Just weeks after the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, where he was taken by U.S. special forces out of Caracas and into New York, where he's being put on trial on a host of rather flimsy charges.
[00:01:05]  On January 26th, 2026, Trump issued an executive order titled Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba, which may strike many listeners as odd because I cannot recall recently, and I'm an avid reader of the news, the government of Cuba making a lot of threats towards the United States.
[00:01:24]  So it reads, it's long, but in part, I'm going to read part of it.
[00:01:27]  The government of Cuba has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States.
[00:01:31]  The regime aligns itself with and provides support for numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the government of the Russian Federation, Russia, the People's Republic of China, PRC, the government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
[00:01:52]  For example, Cuba blatantly hosts dangerous adversaries in the United States, inviting them to base sophisticated military intelligence capabilities in Cuba that directly threaten the national security of the United States.
[00:02:05]  Cuba hosts Russia's largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tries to steal sensitive national security information of the United States.
[00:02:14]  Cuba continues to build deep intelligence and defense cooperation with the PRC.
[00:02:18]  Cuba welcomes transnational terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, creating a safe environment for these malign groups.
[00:02:26]  How many times are they going to use malign in this fucking thing?
[00:02:28]  You just learned that word recently.
[00:02:29]  Now, for these malign groups said that these transnational terrorist groups can build economic, cultural, and security ties throughout the region and attempts to destabilize the Western Hemisphere, including the United States.
[00:02:42]  They can attempt—Hezbollah is attempting to build cultural ties throughout Cuba and the United States?
[00:02:49]  What is this supposed to look like?
[00:02:51]  They're infiltrating Hollywood.
[00:02:53]  Exactly.
[00:02:55]  This thing is.
[00:02:56]  I read this, but reading out loud, it's ridiculous.
[00:02:58]  Cuba has long provided defense, intelligence, and security assistance to adversaries in the Western Hemisphere, attempting to thwart United States and international sanctions designed to enforce the stability of the region, uphold the rule of law, and safeguard the national security and foreign policy of the United States.
[00:03:15]  Cuba continues to try to thwart United States efforts to address threats the United States posed by hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors, including in the Western Hemisphere.
[00:03:27]  Now, therefore, I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, find that this situation with respect to Cuba constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States to the national security and foreign policy of the U.S.
[00:03:44]  And hereby, I'm not saying United States anymore, to the U.S. and hereby declare a national emergency with respect to that threat.
[00:03:50]  So we are under a national emergency right now.
[00:03:52]  Sound the alarms.
[00:03:53]  Because of Cuba.
[00:03:56]  This is the last part I'll read.
[00:03:57]  To deal with the national emergency declared in this order, I determined that it is necessary and appropriate to establish a tariff system as described below.
[00:04:05]  Under this system, an additional ad valorum duty may be imposed on import of goods that are product of a foreign country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba.
[00:04:19]  So all that is to say, and obviously it goes on and there's some legal provisions in there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is that the United States will punish and punish harshly any country that provides Cuba with oil.
[00:04:31]  Now, Cuba is not an oil-producing country.
[00:04:35]  There's a little bit there, but certainly not enough to sustain themselves on.
[00:04:39]  They are also an island, and so depend on imports of all kinds, and those imports require – I will get into this in an interview, but I mean at a certain point, even if something – a ship docks with goods, you can't get it to the rest of the country because there's no fucking gas.
[00:04:55]  And there is no fucking gas in Cuba right now.
[00:04:58]  They have cut off oil entirely to the country.
[00:05:01]  There have been no shipments since this executive order was passed.
[00:05:05]  Actually, I think even before then.
[00:05:08]  Venezuela was Cuba's largest oil supplier.
[00:05:13]  And the U.S. took out Venezuela.
[00:05:15]  Now, I guess some of that oil money is going into a Trump account somewhere in the Gulf.
[00:05:19]  Some of it I read is being sent to Israel.
[00:05:22]  It's a little unclear what's going on with that.
[00:05:26]  There is private sales that are allowed.
[00:05:30]  And that is to say, like that private companies, which are sort of newly minted in Cuba, at least the past seven or eight years, are allowed to buy oil.
[00:05:39]  However, the prices are so outrageous that it's just, it's basically, it's fake.
[00:05:44]  It's like a fake law.
[00:05:46]  There is currently a Russian tanker, the Anatoly Kolodkin, that's coming.
[00:05:53]  It is really unclear what that is going to turn into.
[00:05:58]  I think it's a tanker probably worth tracking.
[00:06:03]  Yeah, it is just, it is a really bad situation.
[00:06:06]  You know, there's sort of been this talk of it was going to be Venezuela, Iran, and then Cuba.
[00:06:13]  Iran is currently actually giving the U.S. a pretty good walloping.
[00:06:19]  But they've laid out their plans quite clearly.
[00:06:22]  This is from an Atlantic article that came out today, Monday, March 23rd.
[00:06:26]  It says, the U.S. Attorney's Office in South Florida is preparing indictments against Cuba's political and military leadership, including members of the Castro family, on a range of possible charges related to alleged violent crime, drug trafficking, immigration, and espionage for people familiar with the planning told us on condition of anonymity to discuss internal government proceedings.
[00:06:50]  U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reddingz is leading a multi-agency effort that could be used to provide legal justification for any military engagement these people added.
[00:07:00]  There's been reporting on this in the past couple months as well.
[00:07:03]  I think the New York Times put out a story basically saying the same thing, that they're looking for any sort of legal pretext in order to swoop in and arrest members of the Cuban government.
[00:07:14]  They were unable to find such pretext, but I would say that the Trump administration is going to doggedly look until they find one.
[00:07:25]  Listeners of this show might be familiar with the fact that Cuba is not doing very well right now.
[00:07:34]  It has been in the news quite a bit lately.
[00:07:37]  I think anybody who follows Cuba stuff moderately will see that Cuba has not been doing very well since about 2020, actually a little before 2019.
[00:07:48]  It's been particularly bad lately.
[00:07:50]  This episode we're doing today is dealing with, well, today and tomorrow's episode are both dealing with the embargo and what is called in Cuba the blockade, which I think is a more apt description of it.
[00:08:02]  There has been a blockade on Cuba since 1963 when JFK signed it into law.
[00:08:10]  The blockade is also insane.
[00:08:11]  I think people maybe embargo is kind of like, oh, well, we're not doing business with them.
[00:08:17]  It makes you think that like, maybe it's something that, okay, you know, the U.S. government won't trade with them or U.S. companies won't trade with them.
[00:08:24]  But it actually is significantly more far-reaching than that.
[00:08:29]  Nothing with more than 10% of American parts can be traded to Cuba.
[00:08:34]  So any kind of like advanced computer equipment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:08:38]  The U.S. does still have a pretty substantial high-tech manufacturing industry, but 10% is a pretty low threshold.
[00:08:46]  And so a lot of things cannot be traded to the country.
[00:08:50]  Ships cannot dock in both Cuba and in the U.S. within 160 days of each other.
[00:08:56]  And keep in mind, you know, Cuba is 90 miles from Key West.
[00:09:01]  It's quite close.
[00:09:02]  And so because of that, it's like hard for them to even logistically get things.
[00:09:08]  This stuff is pretty well known.
[00:09:09]  We've talked about this stuff on the podcast before.
[00:09:12]  You know, during Trump's first term, there was a significant tightening.
[00:09:17]  Actually, let me even go back before then.
[00:09:18]  Obama, under Obama, there was an opening.
[00:09:22]  And Obama actually went to Cuba.
[00:09:24]  It was a pretty big deal.
[00:09:27]  A lot of Cubans were sort of look back quite fondly on the Obama era, but there was this huge boom of tourism.
[00:09:36]  The economy got a lot better.
[00:09:39]  But then Trump came in and there was a significant tightening.
[00:09:42]  You could only travel there in groups that got licenses from the Treasury Department.
[00:09:47]  You were also forbidden from interacting with the state in basically any form.
[00:09:51]  You could not stay in state-owned hotels, go to state-owned businesses, or eat in state-owned restaurants.
[00:09:55]  The same is true right now.
[00:09:58]  There was also a law passed in 1996 called the Helms-Burton Act that tightens sanctions on Cuba.
[00:10:05]  It had strange results.
[00:10:07]  And this is going back to Trump, but we've got to go back in time again here a little bit.
[00:10:12]  This is from the transnational litigation blog.
[00:10:14]  In 1905, Cuba granted a concession to build and operate piers at the port of Havana.
[00:10:20]  The concession was ultimately transferred to Havana Docks, a Delaware corporation, and extended to 99 years.
[00:10:27]  In 1960, Cuba expropriated the concession along with much other U.S.-owned property.
[00:10:33]  Havana Docks filed a claim with the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, which certified a loss of approximately $9 million plus interest from the date of expropriation.
[00:10:42]  When President Trump ended the suspension of Helmsburton cause of action in 2019, Havana Docks sued four U.S. cruise lines that used the piers between 2016 and 2019.
[00:10:52]  That's the Obama years, but things were open.
[00:10:55]  Well, some of that was.
[00:10:57]  The district court awarded damages of nearly $110 million, the present value of the claims times three, against each of the four defendants.
[00:11:06]  Jeez.
[00:11:07]  I know that was later overturned, but it's just, this is the kind of stuff that like the Helms Burton Act was signed into law.
[00:11:12]  There's all these provisions against it.
[00:11:14]  And most of those provisions weren't really enforced.
[00:11:20]  But Trump in his first term started enforcing those provisions.
[00:11:24]  They're being enforced right now.
[00:11:27]  We'll get to that in a sec.
[00:11:29]  But they're being enforced in force right now.
[00:11:32]  So there's another aspect of this, which we mentioned in the interview, and I didn't have it in front of me, so I couldn't get all the facts right, but I got them mostly right.
[00:11:41]  American and Foreign Power Company, which is an American company, owned the Cuban Electric Company in August of 1960 when the Cuban Electric Company was expropriated and nationalized by Fidel Castro.
[00:11:56]  In 1967, American and Foreign Power Company merged with Electric Bond and Shares Company, Abasco, which was purchased by the paper company, Boise Cascade in 1969.
[00:12:09]  Boise Cascade bought Office Max in 2003 for $1.3 billion and changed the company's overall name to Office Max.
[00:12:20]  This new, bigger Office Max merged with the famous Office Depot in 2013.
[00:12:27]  Office Depot has since been failing, I believe, to merge with Staples since then.
[00:12:34]  Cuba owes Office Depot $267.6 million plus 6% interest for every year since the Cuban electric company was nationalized, which means that the nation of Cuba owes Office Depot, according to United States law, $12.5 billion.
[00:13:01]  Yes.
[00:13:02]  I mean, as you can see, listeners, this shit is fucking ridiculous.
[00:13:06]  And this is the kind of stuff that was, of course, signed into law in 1996, but not really enforced so much because it's so sort of unbelievable, I guess.
[00:13:18]  And also just like inactionable.
[00:13:20]  I mean, these things are non-starters if you're trying to negotiate with a country.
[00:13:25]  However, Trump reactivated, essentially, Title IV of the Helms-Burton Act.
[00:13:32]  This is an extraordinary provision.
[00:13:34]  Basically, the U.S. can sanction any third-party organization or company in a foreign country for doing business in Cuba.
[00:13:43]  It was actually enacted a few times in the 1990s.
[00:13:46]  Grupo Domos from Mexico, a Canadian mining company called Sherrod, and an Israeli citrus company owned by Rafi Eitan, the Mossad operative behind the Pollard affair, and who I think was also involved in the, well, I know was involved in the Eichmann kidnapping.

=== The BDS Controversy (15:00) ===

[00:14:04]  We're all sanctioned by the U.S. for, or maybe just warned by the U.S. for this.
[00:14:09]  He was doing BDS.
[00:14:11]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:12]  The Rafi Etan thing is very strange.
[00:14:15]  That's been one of those things that I've known for a long time, but I've never really thought about.
[00:14:18]  But I'm like, that might be worth looking into what the hell happened there.
[00:14:23]  I just, just to stress this, and listeners, I'm sorry, I'm very tired right now.
[00:14:28]  So this might be a little all over the place.
[00:14:30]  Since Trump's first term, there has basically been a ramping up of pressure against Cuba.
[00:14:37]  That did not abate under Joe Biden.
[00:14:40]  Cuba was added to the state sponsors of terrorism list.
[00:14:45]  Biden, I believe, removed him on his last day in office, and then Trump put him back on the next day, the first day in office.
[00:14:52]  Because of that, they're basically, they're unable to access the international financial system.
[00:14:57]  I mean, they are isolated, isolated, isolated economically.
[00:15:01]  I'm going to give you an example of what can happen to you if you just are a regular person, how this might affect you.
[00:15:08]  Say you and I go out for lunch.
[00:15:12]  We get Cuban sandwiches.
[00:15:15]  Delicious.
[00:15:16]  Well, it's quite unlikely after our trip to Cuba and Miami that we'll be eating those for a while.
[00:15:20]  In my mind, it's delicious.
[00:15:22]  Yes.
[00:15:25]  I Venmo you because you're like, hey, actually, can you get me for that?
[00:15:30]  Yeah.
[00:15:30]  I write Cuban sandwich in the description.
[00:15:34]  My Venmo account might be disabled.
[00:15:37]  These sanctions are so wide-reaching that if I'm in Europe, if I'm a Belgium in Belgium, if I'm a Belgian in Belgium, phrase Belgium, and I'm talking to my Austrian friend, and I'm like, hey, I'm going to Venue Mo you or whatever, European Venmo you, a dollar or a Euro, actually.
[00:15:58]  That's what they call them over there.
[00:15:59]  But these are two European citizens sending European currency to one another.
[00:16:05]  Nothing such in the U.S. at all.
[00:16:07]  Using a European currency transfer app or whatever.
[00:16:12]  And I write Cuba in the description, that transaction might be blocked.
[00:16:17]  I mean, it's just one of those things that's like, it is so crazy and so isolating for Cuba that I think people, again, like embargo is really too light a word for it.
[00:16:28]  It really is a blockade in many ways.
[00:16:30]  And now it literally is a blockade with the fact that the U.S. is not allowing oil to go to Cuba.
[00:16:38]  So five weeks ago, I think it was five weeks ago, David from Progressive International gave me a call and it's like, we're going to do this thing in Cuba.
[00:16:46]  Do you want to go?
[00:16:47]  And I was like, I don't know.
[00:16:48]  I got a lot of stuff to do.
[00:16:49]  We have a little trip planned basically for right now.
[00:16:53]  And then like two weeks ago, I guess we decided to do this two weeks ago.
[00:16:58]  Yeah, about something like that.
[00:16:59]  Yeah.
[00:17:01]  I was like, all right, well, we'll come.
[00:17:03]  So we accompanied, I think it was overall 50 tons of, I believe, mostly medical aid, which, by the way, people say, oh, medical aid is an embargo or medical supplies aren't embargoed in Cuba.
[00:17:14]  They are.
[00:17:16]  During the pandemic, this is sort of a famous example of it.
[00:17:19]  Cuba had ordered ventilators from a Swiss company, and that Swiss company was purchased by an American company, and that order was canceled.
[00:17:28]  But we decided to kind of go last minute to see what was going on.
[00:17:33]  I don't know if we've really done one of these things before.
[00:17:36]  This is our first time leaving the country for the show.
[00:17:38]  So you went solo, but this is the first time more than one of us.
[00:17:42]  And so maybe in a couple more years, all three of us will go somewhere.
[00:17:46]  And the last time, I think their last episode when I called in from the Philippines, I was recording from what I realized was a sex hotel, but it was the only place with good Wi-Fi I could find.
[00:17:55]  This is a non-sexual hotel.
[00:17:57]  Well, no, maybe we might have sex, but you don't seem interested in that.
[00:18:00]  So we'll maybe move on from that subject.
[00:18:04]  You've never been to Cuba.
[00:18:06]  No, I've never been most places.
[00:18:09]  Yeah.
[00:18:09]  I've been to a few.
[00:18:11]  Yeah, but Cuba's, you know.
[00:18:13]  I've never been very, very south in the world.
[00:18:17]  Yeah.
[00:18:18]  I've been to some places in the East, the Near East.
[00:18:22]  The mysterious East.
[00:18:23]  Yeah.
[00:18:24]  Not so much in the South.
[00:18:26]  I have been to Cuba once.
[00:18:29]  I spent about three and a half weeks there in 2014.
[00:18:35]  I traveled the country, well, about half the country with a beautiful blonde.
[00:18:40]  I saw many beautiful things.
[00:18:41]  I only spent a little bit of time in Havana.
[00:18:44]  And it was honestly one of the greatest times of my life.
[00:18:48]  You know, we kind of went because it was really cheap.
[00:18:53]  It was while the Obama stuff was happening, but we still had to go through Mexico to get there.
[00:18:59]  I remember they stamped my passport, which Cuba famously usually doesn't do for Americans.
[00:19:03]  Yeah, I didn't get one.
[00:19:04]  Yeah, I didn't get one this time either.
[00:19:07]  And I was like, oh, no, what am I going to get in trouble when I get back?
[00:19:10]  And then the guy I flew back through Mexico, but the guy at the U.S. border didn't even look at my fucking passport.
[00:19:18]  And it was just, it was, it was incredible.
[00:19:21]  You know, it was the, the, you know, the country is, I guess the thing that really stuck out to me the most is how beautiful the country is, like the natural beauty of it.
[00:19:29]  Um, Vinyales, especially, was just like, I'd never seen anything like that before.
[00:19:33]  Um, but also that it's just kind of a normal country, yeah.
[00:19:36]  You know, I think that Cuba has really built up in a lot of people's mind as I think, I don't know, I guess it wasn't, I don't know if it was one of our guests or someone just said that to us, but like people think it's either like heaven on earth here or hell on earth.
[00:19:48]  It's just normal.
[00:19:48]  Well, people, it's a lot of othering language.
[00:19:51]  You know, people talk about the regime and it's oppressive.
[00:19:54]  It's this and that.
[00:19:55]  And it's like, yeah, people are kind of doing their thing like anywhere else.
[00:19:58]  Yeah.
[00:19:59]  Yeah.
[00:20:01]  But I have really fond memories of it.
[00:20:03]  And, you know, it's been heartbreaking to see what's been happening there.
[00:20:07]  And so, I mean, it's just, it's just been more and more isolated, more and more attacked since 2020.
[00:20:14]  And just the country is doing pretty badly, you know?
[00:20:18]  And so it wasn't that I didn't want to go because I didn't want to see the country all fucked up or whatever in some way, but it was just, I knew it would be a little heartbreaking.
[00:20:26]  And also, I didn't think we had time, but we decided to go pretty like two weeks ago.
[00:20:31]  I'm glad we did.
[00:20:32]  Me too.
[00:20:34]  So how this came together is Progressive International, which I got to tell you, PI guys, I know some of you are going to listen to this.
[00:20:43]  Like you guys a lot.
[00:20:44]  Love you guys.
[00:20:46]  But the name is misleading.
[00:20:48]  It does sound a little bit like we're going to go to like a, you know, it's a little, right?
[00:20:53]  Am I wrong?
[00:20:53]  What is it giving to you?
[00:20:55]  It's progress.
[00:20:56]  I'm not, I guess I don't think of myself as a progressive.
[00:20:58]  I don't like my calling myself a progressive.
[00:21:00]  You think it should be called communist international?
[00:21:02]  No, because that's the other thing.
[00:21:03]  I guess I was thinking about this.
[00:21:04]  I was like, all the other internationals, they already kind of called the names on that.
[00:21:09]  You could do the fifth international, perhaps.
[00:21:11]  Even the sixth international.
[00:21:13]  I'm sure there is a fifth international.
[00:21:14]  In fact, I know there's a fifth international.
[00:21:16]  So you can do the sixth or the seventh international, perhaps.
[00:21:19]  But it gets a little, it gets a little numbersy with that.
[00:21:22]  So, but Progressive International is, I guess I would describe them as a freelance diplomatic group that brings together like left-wing parties from around the world.
[00:21:34]  And so, you know, will essentially try to connect like the Cuban government to whatever, you know, a large left-wing opposition party in a major country, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:21:47]  So they host these forums around the world and have these sort of like facilitate like meetings between, you know, like the, you know, Petro and whoever else in other countries.
[00:21:59]  It's cool stuff.
[00:22:02]  But this was like a bunch of groups game.
[00:22:05]  And so it was like a combination of bringing the aid and calling attention to it.
[00:22:09]  And then also having people from, and I think a lot of people get the idea that it was just like 30 DSA guys or something.
[00:22:15]  Yeah.
[00:22:16]  But there was a lot of foreign motherfuckers there.
[00:22:18]  Yeah.
[00:22:18]  People from all over.
[00:22:20]  Yeah.
[00:22:21]  South America, people from Europe.
[00:22:22]  Yeah.
[00:22:25]  Mostly everybody spoke Spanish for the most part.
[00:22:30]  Except us.
[00:22:31]  I'm okay.
[00:22:31]  I feel like it's hard when you're listening to long speeches, you know, I get, it depends.
[00:22:37]  Some people, Mexicans, I understand very well.
[00:22:41]  It depends.
[00:22:42]  You know, sometimes it's an old guy and it's just, it's hard for me.
[00:22:46]  But that's neither here nor there.
[00:22:47]  So there were a lot of people there from different places.
[00:22:49]  Including the beautiful Clara Lopez.
[00:22:52]  Oh, yeah.
[00:22:52]  She was a gem.
[00:22:53]  Who I think stole both of our hearts.
[00:22:56]  But it was, yeah, it was a, it was sort of like, I don't know.
[00:23:01]  I mean, it was put together very quickly.
[00:23:05]  And, you know, I don't know.
[00:23:07]  I think both of us, we tend not to do like big lefty trip kind of things.
[00:23:12]  I haven't done something like this in a while where I've been in kind of a big, a big group.
[00:23:17]  We like to roll.
[00:23:18]  We like to kind of roll on our own time.
[00:23:20]  Dance to the tune of our own.
[00:23:22]  But we did when we were there.
[00:23:24]  We pretty much did.
[00:23:25]  I mean, we definitely, I don't know what the hell everyone else.
[00:23:28]  I do know what other people did, but we kind of did our own thing when we were there.
[00:23:33]  Just to give a little, I guess, you know, not to dally too much, but a little timeline of what happened.
[00:23:39]  So on Friday, we got to Miami.
[00:23:41]  Or Thursday, we got to Miami.
[00:23:42]  Thursday to Miami.
[00:23:43]  And we went to dinner, of course, at the famous Versailles.
[00:23:46]  Oh, yeah.
[00:23:48]  The famous Cuban exile restaurant.
[00:23:52]  And there was a little bit of a protest outside.
[00:23:55]  Yeah, I saw the flags waving from through the window while we were sitting inside.
[00:23:58]  And I thought, I'm going to go.
[00:24:00]  get up close, see what's happening.
[00:24:01]  I'm going to take some photos.
[00:24:03]  And it was very enthusiastic, Free Cuba, Trump, you know, and so those people were excited.
[00:24:09]  I was taking their picture.
[00:24:10]  I learned later they do this.
[00:24:12]  People say every night.
[00:24:13]  I don't know if that's hyperbole, but it seems to be quite a regular thing.
[00:24:16]  But they had a lot of energy.
[00:24:18]  There was young and old, and they were just waving flags, trying to get cars to honk.
[00:24:22]  I guess just kind of making a spectacle.
[00:24:25]  And then there was just a bizarre turn of events where there was a car crash, and it was not clear to me.
[00:24:31]  I don't think this person intended to harm anyone.
[00:24:33]  I don't know that he did, but it seemed like he almost ran people over.
[00:24:37]  I think the guy was maybe trying to like, was distracted by the protest.
[00:24:40]  Anyway, it was kind of a wild spectacle.
[00:24:43]  It was just a surreal, you got these people doing this protest and this kind of spectacular car crash.
[00:24:47]  And then they continue protest, demonstration, whatever.
[00:24:51]  They continue doing it while the police and firefighters are there.
[00:24:55]  It was kind of extraordinary because it was a pretty big car crash.
[00:24:59]  I mean, the guy crashed his fucking car.
[00:25:01]  It was kind of, yeah.
[00:25:02]  I mean, pieces of debris strewn across, but I didn't see, I don't think anyone was seriously injured.
[00:25:07]  There was a guy taken out on a stretcher.
[00:25:08]  Okay, I think the driver.
[00:25:10]  Yes.
[00:25:10]  But it was just strange.
[00:25:11]  No one like really reacted to it.
[00:25:13]  It was people were still sort of, it was a very, I guess, very raucous, joyous protest led by some guy in a TPUSA shirt.
[00:25:20]  Of course, County are not counting gang violence going through my head over and over and over again as a pan to the unfortunate strange incident in Charlie involving Charlie Kirk's neck sort of having an exploding goiter moment, one could say.
[00:25:33]  I know that's what I said.
[00:25:35]  But the police and the ambulance had closed off half the street.
[00:25:38]  And so they were doing this protest to the street as like no cars came by.
[00:25:43]  And so they were sort of just yelling at this guy being taken into an ambulance.
[00:25:47]  Yeah, it was, I hesitate to use the word lynchian, but there was just something otherworldly and grim and this kind of juxtaposition of the very mundane kind of American, you know, this restaurant and the street and the cars.
[00:26:02]  And then just, it was all these things occurring at the same time that just didn't seem to comport with each other.
[00:26:10]  Welcome to Miami, my friend.
[00:26:11]  It's like that here every night.
[00:26:13]  Yeah.
[00:26:13]  And beautiful, like mild, you know, nice evening.
[00:26:17]  Yes.
[00:26:18]  Which we have not experienced in quite a while.
[00:26:19]  Yeah, it's been cold in New York.
[00:26:22]  We flew to Havana pretty early the next morning on a chartered plane that was filled with aid.
[00:26:28]  Like the entire cargo hot sold, so no one could bring their fucking luggage.
[00:26:34]  I mispacked, but that's neither here nor there.
[00:26:36]  Packing is mundane.
[00:26:37]  We don't, we don't got to get into that.
[00:26:39]  But that's, we can complain about the mundanities when we get to our next destination.
[00:26:43]  But I just think people should keep that in mind that there was no women in our group of two.
[00:26:48]  Yes.
[00:26:49]  And packing is difficult.
[00:26:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:51]  I struggle with it.
[00:26:55]  We got there and, you know, we went from the airport to basically downtown to Havana.
[00:27:03]  And the first thing that I noticed was just the complete lack of cars on the street.
[00:27:07]  Yeah.
[00:27:08]  And I remarked to somebody that it looked like pictures you'd see of Pyongyang like 10 years ago.
[00:27:13]  And then, of course, like I realized, like, actually, Pyongyang has like way more cars than this.
[00:27:17]  Yeah.
[00:27:18]  I mean, this is, I can't think of a better descriptor.
[00:27:21]  So apologies that this sounds corny and cliche, but it reminded me of sort of like a zombie film where or some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario where, or I suppose you saw scenes like this during COVID where there's just no traffic and you see these places that were bustling.
[00:27:38]  Clearly, you know, they were designed to be full of people and vehicles and there's just nothing.
[00:27:43]  Yeah, like a wide highway or avenue.
[00:27:46]  And the weird thing is, you know, I've been on these streets before.
[00:27:49]  I've been in traffic jams in Havana and there was nothing like that happening.
[00:27:53]  I mean, it's just, I cannot stress it enough.
[00:27:56]  There's really not a lot of cars in the street there.
[00:27:58]  In some parts, you'll see some taxis which are paying $10 a liter, which means it's like 20 a gallon for fuel because they're still able to, again, like I said, there's exceptions to the Trump fuel blockade, which is that private businesses can buy it, which there's a huge private sector in Cuba now.
[00:28:19]  I think it's a third of the workers are employed in the private sector.
[00:28:22]  But still, I mean, the prices are serious.
[00:28:27]  We went to the convention center right off, which is a beautiful building.
[00:28:30]  Yeah.
[00:28:31]  Really, really something.
[00:28:33]  And there was a group of most people from the upper echelons of the Cuban government there.
[00:28:41]  President Diaz Canal spoke for a while, thanked everyone for coming, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:28:47]  Quite a while.
[00:28:48]  Yeah.
[00:28:48]  Well, not that long.
[00:28:49]  Not Fidel Castro long.
[00:28:51]  But it was sort of a last-minute thing.
[00:28:56]  I suppose, or maybe they've been keeping it under wraps, but I've been told earlier that day that it was like, yeah, he's going to come down and address everybody.

=== Cuban Doctors Abroad (11:48) ===

[00:29:05]  It probably seemed longer than it was to us because we took quite a while to figure out the translation technology.
[00:29:11]  That is a fact.
[00:29:13]  So it was in one of those places with earpieces at every table.
[00:29:17]  And I don't want to say we in this because it was you that couldn't figure it out.
[00:29:22]  I just didn't want to be fucking with this thing.
[00:29:25]  It felt rude.
[00:29:25]  I thought I was going to press something wrong and like turn on my microphone, which sort of happened spontaneously at a couple of points.
[00:29:31]  And I just thought like, I'm just going to, and I was challenging myself to understand the Spanish, which I was getting a little bit of.
[00:29:37]  But then as I got more and more kind of fatigued, I was getting less and less.
[00:29:41]  And eventually we realized that we could listen to it in English.
[00:29:44]  Yes.
[00:29:44]  Yeah.
[00:29:45]  Yeah.
[00:29:46]  But my fucking GOAT was there, Gerardo Hernandez from the Cuban 5.
[00:29:54]  I got to speak to him.
[00:29:56]  I asked, you know, if we could do an interview with him that was sadly not able to come about, although I'm going to make it happen.
[00:30:03]  But, you know, he is just, that is, is a line of a man who was able to speak to him.
[00:30:11]  And then, I mean, I don't know how detailed we get.
[00:30:14]  Then we, then we, we, we had dinner with Jeremy Corbyn.
[00:30:17]  And then, uh, and I, I met a fucking, um, I met a labor MP who liked Mad Ball, which was a very surreal experience.
[00:30:25]  You guys were really getting into it.
[00:30:27]  This guy loves New York hardcore.
[00:30:30]  Um, so shout out to Richard Bergen, I think it is, um, because we're loving, we're loving New York hardcore.
[00:30:38]  Although it did strike me as very strange that somebody in the government of anywhere, I mean, in parliament, but would be listening to Mad Ball.
[00:30:49]  Yeah.
[00:30:50]  Um, it was uh the next day, it was strange.
[00:30:57]  So, like, like a little bit of, like, we mentioned that there's a lot of groups that came to this.
[00:31:01]  Um, it was interesting that the backlash began pretty much immediately from what I saw online.
[00:31:07]  It wasn't really internet there.
[00:31:09]  But I think there was this perception that began, I don't know, I guess for reasons that I can understand, because from the political enemies of Cuba and probably many of the people who were going sort of were like, this is like an influencer trip or something like this.
[00:31:25]  There were all sorts of intersecting and sometimes diverging propaganda being sewn.
[00:31:32]  And it was very strange because they're just kind of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
[00:31:36]  And they're throwing a lot of things at the wall.
[00:31:37]  Throwing a lot of things at the wall.
[00:31:39]  You know, I just, it was funny because oftentimes you'll like read whatever on social media, something that you know is fake.
[00:31:47]  Like what that I yell Jacobi guy or whatever will make some post and you're like, I just know you're lying.
[00:31:52]  Like all these people lie all the time.
[00:31:54]  But then to witness on the other side directly be a participant in one of the things that I'm like, okay, well, you are lying about something I had seen with my own eyes.
[00:32:04]  Yeah.
[00:32:04]  And sometimes you see something that is greatly exaggerated, but there's, you know, some, it's like something happens to 10 people and they'll say it's a thousand people.
[00:32:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:14]  But some of this stuff, it was just like, this is wholly fictional.
[00:32:17]  Yes.
[00:32:18]  You know, like you're, you're dreaming of this.
[00:32:19]  And then it's just like corroborated by like either an AI photo or some photo that has no relation to the thing that you're claiming, but it's just like a picture of a building.
[00:32:29]  Yeah.
[00:32:30]  And it's like, then people just kind of run with that.
[00:32:32]  There was a lot of AI photos that people were, I think, thought were real photographs of like pink-haired people on buses taking pictures of poor people.
[00:32:39]  And then like, oh, they're partying at, you know, these fancy places or whatever.
[00:32:45]  Not a lot of fancy places in Cuba.
[00:32:47]  No.
[00:32:48]  But like, for instance, like there was a hotel that everyone was staying at.
[00:32:51]  Well, not everyone, but that a lot of people were staying at.
[00:32:53]  You can only stay at a certain places in Cuba.
[00:32:57]  Like I mentioned before, it is literally, it's illegal for Americans to stay at most hotels because most hotels are state-run.
[00:33:06]  And private hotels are able to, which is like the one we stayed at, which was able, are able to get fuel because they're private companies and the fuel exemption is lifted there.
[00:33:20]  And so when there was a blackout on the second night, they were like, they diverted power from the hospitals to keep these white boys, they keep the light on for these white boys.
[00:33:30]  And it's like, well, first of all, it's not how power grids really work in this instance.
[00:33:34]  But second of all, it's like it is an unfortunate effect of the sanctions that happened in the first place.
[00:33:39]  I felt fucking, it made me feel weird to have power in there, to be completely honest.
[00:33:44]  Also, it went out a couple of times.
[00:33:46]  Well, my power, okay, I guess my power was out the entire first night.
[00:33:50]  And the internet was out most of the time.
[00:33:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:53]  Which I didn't have the first time I was there.
[00:33:54]  I was kind of looking forward to the second time either.
[00:33:58]  And that's not, maybe I sound defensive there or something.
[00:34:00]  It's just, it is just like, I think it's worth explaining a little bit because I think these things sort of metastasize in people's minds.
[00:34:05]  Like they were saying that there was the Irish rap group kneecap caused some sort of national blackout because they performed a or caused the national blackout that occurred while we were there because they performed a concert.
[00:34:18]  That's ridiculous.
[00:34:20]  It's not how amplifiers work.
[00:34:22]  But also, like, if you think about it for more than two seconds, this is a country of 10 million people with a nationwide power grid.
[00:34:29]  And I don't think that like four amplifiers plugged in in Havana, which were, by the way, they jumped on, I guess, some already existing Cuban music show, which we didn't go to, but or we were doing something else.
[00:34:41]  And it just becomes this thing and it becomes this sort of like hysteria around it.
[00:34:46]  I can't tell if anyone actually believes this stuff, but it doesn't really matter because if you say it enough, you functionally believe it.
[00:34:52]  We went to a hospital complex the first day, met a doctor and a bunch of medical students told us about performance surgeries in the dark.
[00:35:03]  I mean, I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but again, people were following the news.
[00:35:06]  There's been these nationwide blackouts, sometimes lasting for, I think, the longest one was 36 hours.
[00:35:11]  And there's been these sort of things for a few years now, off and on, generally not for very long.
[00:35:19]  Like, I think there was one last year as well in November, but they're happening frequently now.
[00:35:24]  Cuba is not able to, as it becomes more and more economically isolated.
[00:35:28]  And now that there's no fuel, the power grid is breaking down.
[00:35:35]  It was crazy to think about that.
[00:35:37]  I was asking that guy.
[00:35:38]  I was like, so like, what are the issues here?
[00:35:39]  And it's like, people can't get to work.
[00:35:41]  Yeah.
[00:35:42]  I mean, it's crazy.
[00:35:43]  I don't know.
[00:35:44]  There have been some notable instances in my lifetime of power outages in the United States that make get a lot of attention in the news because it's so remarkable and so disruptive.
[00:35:55]  Yeah.
[00:35:56]  But I mean, when I think of my life, I remember growing up, there would be a terrible snowstorm and the power would go out or something and it would last a couple hours.
[00:36:04]  Nobody's annoyed.
[00:36:05]  But like in hindsight, it's just kind of like quaint, you know, you light a candle, you have flashlights.
[00:36:10]  Like that's my memory as a kid because it was so, it wasn't a threat to your way of life.
[00:36:17]  And that's the kind of thing, though, obviously that it tips over very quickly into like severe a threat.
[00:36:24]  Yeah.
[00:36:25]  You know, and it's like, it's not cute.
[00:36:27]  It's not fun at all.
[00:36:29]  And it is so far-reaching in ways that I are honestly easy to imagine if you really sit and think through it, but you usually don't because power's there when you flip the light switch.
[00:36:39]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:40]  And like, it's, it's, it's one of those things, and we talked about a little bit in this interview, but it's so totalizing that it's like almost, you can't really comprehend it unless you live in it, which we don't live it.
[00:36:49]  You know what I mean?
[00:36:50]  It's almost certain that most people listening to this, probably everybody listening to this, unless you're Puerto Rican, don't really live it either.
[00:36:57]  And not just Puerto Rican, I guess, live in Puerto Rico.
[00:36:59]  Because if you're a Puerto Rican guy in New York, you probably are like, what the fuck, the lights on.
[00:37:04]  And it is just, I don't know.
[00:37:06]  It's really, it is, it's something that cannot be stressed enough that this is a direct result.
[00:37:12]  This isn't me being like, lefty guy saying this or whatever.
[00:37:15]  This is a direct result and the intended result of American government policies against the people of Cuba.
[00:37:24]  People who think that, oh, this just affects the regime.
[00:37:27]  This just affects the government.
[00:37:29]  No, it doesn't.
[00:37:31]  You know, the government is affected by this.
[00:37:33]  Like, that's another thing, too.
[00:37:34]  It's like, it's not like there's like some government compound where everyone's party and there's lights on.
[00:37:38]  The entire country is dark during these incidents, including hospitals.
[00:37:44]  And, you know, people, again, this surgeon told us that we met with was like, yeah, I mean, when people, the power goes out, we asked, like, what happens if it goes out during a surgery?
[00:37:52]  It's like, you just close them back up, man.
[00:37:54]  Like, what could the fucking you do?
[00:37:56]  You know, I guess you're using your fucking flashlight.
[00:37:58]  Yeah.
[00:37:59]  I mean, Jesus Christ, imagine waking up from surgery and you're like, so did it go well?
[00:38:04]  Like, no.
[00:38:05]  Well, we cut you open, but we didn't do the procedure.
[00:38:08]  Yes.
[00:38:08]  Yeah.
[00:38:09]  Because the United States caused the power to go out.
[00:38:12]  Yeah.
[00:38:12]  And that was the, that was the, that was the, the thing about when people were talking about the hotel thing or whatever.
[00:38:16]  And it's like, again, I don't really let it get to me, but it was just like, well, actually, what you want, you're glad the power went out everywhere.
[00:38:25]  And you just wanted to be at one more place.
[00:38:28]  But like the intended result of the politics that you voted for and that you support very directly is the power going out for this entire nation.
[00:38:37]  Like that is caused by Donald Trump.
[00:38:38]  That is caused by, it is just, it is an incontrovertible fact.
[00:38:42]  I think that even people who like Donald Trump, who have at least a little bit of honesty in them, would admit that.
[00:38:47]  That there's no, there's no like, you can't be like, oh, this is Cuban economic mismanagement.
[00:38:52]  No, if there's no oil, there's no oil.
[00:38:55]  Doesn't matter what economic system that you have there.
[00:39:01]  We went for an interview with the deputy foreign minister Cosio.
[00:39:07]  And I got to be honest, the guy was, I found him quite charming.
[00:39:10]  He was great.
[00:39:10]  Yeah, he was great.
[00:39:12]  Also, you know, shout out to Breakthrough News.
[00:39:16]  We ran into them there.
[00:39:18]  I asked him about Cuban doctors being kicked out of countries due to U.S. pressure.
[00:39:23]  And, you know, the Cuban doctor program, for those who don't know, we'll go into a little bit more on tomorrow's episode about that.
[00:39:30]  I think.
[00:39:31]  Actually, I can't remember if we do.
[00:39:33]  I don't know if we do.
[00:39:34]  Yeah.
[00:39:35]  We'll talk to a gentleman in the field of the sciences.
[00:39:38]  Yeah.
[00:39:39]  Maybe we talk about a little bit in this one.
[00:39:41]  I don't know.
[00:39:41]  Maybe I just talked to a bunch of people about it.
[00:39:43]  I don't know.
[00:39:43]  The past, I haven't slept much in the past few days.
[00:39:47]  But Cuba sends doctors out to countries.
[00:39:51]  And oftentimes they are in rural areas where there are no medical aid at all.
[00:39:56]  The only people there are Cuban doctors.
[00:39:58]  And the U.S. has been threatening sanctions against countries that have Cuban doctors.
[00:40:03]  So I think they just left Guatemala, Jamaica.
[00:40:07]  And, you know, this is a sort of important source also of foreign currency for the Cuban government, who again are locked out of the world financial system in very major ways.
[00:40:17]  You know, the Cuban doctors themselves that go are paid several times more than they are paid in Cuba.
[00:40:24]  You know, and it's also a very important Cuban foreign policy thing.
[00:40:27]  I mean, this is really like Fidel Castro was, this is a major part of his legacy is what Cuba sends all over the world is doctors and teachers.
[00:40:36]  And the U.S. government is shutting that down and sanctioning any country that wants them there.
[00:40:44]  And it is just, you know, he answered like, yeah, they weren't very successful at first.
[00:40:50]  They've been trying to do this for a while.
[00:40:51]  And now it's just country after country after country.

=== Modern Warfare in Cuba (05:14) ===

[00:40:53]  Found it to be very candid.
[00:40:55]  He did a meet the press interview also where I don't know if you saw that.
[00:40:59]  He did one yesterday.
[00:41:01]  I just watched it.
[00:41:02]  And they keep trying to get him to be like, are you preparing for an American invasion?
[00:41:06]  He's like, well, yeah, of course we are.
[00:41:09]  They say they're going to might invade us.
[00:41:11]  And then it's like, Cuba is arming.
[00:41:13]  Cuba's arming for war.
[00:41:14]  Cuba does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles.
[00:41:19]  I guess actually any ballistic missile they would have.
[00:41:21]  Well, that would be the same continent.
[00:41:22]  But like, they don't have ballistic missiles.
[00:41:24]  They don't have shah head drones.
[00:41:25]  Like they have like AKMs and some old tanks.
[00:41:29]  Like it's not a country that is like adapted to modern warfare.
[00:41:34]  And I think that's a country that wants to adapt to modern warfare.
[00:41:37]  Cuba is a very peaceful country.
[00:41:40]  And it is just, I don't know.
[00:41:43]  I mean, it also is just like, it sucks.
[00:41:47]  I mean, it was nice.
[00:41:48]  It was like other left-wing media outlets and stuff.
[00:41:50]  But I'm like, it'd be kind of nice if it was like also like someone from the mainstream media here to talk to this guy.
[00:41:58]  You know, a country that, or a country that ours is threatening to invade.
[00:42:05]  The next, that night, there was a total power outage.
[00:42:07]  Yeah.
[00:42:08]  Yeah, that was, that was something new for me.
[00:42:12]  I mean, I, I, I took this walk to meet up with, you know, the progressive international guys, and it was not very far.
[00:42:21]  First of all, anybody who knows me knows that I am congenitally disabled at navigation, you know, and I am not shy at admitting that.
[00:42:29]  I am, I get lost easily and when something is well lighted.
[00:42:35]  But this was, it was pitch black.
[00:42:37]  When I was going there, the sun was going down and I didn't have internet.
[00:42:41]  So I didn't have Google Maps.
[00:42:43]  And it's like a perfect storm for me.
[00:42:45]  Like, so I, and nothing happened to me.
[00:42:47]  Nobody threatened me.
[00:42:48]  It was fine.
[00:42:49]  But I was getting anxious and it was just a strange feeling of dread to see the sun setting, to be walking through unfamiliar streets, and there's no light.
[00:42:59]  Yeah.
[00:42:59]  And it just really, you really felt it in a way that I haven't experienced before.
[00:43:03]  And then, of course, later we walked back in a group and it was pitch black.
[00:43:07]  Pitch black.
[00:43:08]  Yeah, I mean, you know, somewhere in the second day, or the first day rather, like in the afternoon, I think just some of my feelings caught up with me.
[00:43:21]  Wow, that's a really wax to say, but whatever.
[00:43:23]  Like, you know what I mean?
[00:43:24]  Like, I actually felt not like I felt a bullion or whatever, but like, you know, I sort of had time to slow down and be like, man, I'm actually really sad.
[00:43:33]  You know, like this fucking sucks.
[00:43:36]  It is, it is just like the, there's an air of desperation and sadness that I think is familiar to anybody who has gone to places that are very depressed economically.
[00:43:52]  But Cuba, you know, has been a poor country for a while, but this is a relatively new phenomenon.
[00:43:59]  And, you know, there's, there's, Cuba before didn't have beggars on the street.
[00:44:03]  It just didn't.
[00:44:05]  It didn't have people who would maybe try to mug you or whatever.
[00:44:10]  There wasn't really a lot of crime.
[00:44:11]  I mean, Cuba has very, very, very low crime rates.
[00:44:14]  And I experienced that.
[00:44:15]  You know, the entire, the first time I was there, I felt entirely safe at all times.
[00:44:19]  And we were pretty off the beaten path for a lot of it.
[00:44:23]  Saving people's houses and stuff.
[00:44:24]  And then this time, I was like, yeah, there is like a real desperation.
[00:44:29]  There's a ton of beggars.
[00:44:30]  There's, you know, there's prostitution on the street, which wasn't unknown before, but this is, it is, it is just like the frequency of it has really increased.
[00:44:40]  And there was just this general air of, I don't know, hopelessness.
[00:44:45]  And powerlessness, which I think our guest will hear from in a moment speaks to very eloquently because it's like, you know, people have different ideas about who they blame or where their anger is directed.
[00:45:00]  But like someone's doing this to you.
[00:45:02]  This is not a natural disaster.
[00:45:04]  Yeah.
[00:45:04]  You know, this is not a blizzard or an earthquake.
[00:45:08]  This is man-made deprivation.
[00:45:11]  And, but what can you do about it?
[00:45:13]  Nothing.
[00:45:13]  Nothing.
[00:45:14]  You know, as a Cuban, you're trying to live your life.
[00:45:16]  You can't, you know, like I get upset when my internet goes down for a couple hours.
[00:45:21]  And it's like, you don't have gas.
[00:45:23]  You can't get places.
[00:45:24]  You don't know that you have a hospital.
[00:45:25]  And it's somebody, you know, just across the water is doing this to you and your family and all your friends and everyone you know.
[00:45:32]  And what are you supposed to do about it?
[00:45:34]  And it's in the name of your liberation, too.
[00:45:36]  I mean, that is what, when I, you know, walking the streets of Havana, seeing the fact that there's not, there's trash on the street because there's no fucking gas.
[00:45:45]  There's no fucking oil for garbage trucks.
[00:45:50]  I don't see how these policies from the Trump regime are supposed to benefit the Cuban people.
[00:45:54]  But as our guest very eloquently points out, it's no, it's to make people revolt, which, I mean, yeah, it is just, it is, it's unbelievable to me that people fall for this shit.
[00:46:06]  You know, make this quick.

=== Suffering Children in Havana (09:15) ===

[00:46:07]  You know, the next day we went to another hospital.
[00:46:11]  And I, by the way, we have to shout out.
[00:46:14]  I can't believe I haven't done it so far.
[00:46:16]  Belly of the Beast.
[00:46:17]  Yeah.
[00:46:18]  Read from Belly of the Beast was just incredible.
[00:46:23]  Showed us around the entire time.
[00:46:24]  Again, we didn't really participate, I guess, in most of the stuff that the flotilla, a lot of people did, or I think any of it, but we, except for the initial thing, he was able to just like just take us to places and meet people and talk to people and translate for us.
[00:46:42]  And it really, it was, it was very grateful for it.
[00:46:46]  And they're fantastic outlet.
[00:46:48]  We'll put sort of the link to them in the description to this.
[00:46:52]  That was a pediatrics ward.
[00:46:54]  And that was a really Difficult experience.
[00:47:00]  That was hard.
[00:47:01]  It was hard to see.
[00:47:02]  Yeah.
[00:47:03]  I they were very kind and very gracious and appreciative of our presence hearing their story.
[00:47:11]  And, you know, I took some photos and the Belly of the Beast folks were taking video.
[00:47:17]  But yeah, that moved me.
[00:47:19]  And, you know, we saw a couple of patients.
[00:47:23]  The first one we saw was, I think, a 17-year-old boy who had had a brain hemorrhage and was on a ventilator.
[00:47:29]  And the second was a 10-year-old boy who had advanced cystic fibrosis.
[00:47:35]  Yeah.
[00:47:35]  Yeah.
[00:47:36]  The first boy, I mean, looked like a Kathy Kolowitz drawing or something.
[00:47:40]  I mean, he was just like, he had this sort of ragged bandage over his eyes and his head was lolling back and forth.
[00:47:48]  This really is, yeah, it's really difficult.
[00:47:52]  And when the lights go out and the power goes out, it can take up to, you know, maybe it's five, six minutes, maybe sometimes two hours for the generators to kick in.
[00:48:00]  And in that period, the nurses describe to us like they have to just sprint to the ventilators and hand pump them.
[00:48:08]  And, you know, this was, there was still black, there was still a blackout while we were there.
[00:48:12]  I mean, the generators were on at the hospital, but this is the William Solaire hospital complex.
[00:48:17]  But the little boy with cystic fibrosis was really, you know, it was difficult.
[00:48:26]  Well, his parents were there, young parents.
[00:48:29]  Just look like, you know, any other young parents that you or I or any listeners might know.
[00:48:35]  Looked like any little boy, you know, anyway, would know.
[00:48:38]  And he had a lot of like stuff, you know, the nurses had made, and his parents had like made his area sort of cheerful as possible.
[00:48:47]  We had these, these like, it was like balloon animals, but made from surgical gloves.
[00:48:51]  Yes.
[00:48:52]  Because they don't have fucking have, like, you got this hospital again, like, this equipment is like a mishmash of like old equipment from like Eastern Europe and shit.
[00:49:03]  You know, cystic fibrosis is a disease where, you know, mucus sort of collects in your lungs and kind of all over your body, actually.
[00:49:15]  It's a relatively rare disease.
[00:49:17]  I think there's only like, it's maybe like 30,000 people in the U.S. with it.
[00:49:21]  And it sucks.
[00:49:23]  It's really painful.
[00:49:25]  But in recent years, there has been some pretty major advances in treatment of it.
[00:49:31]  And there is a drug called Trikafta, which I think is a combination of three drugs.
[00:49:36]  Probably the dry part covers that.
[00:49:40]  It helps up to like, I think it's 90% of people with CF.
[00:49:45]  It really helps them.
[00:49:46]  And like your life expectancy with CF is really low in general.
[00:49:52]  But with this drug, you can have just straight up a normal life.
[00:49:55]  Like a lot of the symptoms will go away.
[00:49:58]  Your life expectancy goes from like 15 years, 20 years to like 70 years.
[00:50:05]  It's like a miracle drug.
[00:50:07]  And there's a really interesting story about people who with kids with cystic fibrosis fighting to make this drug available and have a generic make it.
[00:50:16]  I think the Bangladeshi company makes it a generic version because it was prohibitively expensive, like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at first.
[00:50:25]  This kid, his parents, his mom, we talked to his mom for a while, just explaining they were from the provinces.
[00:50:35]  They had a really good relationship with their doctor at home, but they couldn't do anything.
[00:50:38]  They had no medicine there.
[00:50:40]  And that goes along with stories I heard from people in the medical field that some provincial doctors just have like, and there's a lot of doctors in Cuba, just have boiled water as essentially the only thing that they can do and like rags.
[00:50:55]  And so if you have something like cystic fibrosis, this involves complex medication.
[00:51:00]  You can't really get that.
[00:51:01]  And his medication stopped working and he was in palliative care, which means the kid's going to die.
[00:51:08]  And this is a disease that is very treatable.
[00:51:12]  And she had two boxes of medication that she never got the medication because they weren't able to import it because of the embargo.
[00:51:20]  And because of the government doesn't have any money, the Cuban government used to be able to send you off.
[00:51:25]  If you had a disease, the Cuban government would like pay for you to go somewhere and like get cured or import specialized medicine for people.
[00:51:32]  This is something that like, you don't have to be like a huge Cuba booster to like recognize this is true.
[00:51:36]  This is just a fact.
[00:51:37]  This is something that they did.
[00:51:39]  They just can't do that anymore.
[00:51:41]  And she was talking about this medication.
[00:51:43]  They just can't get that medication.
[00:51:44]  It's like, you know, if that kid had been born 90 miles away, he would be able to live a normal life.
[00:51:49]  But at this point, he was nine years old.
[00:51:50]  He weighed 44 pounds.
[00:51:54]  And, you know, I have a, I have a, I have a neighbor who or I live next to a family.
[00:52:00]  I guess it's another way of saying neighbor.
[00:52:03]  I've neighbors of a kid with cystic fibrosis.
[00:52:06]  I love this kid.
[00:52:07]  And when I first moved in there, you know, I found out I didn't really know what cystic fibrosis was.
[00:52:12]  They explained it to me.
[00:52:13]  And I was like, wait, that means like it's a pretty short life expectancy.
[00:52:18]  And that sort of, I don't know, I guess I had never really, I had friends die before as an adult, but like, you know, I'm friends with this little kid.
[00:52:25]  He's like a four-year-old.
[00:52:26]  And I'm like, it's like, it's just, it really, I don't know.
[00:52:30]  I, I, it, it greatly affected me.
[00:52:33]  And then when this drug came out, the, the, or they were able to get this drug.
[00:52:36]  I mean, it was just night and day.
[00:52:37]  You don't, you can hear a lot of people in my apartment building.
[00:52:42]  Um, and I'd hear him coughing all the time because that's a big thing.
[00:52:45]  You cough all the time.
[00:52:46]  It's just really mucusy coughs.
[00:52:48]  Uh, and, you know, it's not, he's not cured or anything like that, but I mean, it's just, it's like night and day.
[00:52:52]  It's all this energy now.
[00:52:53]  And it's just like it'll be able to live like a normal little kid.
[00:52:56]  And, you know, I couldn't help but like imposing him over this, you know, his face over this kid.
[00:53:00]  It just is really, it was really difficult.
[00:53:04]  I mean, it's just still, I mean, it's just, it's even difficult to think about it now.
[00:53:09]  And, and yeah.
[00:53:11]  And so, I mean, we're touching the mound still, but it's just, I don't know.
[00:53:16]  Maybe more on that later.
[00:53:17]  I don't know.
[00:53:17]  But I, that was hard, man.
[00:53:20]  Yeah.
[00:53:21]  I mean, a part of me felt, I don't want to say good, but, you know, to witness that and to see their appreciation that we were able to kind of tell the story, I guess, made me feel like I was doing something, you know?
[00:53:36]  Yeah.
[00:53:38]  And it felt, I don't know, they were, they were showing us their experience and sharing their pain with us.
[00:53:45]  Yeah.
[00:53:45]  And, you know, just this boy, like I have to go through these photos still and it's kind of difficult to do, but like the, there's just this cute little boy, but his arms are so thin.
[00:53:54]  Yeah.
[00:53:55]  You know, and the mom, yeah, his parents look so young.
[00:53:58]  And she spoke very eloquently, but, you know, was getting just choked up, just kind of, you know, she knew that like we couldn't fix this, but it was like our country that caused this.
[00:54:11]  It was just a really human and a really painful situation to be in and to witness.
[00:54:17]  yeah yeah yeah um yeah it's i mean you're never gonna have fun going to a pediatric ward anywhere but it was just i mean this is and this is just i don't know it was very difficult um Yeah, just to witness and also just to realize that like the government, my government's doing this, you know, which I know, you know.
[00:54:39]  But then like when you look into the eyes of like a, just literally, you look just in the eyes of a dying child and his fucking parents who are just so desperate.
[00:54:49]  And then you're like, well, it's just, it just, it really brings it home.
[00:54:52]  I mean, there is something different.
[00:54:53]  Like we read about all the atrocities committed by our government every day and we see images and video and it's very vivid and very awful to look at.
[00:55:01]  But there is something different about standing in the room and looking into the eyes of this kid suffering that I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but it drives it home, certainly in a different way than looking at it on your phone and then scrolling to some ad or whatever.
[00:55:20]  Yeah, yeah.

=== Batista and the Revolution (08:33) ===

[00:55:22]  And then we interviewed Danielle and Danielle.
[00:55:27]  Daniel.
[00:55:28]  Daniel.
[00:55:28]  In English.
[00:55:29]  I keep trying to add a little Spanish to it.
[00:55:32]  Daniel.
[00:55:32]  Daniel.
[00:55:34]  We interviewed Danielle after that, and now we are back here to continue our journey.
[00:55:38]  But I don't know.
[00:55:40]  It is tough times right now for Cuba.
[00:55:44]  And I think that the U.S., I mean, everybody, long time Cuba people there, you know, there was a lot of people who have been going to Cuba since like the 70s, 60s.
[00:55:52]  We're like, this is really bad.
[00:55:54]  It's worse than a special period in the 90s.
[00:55:57]  And, you know, we're just hoping to, I don't know.
[00:56:03]  Hopefully, if you maybe, I know this intro might disabuse people from this, but hopefully like your sort of friends that maybe don't follow politics so much or maybe know about Palestine a little bit or something now because of because of the tremendous amount of activism that's been done over that in the past couple of years.
[00:56:19]  Like this is just also in line with all of that.
[00:56:22]  And so hopefully, I don't know.
[00:56:24]  I'm not saying you have to send this to them, but maybe send something to them or tell them about something yourself about what their government is doing here in the U.S. and with that being said this is uh this is our interview with daniel what the book are you guys The Nazi Hydra in America?
[00:56:52]  That's because of what I was telling you before.
[00:56:54]  So that book is part of the research for the story, the report we did on the cruise ship sky.
[00:57:00]  Interesting.
[00:57:00]  Okay, we'll talk about that in a second.
[00:57:01]  Let me introduce you first.
[00:57:02]  You introduce yourself.
[00:57:04]  Okay, so I'm Daniel Montero.
[00:57:06]  I'm a journalist and filmmaker with Belly of the Beast, which is a U.S. media mostly covering Cuban grocery relations.
[00:57:14]  I'm based out of Havana, and I've been working with the organization for the past five years.
[00:57:19]  And you are, but you are Cuban.
[00:57:21]  I am.
[00:57:21]  I'm very much a Cuban.
[00:57:22]  I was born and raised here.
[00:57:23]  Yeah.
[00:57:24]  Barely even left this motherfucker.
[00:57:25]  Yeah, only once.
[00:57:26]  Yeah.
[00:57:28]  Wait, I'm not allowed to curse.
[00:57:30]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:57:32]  Awesome.
[00:57:32]  I love that.
[00:57:33]  I love that.
[00:57:34]  I'm a very filthy mouth.
[00:57:35]  I don't know if TV or anything like that.
[00:57:36]  Awesome.
[00:57:37]  You are from an island that we were talking about earlier that I straight up thought was entirely a national park.
[00:57:43]  Well, you're not very much apart from the general imagination of Cubans.
[00:57:49]  Cubans don't know shit about my island.
[00:57:51]  It's a big fucking island.
[00:57:52]  It is.
[00:57:52]  It's a lot bigger than people think.
[00:57:54]  But there's like 80,000 people there.
[00:57:56]  What's it called?
[00:57:56]  It's called the Island of Youth, formerly the Island of Pine Trees.
[00:58:02]  But not anymore.
[00:58:03]  It was changed by Fidel Castro in the 70s, and we've been the Island of Youth since.
[00:58:07]  Why did he change it?
[00:58:08]  That's pretty good.
[00:58:09]  Well, there was a national program about education.
[00:58:12]  So they were building a lot of schools in the countryside in different parts of Cuba.
[00:58:16]  And the ground zero for that operation was my island.
[00:58:19]  So they built dozens of schools there.
[00:58:21]  And we had kids from dozens of countries studying there and from all over the island.
[00:58:25]  Oh, cool.
[00:58:26]  So the majority of the population at the time in the 70s was young students.
[00:58:31]  So it was the island of youth because basically most people there were young.
[00:58:36]  Not because all of us would stay young forever.
[00:58:39]  Yeah.
[00:58:40]  But that's kind of, I find that kind of a charming idea to make a bunch of schools on a little island and just send everybody there.
[00:58:46]  I don't know why you would, what was the point of it?
[00:58:49]  Well, there was a the idea was that kids would learn that they were also part of the revolution and it was up to them to work towards the revolution.
[00:59:00]  So kids would study half the day and would work on the fields on the other half the day.
[00:59:04]  Yeah.
[00:59:05]  Opposing sexual, so basically, I don't know, half the kids would be studying, half the kids would be working.
[00:59:10]  And in my island, it was mostly citrix.
[00:59:13]  As I say, citrix, so oranges and no idea how to say that.
[00:59:17]  So like, yeah, similar.
[00:59:18]  Describe them to me.
[00:59:19]  Bigger than an orange.
[00:59:20]  Are they somewhat like sour tasting?
[00:59:23]  Sure, a little bit.
[00:59:24]  Is it a grapefruit?
[00:59:26]  Nah, look, forget it.
[00:59:28]  Similar to that.
[00:59:29]  Yeah, I'm sure that you know what?
[00:59:30]  We had a lot of that shit.
[00:59:31]  Something that you learn later in life, something that I learned later in life, but you know, I'll extrapolate this to everybody else in the world to pretend that I'm not just alone in this, is that there's way more fruits than you thought there were growing up.
[00:59:42]  Yeah, and a lot more colors, too.
[00:59:45]  Crazy.
[00:59:45]  Yeah, well, anyways.
[00:59:46]  Yeah.
[00:59:47]  So we had some of those weird shit there.
[00:59:48]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:59:49]  And kids would work on it.
[00:59:51]  And that was their way to contribute to the revolution.
[00:59:54]  That's cool.
[00:59:55]  I like that.
[00:59:55]  I like the idea of that.
[00:59:57]  I want to talk about, there's a few things that I want to talk about, but I think that, one, let's establish some basic history first.
[01:00:05]  What is Cuba?
[01:00:07]  Well, we're a country of around 10 million people in the Caribbean.
[01:00:13]  We're the biggest country in the Caribbean.
[01:00:15]  We're 90 miles out from you guys.
[01:00:19]  I could also say from us guys in Florida.
[01:00:22]  Yes, yeah.
[01:00:23]  And we've been somewhat of a republic since 1902.
[01:00:28]  And we've actually been very connected to the United States for most of our and your history.
[01:00:34]  Does that explain it?
[01:00:35]  Yeah, well, I would like to maybe explain it a little further because I think a lot of people know that, okay, Batista was like U.S.-backed or whatever.
[01:00:42]  And there was something, there was Theodore Roosevelt and there was the Rough Riders and things like this.
[01:00:47]  But maybe a little beyond that, what exactly was the U.S.'s relationship with Cuba?
[01:00:53]  So back in the 19th century, that's where countries in Latin America actually started becoming countries.
[01:00:59]  You know, we were all Spanish colonies, the majority of us, or Portugal.
[01:01:02]  And, you know, independence fights started in Mexico and South America in the 1810s, 1820s.
[01:01:07]  Cuba was a bit slow to get there.
[01:01:09]  That's for a number of reasons.
[01:01:11]  One, we had the biggest Spanish military presence.
[01:01:14]  We were the key to Spanish trade in the continent.
[01:01:18]  You know, between Spain and their properties in South and Central America, it was Cuba.
[01:01:23]  It was a necessary stop.
[01:01:25]  So we had a large military presence here.
[01:01:27]  So bottom line, by the time we started independence fights in 1868, most of the continent was independent already.
[01:01:35]  So that also means that the U.S. was already a powerful country.
[01:01:39]  Yeah.
[01:01:40]  And even though it was going through its own civil war, 1871, 75, if I have that correctly.
[01:01:46]  65.
[01:01:47]  Well, there you have it.
[01:01:48]  So we were close enough.
[01:01:49]  And there's similar reasons too.
[01:01:51]  You know, the issue of slavery and its relation to production was very much predominant.
[01:01:57]  Yeah, because you guys had a ton of black people here.
[01:01:59]  It was a lot of slaves.
[01:02:00]  In a period of 300 years, 1.3 million people were brought to Cuba on slavery conditions.
[01:02:06]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:02:07]  So anyways, we spent 30 years fighting for independence on and off.
[01:02:12]  And in the last year of Cuba's war with Spain, 1898, the U.S. joins the party.
[01:02:18]  And that's what you guys have studied in school as the Spanish-American War.
[01:02:23]  We would argue is the Cuban-Spanish-American War because it was a war fought in Cuba mostly.
[01:02:30]  And so the Spanish Navy is quickly defeated by the Americans.
[01:02:34]  And a transition government is established in Cuba.
[01:02:39]  That transition government lasted four years and it set the grounds for what our republic would be, which in practice was a new colony of the United States.
[01:02:48]  It's also useful to point out that that's how the U.S. got its hands on Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Juan after defeating the Spanish in Cuba.
[01:02:59]  In the case of Cuba, because he had a large army, they couldn't just do what they did with Puerto Rico.
[01:03:03]  So even though we become a republic after those four years of transition government from the United States in 1902, they did take care of imposing something called the plot amendment.
[01:03:12]  Now, this amendment basically gave the United States the legal grounds to military and politically intervene in Cuba whenever they saw fit.
[01:03:22]  Funny enough, it is also that amendment that gave the U.S. grounds to take over Guantanamo.
[01:03:28]  Oh, yeah.
[01:03:28]  Because it gave the U.S. the right to forever rent land for naval bases in Cuba.
[01:03:36]  So basically, you've had Guantanamo since.
[01:03:39]  Yeah, we still have it.
[01:03:41]  And so that's what happened.
[01:03:42]  So we become a republic in 1902, but we became very dependent on the U.S., as you can imagine.
[01:03:48]  The U.S. actually intervened in Cuba military after that, whenever they wanted.
[01:03:53]  But most importantly, we became economically dependent.

=== Guantanamo Legal Grounds (15:14) ===

[01:03:56]  Yeah.
[01:03:57]  Because what was the big industry here?
[01:03:58]  It's like sugar?
[01:03:59]  Sugar, sugar.
[01:04:00]  And that was very much the sugar industry, most of it would go to the U.S.
[01:04:04]  So we were dependent on the U.S. to purchase our sugar, which was by far the main commodity we had.
[01:04:10]  But it's not just that.
[01:04:11]  Like U.S. companies gain a monopoly on the majority of Cuba's important industries, like electricity or the telephone.
[01:04:20]  These were owned by American companies.
[01:04:22]  Yeah, I know.
[01:04:23]  I was actually looking at this.
[01:04:24]  The company that owned the Cuban electrical grid, or I think it was called the Havana Electric Company, which originally started by some dissolute Cuban general in the 30s or 20s, I believe.
[01:04:37]  They also owned the electoral grids of like, or the electrical companies in like big ones in China and Brazil, I think Chile, like all over all over the world.
[01:04:48]  It's fucking insane.
[01:04:49]  And it's Cuba, to me, seemed very, I mean, I think to anybody, seems really just dominated by the U.S., even if we don't want to directly administer it.
[01:05:00]  Oh, that's absolutely right.
[01:05:01]  And it's not just that example you made.
[01:05:03]  You can point to the telephone, which I, you know, that was also owned by a large conglomerate called ITT International Telephone and Telegraph.
[01:05:10]  We had a strong presence of the Italian-American mafia here as well.
[01:05:14]  You know, you could take an Italian-American mafia tour of Havana and see where, you know, what hotel Luke Luciano used to stay at or the businesses that Mayor Lansky run.
[01:05:26]  So that tells you the extent to which there was a U.S. footing in Cuba.
[01:05:32]  Should we close Tom's?
[01:05:35]  We should just tell them, dude.
[01:05:37]  Shot it.
[01:05:44]  Who's out there?
[01:05:45]  It's Reed.
[01:05:47]  Just see what you want, just tell them we're recording.
[01:05:56]  I've been told I'm your first interviewee to smoke on an interview.
[01:06:01]  I'm honored.
[01:06:03]  Is that true?
[01:06:04]  It might be.
[01:06:05]  He's told me a lot of people have vaped.
[01:06:07]  There's been a lot of vaping.
[01:06:08]  I'm the first one to do it all natural.
[01:06:10]  Yeah, but because we have quite restrictive rules around that.
[01:06:13]  You do?
[01:06:14]  So I shouldn't?
[01:06:14]  No, no, in America, in the U.S.
[01:06:17]  No, you can say, what do you mean?
[01:06:18]  What are they going to do?
[01:06:19]  Go through the fucking.
[01:06:20]  Well, they could.
[01:06:22]  They're going to extradite you and be like, you're going to be able to do it.
[01:06:23]  No, but they could boycott you because you allowed smokers into the show.
[01:06:27]  No, no, no, no.
[01:06:28]  Can we take it from where we were?
[01:06:29]  Yes.
[01:06:30]  Where were we?
[01:06:31]  We actually, I think we closed the closed the question, yeah.
[01:06:36]  Famously, Batista seems like maybe he wasn't.
[01:06:42]  Even this is the thing I don't understand.
[01:06:45]  I'm like, even if I'm coming from like the U.S. or like big U.S. companies' point of view, I guess it's the same thing.
[01:06:52]  I at least want like a competent dictator to kind of keep all the fucking like the land reform from happening.
[01:07:01]  And, you know, like you want to do enough to where people aren't like, hey, you know, I'm going to kill you and like do a revolution.
[01:07:09]  Consistently, I feel like the U.S. just kind of just had some guy who didn't do that.
[01:07:14]  Like they maybe gave a fuck about like certain parts of the capital being clean.
[01:07:17]  And then the rest of the country, like, oh, you're kind of just, you'll either like basically be a peasant or a slave, whichever one is up to you.
[01:07:23]  And that kind of seems to be the case with Batista.
[01:07:27]  A lot of people did not like him.
[01:07:28]  All segments of society did not like him.
[01:07:30]  And there was a groundswell and a fairly big revolution.
[01:07:35]  But prior to that, he was like good friends with, like you're saying, a lot of these American companies.
[01:07:40]  And then gets overthrown.
[01:07:43]  I think most people listening to the show probably know that story, at least the basics of it.
[01:07:47]  And a lot of you guys, well, I don't want to say you guys, because no disrespect, but what you told me earlier, you grew up pretty poor, so you probably won't even fuck with these guys.
[01:07:55]  These guys wouldn't even look you in the eye.
[01:07:57]  But a lot of these guys moved to Miami.
[01:07:59]  They're very rich ones at first and people connected with the government.
[01:08:04]  And there becomes a somewhat of a problem between the new Cuban government and the United States.
[01:08:11]  So, and again, we don't have to linger too long on this because I feel like many of our listeners will know at least the basics of this.
[01:08:18]  But the problems began really pretty much immediately.
[01:08:23]  Some of the stuff we're talking about today, though, I think it stems from, obviously it stems from like the communist influence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:08:31]  But really, legally, a lot of it stems from nationalizations, specifically of some of these big companies that we're talking about here.
[01:08:41]  You and I were talking earlier, and this is something I think I probably have repeated at some other point during these episodes, but Office Depot, I don't know if they still do.
[01:08:52]  It's either Office Depot or maybe Staples now, but these are stores where they sell large pieces of paper, sometimes small pieces of paper, all sorts of sizes of pieces of paper.
[01:09:02]  I think they have like an over a billion dollar claim against the Cuban government due to them buying a company that had been absorbed by another company that had purchased shares of another company that owned shares in a nationalized electric company in Cuba.
[01:09:16]  And it is just baffling to think about.
[01:09:20]  But a lot of this shit came about in the 1950s because Cuba nationalized some industries and American companies figured they were owed a little bit of money.
[01:09:30]  Yeah, and to take it up on Batista, the funny thing about Batista is that the guy was actually quite popular before.
[01:09:37]  He was a president, elected president of Cuba in the 40s.
[01:09:40]  But in 52, he realized he wasn't going to win the elections and he takes over, basically.
[01:09:45]  He's a coup, becomes the president.
[01:09:48]  And that's what shed hits the fan, basically, because had he not become basically a bloody dictator, we might have had a revolution.
[01:10:00]  Yeah.
[01:10:00]  Because that was the unifying factor.
[01:10:02]  You know, it's easier for people always to know what they're against than what they're in favor of.
[01:10:07]  And he became really, you know, the villain of the story.
[01:10:12]  And that's what gave Fidel Castro the possibility of becoming a good guy.
[01:10:15]  And a lot of people stood behind him.
[01:10:17]  But anyways, you're talking about nationalizations.
[01:10:20]  Look, you can look at the historical speeches, even from after Fidel Castro's power, and you'll see that he's saying Cuba will not be a communist country.
[01:10:30]  Which is funny if you look back in history, right?
[01:10:32]  Well, I was always told that maybe Raul was a little bit more of the ideologue at first.
[01:10:37]  And Che.
[01:10:39]  Yeah.
[01:10:39]  But Fidel was more of a practical guy.
[01:10:41]  Yeah.
[01:10:42]  You know, sure, you can look at his speeches and you would say, sure, this is someone on the left.
[01:10:46]  But Soviet communism, no.
[01:10:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:50]  That's the thing.
[01:10:50]  I mean, he tries to come to terms with Eisenhower at the time.
[01:10:54]  That wasn't possible.
[01:10:56]  The U.S. refuses to buy Cuban sugar and buy and process Cuban sugar, refuses to sell oil to Cuba.
[01:11:03]  Cuba nationalizes U.S. companies.
[01:11:05]  And from there, it increases.
[01:11:07]  Like the embargo was legally established in 1962 under Kennedy, but from early on in the revolution, this really goes south.
[01:11:16]  Because 62 is a legal step, but you have a 1961 Bay of Pigs, which was backed by the CIA.
[01:11:23]  These were Cubans that had left the island and they were trained and they were paid for and they were given weapons by the CIA.
[01:11:34]  So obviously that's not a great place to start negotiations on indemnization for companies that have been nationalized.
[01:11:42]  So that's still very much a pending, that's been since a pending episode of the Cuba-U.S. relations.
[01:11:50]  Yeah.
[01:11:50]  And one that seems to be reservism.
[01:11:56]  You mentioned earlier about the golden telephone.
[01:11:59]  Well, actually, you know what?
[01:12:00]  We'll get to that in a second.
[01:12:02]  Because I want to kind of fast forward a little bit up until recent times.
[01:12:08]  You and I were talking, and I'm sure I mentioned this in the intro to one of these episodes you've heard.
[01:12:13]  I was here in 2014.
[01:12:15]  I think I came here right before Obama gave his speech because, or maybe it was like immediately after or something, but I had to go through Mexico to get here.
[01:12:23]  And then the day I got back, my flight got back, they lifted the restrictions that I could have just flown normally.
[01:12:30]  It would have been fine.
[01:12:31]  People have always been able to sort of fly.
[01:12:32]  There's always been flights, but it was kind of a rigmarole to actually have to be able to get one to come for tourist reasons.
[01:12:38]  It was much easier to fly through Mexico.
[01:12:40]  But then it was just, they sort of lifted the restrictions.
[01:12:44]  And that was like the first really major kind of sign of a détente or a kind of an understanding between the Cuban government and the U.S. government.
[01:12:53]  You know, there has been a blockade for many decades, just like we're talking about right now.
[01:13:00]  And again, everybody, you fucking, you know, this.
[01:13:02]  You may won't know some of the details, which we'll get into in a little bit.
[01:13:07]  But I think a lot of people were quite hopeful at a newer era of relations.
[01:13:12]  And so you are from a small town.
[01:13:14]  You moved to the big city, said you become a journalist, and then you became a tour guide, which is kind of where I want to bring into the blockade a little bit.
[01:13:22]  When did you become a tour guide?
[01:13:24]  So I moved to Havana in 2015 and I started working as a tour guide immediately.
[01:13:29]  I needed to find a way to support myself and tourism was the way to go by miles.
[01:13:36]  Fortunately, I knew how to speak English already.
[01:13:39]  And I knew that was the window.
[01:13:41]  It was the Obama years.
[01:13:42]  When you tell any Cuban the Obama years, they look fondly on that.
[01:13:47]  Oh, man, yeah, the good years.
[01:13:49]  Yeah.
[01:13:50]  Because for more than half a century at that point, we'd had the same type of politics come from the United States.
[01:14:00]  And they were not helping.
[01:14:01]  But when the Obama years happened, when the Obama change of policy engagement with Cuba happened, that actually met a tremendous growth for Cuban economy and for Cuba's private sector in particular, who was still being born at the time.
[01:14:13]  It's more than likely that if you walk around, especially the restaurants that you visit, it's more than likely that they all opened in those years between 2015, 16, 17.
[01:14:22]  Those are the years.
[01:14:23]  There was no, there was basically, there was, I think, like one that we went to in like three and a half weeks the entire time.
[01:14:29]  The rest of it, we went to government restaurants of varying quality.
[01:14:35]  But yeah, I mean, that's sort of one of the first things that I noticed besides, of course, we'll get to the lack of cars on the street, was that there's just a million restaurants.
[01:14:43]  Now, many of them, some of them actually, you know, fairly, fairly dined at, but many of the ones that are aimed at tourists, fairly empty.
[01:14:52]  But that was sort of these big boom years, right?
[01:14:54]  Because it was, you know, Cubans have been asking for at all levels as society has been asking for lifting of the blockade for a long time.
[01:15:02]  Obviously, like.
[01:15:04]  The U.S. is by far the largest country around Cuba, 90 miles from it.
[01:15:10]  A lot of goods made in the U.S.
[01:15:11]  And the blockade isn't just about goods made in the U.S., but all kinds of Cuba's interaction with the financial system.
[01:15:17]  But also, it's a Caribbean island.
[01:15:19]  People want to come here.
[01:15:20]  You know what I mean?
[01:15:21]  Like, you know, whatever you might think of tourism, for anyone who's listening to this from Barcelona or whatever, you know, it does oftentimes help the economy of nations that are not heavily industrialized, which this one is not.
[01:15:34]  And I think that that seemed to me, there was like this sort of thaw in relations, and then a ton of tourists came.
[01:15:41]  It became like the boom years for cruise ships.
[01:15:44]  Yeah, 2016, 17, and 18 are all record years of travelers to Cuba.
[01:15:50]  In 2018, we had around 4.8 million people.
[01:15:54]  That was tremendous for us.
[01:15:56]  I mean, I was working in that sector.
[01:15:57]  I was, you know, I was very happy about that.
[01:16:00]  But it's not just me.
[01:16:00]  You could see it all around.
[01:16:02]  It felt like everything was possible.
[01:16:04]  In 2016, when Obama came here, we had Obama, Chanel, and the Rolling Stones on the same month.
[01:16:10]  That was like Cuba was the center of the world for a little bit there, you know?
[01:16:16]  And it felt like everything was possible.
[01:16:17]  It felt like the country was changing.
[01:16:20]  And that had a tremendous impact on a lot of people.
[01:16:22]  Because look, we think about the tourist industry.
[01:16:25]  Sure, that's obviously the direct relation.
[01:16:29]  But at the same time, no one, you know, you're not isolated from this whole thing.
[01:16:34]  So if you have a lot of people coming in and a lot of investment coming in, which also happened during Obama, this has a benefit on the entirety of the country, which is what made Trump's arrival all the more tragic.
[01:16:46]  Because for the first time in history, we'd had a U.S. president say, you know what?
[01:16:50]  This shit's not working.
[01:16:51]  We've been trying this for half a fucking century and we haven't gotten anywhere.
[01:16:54]  Let's try something else.
[01:16:56]  Maybe this different angle will get us to where we want to get.
[01:17:00]  And we benefited from that as a country.
[01:17:02]  Then Trump comes in.
[01:17:04]  First couple of years, it looked like he was going to turn things around.
[01:17:08]  But still, Obama policies were in place in 2017 and 2018.
[01:17:12]  We continue to benefit.
[01:17:13]  2019, different deal.
[01:17:15]  In 2019, he banned cruise ships to Cuba.
[01:17:18]  He banned flights to any city by Havana.
[01:17:20]  I remember I was here working with tourism.
[01:17:22]  I remember how tragic it was for my colleagues around me.
[01:17:28]  And from there, it just continued and continued to get worse and worse because it was sanctioned upon sanction.
[01:17:34]  Trump did something that no other president had done.
[01:17:37]  The embargo, the blockade, has always been there, but it's a set of laws and regulations that it's like a roadmap to what Cuba's relation to the world economically can be.
[01:17:47]  But there were still better or easier ways for Cuba to navigate them.
[01:17:51]  But what the Trump administration the first time around did was that they imposed maximum pressure targeted sanctions.
[01:17:58]  They localized the different ways in which Cuba was making money and they went after those.
[01:18:02]  So give me an example of this.
[01:18:03]  Well, number one would be tourism, which I just mentioned.
[01:18:06]  Cuba has at that point becoming more and more dependent on a tourism economy.
[01:18:10]  And it was a direct hit to it just by cruise ships and flights.
[01:18:13]  That alone met hundreds of thousands of people less coming to Cuba.
[01:18:17]  But you can think of Cuba's medical missions too.
[01:18:20]  Cuba sends doctors worldwide to dozens of countries every year.
[01:18:24]  And these are actually one of the main sources at this point, the main source of foreign currency for Cuba.
[01:18:29]  And they started going after those as well.
[01:18:31]  I mean, that's still very something that's happening right now with the U.S. going after countries.
[01:18:35]  And we've had eight countries since last year.
[01:18:37]  I know.
[01:18:38]  Yeah, God, I think it's Jamaica was the most recent one.
[01:18:40]  Remittances as well.
[01:18:42]  Yeah.
[01:18:43]  I mean, Western Union has been banned like twice or twice at this point.
[01:18:46]  You know, so like they simply were going, okay, so this is how Cuba's making money.
[01:18:50]  Let's suffocate that.
[01:18:51]  You know, I was one of the idiots that celebrated Biden's victory in 2020.
[01:19:02]  We had a lot of those too.
[01:19:04]  Because I thought, of course, this guy's going to come back to Obama's policy.
[01:19:09]  He was not in vice president.

=== Trump Biden Cuba Policy (06:20) ===

[01:19:11]  Yeah.
[01:19:11]  So like, why wouldn't he?
[01:19:13]  Well, God will be wrong, right?
[01:19:16]  For the duration of his time in office, the majority of Trump sanctions stayed in place.
[01:19:21]  I actually, I prefer to call it Trump Biden policy, Trump Biden's Cuba policy, rather than Trump, because just calling it Trump's policy excuses what Biden did, which was basically looking at a country that was struggling with COVID, you know, that was struggling to save its people's lives and said, yeah, let's keep the pressure going.
[01:19:40]  When he had the perfect excuse based on humanitarian grounds to change policy and go back to Obama's way of, he chose not to.
[01:19:48]  Yes.
[01:19:48]  You know, so that's why I prefer to call it Trump Biden policy.
[01:19:52]  And I don't know, maybe we can keep going from there, everyone.
[01:19:56]  I don't know.
[01:19:56]  No, I mean, this is something that's like, it's so fucking baffling to me, right?
[01:20:01]  I understand it from like a certain Cold War angle, right?
[01:20:04]  You know, this is your enemy.
[01:20:06]  There's, there's these communists 90 miles from Florida, yada, yada, yada, you know, Cuban Missile Crisis.
[01:20:15]  These guys are, you know, they're hanging out with the Nicaraguans, whatever, whatever, whatever.
[01:20:19]  But then it's like after the Cold War, they sort of struggle to like redefine what the policy is going to be.
[01:20:25]  Obviously, eventually they settle on, you know, Cuba is this big state sponsor of terror.
[01:20:29]  Trump's recent executive order said that Hamas and Hezbollah are hanging out here in Havana.
[01:20:34]  I don't know why.
[01:20:35]  What the fuck are you doing in Havana?
[01:20:37]  There's no disrespect.
[01:20:39]  What are you making?
[01:20:40]  There's not money here.
[01:20:41]  You know what I mean?
[01:20:42]  The guns, first of all, I haven't seen very many, but the pictures I've seen in the army, they're kind of the same guns they have over there, except a little bit older and, you know, maybe subject to more tropical, you know, still the same Russian weapons.
[01:20:54]  Yep.
[01:20:55]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:20:55]  I'm sure when you're in the army, I'm sure you had fucking AKM or something.
[01:20:58]  Yeah, that's the one.
[01:20:59]  It's the one.
[01:21:00]  It's like, I'm sorry, I don't think Hezbollah needs to go to fucking the Caribbean to get a couple rounds of AK ammunition or whatever.
[01:21:08]  Anyways, but it becomes, okay, Cuba becomes the state sponsor of terror and that sort of becomes integrated into global war on terror sort of framework.
[01:21:15]  We can put you in your sort of okay, access to evil.
[01:21:19]  We can make like this vague, broad coalition between these holdover communist states for the 20th century and then these, whatever, Arab republics or Islamic countries in the 21st century.
[01:21:38]  And it's just bizarre because Biden, you would think, not that he had a very progressive or at all progressive foreign policy, but it's not a hugely popular, like the blockade isn't like something that like average Americans are clamoring for.
[01:21:53]  There is one particular constituency that is part of a swing state's voting block that is very much in favor.
[01:22:02]  But those people are not really voting for Democrats anyways.
[01:22:05]  That's not like, I mean, certainly not from what I've witnessed, but like the hardcore anti-Castro or whatever, anti-Cuban government at this point, Miami Cubans, they're not like swing voters that you can get by like, you know, saying, okay, we're going to, I don't even know what they really else people really want, you know, legalize, I don't know.
[01:22:29]  I don't know what I don't know what people want in their lives.
[01:22:32]  Look, I think there's a myth that the Cuban American community, it's all in favor of sanctions.
[01:22:39]  And I call it a myth because I don't agree.
[01:22:43]  Yeah.
[01:22:43]  There are polls every year that show you that it's not like they all oppose it, but it's very much a split thing.
[01:22:49]  It's a take it or leave it kind of thing for them.
[01:22:51]  And look, the Florida International University does a yearly poll on this, right?
[01:22:56]  And it's very interesting to look at the results by year.
[01:23:00]  During the Obama years, for the first time ever, the Cuban American community at this poll was majoritarily opposing U.S. sanctions.
[01:23:08]  Interesting.
[01:23:08]  You know what that tells me and tell a lot of experts at the time?
[01:23:11]  Leadership matters.
[01:23:13]  What the direction of the country as a whole towards Cuba is actually can determine what people's feelings towards this are.
[01:23:22]  But even when the position right now is quite the opposite, you still have more than 40% of that Cuban-American community that's supporting engagement, especially those that have been born in the U.S.
[01:23:33]  Yeah.
[01:23:34]  You know, the children of the migrants, they're very much, like in my experience, very much wants engagement with Cuba.
[01:23:40]  There's a bunch of myths related to this as well.
[01:23:42]  I mean, you pointed to it, the swing state of Florida.
[01:23:45]  You know, the famous Bush Big War 2000 election was supposedly determined by the Cuban vote.
[01:23:49]  But that's no longer the case.
[01:23:51]  You know, when Biden was in office, everyone worth their salt would have told you there's no way Biden's winning Florida.
[01:23:57]  Exactly.
[01:23:57]  It's a red state.
[01:23:58]  It's a rate state.
[01:23:59]  So that's not it either.
[01:24:00]  So a lot of people said, well, Bob Menendez.
[01:24:02]  Bob Menendez was the now disgraced senator for New Jersey, Cuban-American as well.
[01:24:07]  He was the head of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, and he was a very important man within the apparatus.
[01:24:13]  And a lot of people thought, well, Biden's deferring to Menendez.
[01:24:16]  And Menendez is very much hardcore and hardliner in terms of Cuba.
[01:24:20]  But then the guy went down in flames, went to prison as a fucking traitor.
[01:24:24]  Don't, don't, no, he's our guy.
[01:24:27]  He's our guy, and we'll defend him.
[01:24:28]  And by the way, they never proved that gold came from Egypt.
[01:24:31]  A lot of guys, he's from, listen, he's from Cuba, where sometimes, yeah, you have to hide some eggs under your bed.
[01:24:38]  The government take him.
[01:24:39]  He just simply hid his gold under the bed.
[01:24:42]  Look, what I'm trying to get at is this.
[01:24:44]  I think for me, Biden just didn't care and didn't have the balls to do anything about Cuba.
[01:24:52]  Yeah.
[01:24:53]  And there's another thing.
[01:24:54]  Biden is a Cold War politician.
[01:24:56]  Yes.
[01:24:56]  He very much came out politically age at a time where the world was divided into these two sides.
[01:25:02]  And Cuba, you know, and communism is the biggest threat to the American way of life.
[01:25:06]  And so whatever we do to get rid of communism anywhere is fair game, even if that means starving people to death in some Caribbean island.
[01:25:14]  So Biden was okay with that.
[01:25:16]  Yeah.
[01:25:17]  So Biden, did they show the debate here?
[01:25:22]  We could see it.
[01:25:23]  Some of us watched it.
[01:25:24]  I tell you this, if I was in charge of Cuban state TV or whatever, I would have played that motherfucker 24-7, be like, look at what they got.

=== Oil Blockade Tactics (15:38) ===

[01:25:32]  But that was tough.
[01:25:33]  The debate was tough for Biden.
[01:25:35]  One of our greatest acts of ageism was him losing the next election.
[01:25:39]  And then Trump comes back in and really takes a gander down south at Cuba.
[01:25:46]  And of course, he puts Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.
[01:25:52]  And things have gone quite poorly, I would say.
[01:25:56]  So I want to actually go back a little bit because you mentioned COVID, you mentioned a humanitarian crisis.
[01:26:01]  But also that coincided with, like you said, the sanctions and a pretty severe and worsening economic crisis here in Cuba because of that.
[01:26:08]  Cuba is sort of isolated more and more from the international financial system, but there's also a year where there's basically nobody in, like there's no flights to the island really or anything like that.
[01:26:20]  And there's setbacks.
[01:26:21]  COVID affected a lot of countries all over the world in different ways, uniformly negative.
[01:26:28]  But Cuba really had a harder time than a lot of countries.
[01:26:32]  Even despite sort of the heroic efforts of the health industry, it was more on the economic side that things really did not go well.
[01:26:38]  And it has struggled to recover.
[01:26:41]  I have friends that came here in 2022 and they came back and they're like, oh, it's not, it's not doing so good right now.
[01:26:48]  And the sanctions have gotten more intense.
[01:26:51]  And now there is recently this oil blockade.
[01:26:55]  And, you know, this is one of those things where obviously I follow the news quite closely.
[01:27:01]  I knew when this was happening and I followed it about it, but it's really hard to put into it's hard for me to, it was hard, and it still is, obviously, because it's not like I'm fucking leave here or anything, but like it's really difficult to even imagine what that's like if you're not experiencing it.
[01:27:19]  And like I've had a very, very, very vanishingly small, you know, experience of part of it with the caveat that even with that, I'm in a major city or in the capital.
[01:27:31]  And obviously I've heard it's much more severe in other parts of the island, but there's no oil here.
[01:27:37]  And Cuba is, I know that there's a, there's been long time plans with a relatively modest transition to, you know, to solar or to other renewable energy sources, but that also due to sanctions have been very difficult to get to get going.
[01:27:53]  It's fucking crazy, man.
[01:27:55]  I got to tell you, like, when I got out of the airport, I mean, on that bus going to Havana, it looked like I remarked to somebody next year, I'm like, dude, it fucking looks like pictures of like Pyongyang or something.
[01:28:07]  Like with, you know, you see like a few cars and like some bicycles.
[01:28:10]  And then I was like, actually, Pyongyang has more cars than this.
[01:28:12]  Like there's, it's like, I'm not even like trying to be cheeky or whatever.
[01:28:17]  I was just like, dude, this is fucked up.
[01:28:19]  And obviously in my head, I'm like, yeah, there's no oil.
[01:28:23]  It's not like there's a little bit of oil.
[01:28:25]  There's no oil.
[01:28:26]  And there's no gasoline.
[01:28:27]  There's no like this, this is just like, there's very, very, very, very little.
[01:28:32]  But to actually see it, it's really intense.
[01:28:36]  It started a few months ago.
[01:28:37]  Like, how is how have you even just seen this change in your day-to-day life?
[01:28:42]  It's unavoidable.
[01:28:44]  You can't escape it.
[01:28:47]  Look, I understand how for anyone coming from the outside, even for us here, it's hard to comprehend how a country can function without fuel.
[01:28:59]  And the question, the answer is it can't.
[01:29:02]  It just can't.
[01:29:03]  Like everything is dependent on it.
[01:29:06]  And Cuba's pretty much coming to a halt.
[01:29:08]  We're slowly getting to a point where there'll be absolutely no fuel and no way to get the power back on.
[01:29:17]  Now, the impact of this is everywhere, basically.
[01:29:23]  Number one, you saw it.
[01:29:24]  There's no public transport.
[01:29:25]  A lot of the cars, a lot of taxis, no matter like they're not working because people can't get fuel.
[01:29:31]  This has taken it, has had a tremendous impact on anything else.
[01:29:35]  Our colleges are closed.
[01:29:36]  Kids are studying from home, if they can, whichever means they can.
[01:29:40]  And more importantly, our healthcare system, you know, wants a working and very good healthcare system is unable to provide the care to the people.
[01:29:53]  I have no other way to say this than say, you know, the oil blockade is currently killing people here.
[01:30:00]  Because when you understand that there are no ambulances, that medical personnel has no way to get to the hospitals, that the ones that are getting to the hospitals are overworked, that they don't have the materials to work once they're there, you understand that patients have no way to get into the hospital either.
[01:30:18]  It's taking them a lot longer than it could.
[01:30:20]  You understand that there is simply no way in which this isn't causing people's death.
[01:30:26]  Now, when you frame it like that, you understand just how pressing it is for this to be resolved.
[01:30:33]  And you understand how every day that passes is actually killing more and more people, especially as things get worse and worse because we still have some fuel around.
[01:30:42]  There's still some things working.
[01:30:44]  But what's going to happen next week?
[01:30:46]  What's going to happen next month?
[01:30:50]  I'm terrified of what that looks like.
[01:30:52]  Yeah, how does that uncertainty feel?
[01:30:53]  Because it seems like it's hard to even make basic plans, right?
[01:30:57]  Like you work as a journalist.
[01:30:58]  You guys make fucking hell of videos.
[01:31:01]  You guys make very nice videos.
[01:31:03]  But I'm like, you edit that shit on a laptop.
[01:31:06]  What happens if there's no power for?
[01:31:07]  Okay, maybe a laptop, you can hold the charge, have a little bit of like a, you know, a portable battery or something.
[01:31:12]  You know, fucking, you can work offline for a couple of days.
[01:31:17]  What happens if it's out for like four days or five days?
[01:31:19]  You know what I mean?
[01:31:20]  It's like, and then that beyond that, who gives?
[01:31:22]  You know, it's like after, you're not even worried about editing a video at that point.
[01:31:26]  It's like, what do you do with the food in your refrigerator?
[01:31:28]  I mean, what do you do with the food in your refrigerator?
[01:31:30]  Like the last last night the power went out, but like, you know, what is it, last week, two weeks ago, the power was out for like almost like two days.
[01:31:37]  What did you, what did, what happened to your food?
[01:31:39]  I mean, this is a stupid question, I know, but like, is it one of those things where it's just like, what did you do?
[01:31:43]  No, I mean, a couple of days, you're still good as long as you have it in the fridge part.
[01:31:47]  Yeah.
[01:31:48]  Like with the first one in 2024, it went on for like four or five days.
[01:31:52]  At that point, everything got spoiled.
[01:31:53]  Like there was no saving anything there.
[01:31:55]  It's just throw it all in the garbage.
[01:31:57]  Yeah.
[01:31:58]  And if you can afford it, buy new stuff.
[01:32:00]  And that's where I want to get at.
[01:32:01]  Look, crisis never affect everyone the same way.
[01:32:06]  Those that have less will always feel it more.
[01:32:10]  I'm not worst off.
[01:32:11]  You know, I, you know, I still have ways to get by.
[01:32:14]  Here at the office, you have, we have a generator.
[01:32:17]  There's no power.
[01:32:18]  We turn it on.
[01:32:19]  Yeah.
[01:32:19]  And we keep working.
[01:32:21]  But and those around us that can afford it, they've bought generators, they've bought ecoflows, they've bought some of them even bought solar panels.
[01:32:29]  But that is not the majority of Cubans.
[01:32:31]  The majority of Cubans have to make do with cooking on charcoal.
[01:32:36]  The majority of Cubans have to make do with their buying their food on a daily basis because they can't preserve it.
[01:32:44]  The majority of Cubans are struggling to eat, man.
[01:32:47]  That's not the way to put it.
[01:32:48]  Like the community where I live, it's one of the poorest in the city.
[01:32:52]  And I see it day to day.
[01:32:54]  You know, the level of uncertainty is down to the level of fucking food.
[01:32:59]  Forget like the infrastructure of the country.
[01:33:02]  How do I get to whatever?
[01:33:03]  Eating.
[01:33:04]  Eating is the problem they're dealing with.
[01:33:07]  I think somebody who might not know too much about Cuba would say, well, it's a communist country.
[01:33:10]  People have always been struggling for food.
[01:33:12]  But that has not been the case.
[01:33:13]  No, no, not at all.
[01:33:14]  Look, man, this is not the country I grew up on.
[01:33:19]  You know?
[01:33:21]  We were very poor, my family in particular.
[01:33:26]  But the basics were there.
[01:33:29]  I could trust that if I went to the hospital, I was getting the best possible care.
[01:33:35]  These people were professionals to the level of the best doctors in the world.
[01:33:39]  And the system was implemented in a way that anything I needed would be provided to me at no cost.
[01:33:46]  I could go to school and I knew that the professors would be good, that the infrastructure would be set in place for me to get to whatever degree of education that I could get.
[01:33:55]  I came to college.
[01:33:56]  I went to college for nothing.
[01:33:59]  If I had wanted to keep studying and do my master's in PhD, I would have been able to do that to no cost.
[01:34:08]  That's why the times that we're living on right now are so shocking because we're not used to it.
[01:34:14]  We are not used to having hunger in Cuba.
[01:34:17]  I'm not saying this was perfect, man.
[01:34:19]  From it like I.
[01:34:21]  I try to explain it this way, you know, Cuba might have been the easiest country in the world to survive, but it was also one of the hardest to thrive.
[01:34:28]  That was the bargain.
[01:34:29]  Though that was a bargain, you knew that we wall as a collective would be above water, even if just above.
[01:34:34]  That's no longer the case and it's shocking to me, like I still see someone going through the garbage, and i've, and it makes me feel so bad, so sad because, like i've never saw that growing up.
[01:34:48]  Yeah, that's new.
[01:34:49]  That's new to me, you know, and it's important to talk about this for a U.s audience, particularly because this has everything to do with what's going on between our two countries and with U.s sanctions.
[01:34:59]  It is, it cannot be, a coincidence that as, as sanctions increase to an unprecedented level, the country starts to tank.
[01:35:08]  Of course this is not a coincidence.
[01:35:10]  These are connected.
[01:35:11]  So i'm not saying there are no internal factors playing into whatever is going on in Cuba.
[01:35:16]  Of course there are, like any country.
[01:35:19]  But this, I honestly believe that the majority of the problems we're dealing with right now are the result of U.s policies.
[01:35:25]  Well, I think there's a pretty one-to-one correlation between the fact that the lights go out and that there's no fuel coming to the island.
[01:35:30]  You know, I mean I, I think of the the the, the effects of just literally not being able to drive a car.
[01:35:37]  And you talk about like yeah, going to work okay well, you don't go to work, you can't get paid.
[01:35:42]  Well, beyond that, even the car that brings the money to the bank or brings your paycheck or whatever, isn't getting there either.
[01:35:48]  Like it's it's, it's something that, like you know, even if there's food somewhere, how do you distribute it?
[01:35:54]  Right, there's no truck.
[01:35:56]  Like that's, like that's I, I I think is like, is worth stressing to people.
[01:35:59]  Like it's just like there's no fuel means no anything, you know, and uh, and it's so, I mean, it's just, it's, it's in, and there's so many small ways and big ways.
[01:36:13]  It affects everybody's day, basically all day, and it becomes something that like, it seems to me, at least from from my interactions with people and talking to people, which again have been, you know, somewhat limited just due to the time that i'm here um, but you know, you can kind of extrapolate and think of how it would affect even your own life, even if you, the people listening to this, you know obviously maybe, maybe you're not in contact with any Cubans or whatever.
[01:36:34]  Uh, I don't think they can imagine.
[01:36:36]  I mean, it's just, it's.
[01:36:37]  It's just like you can't do anything, you know, after dark.
[01:36:42]  It's dark, you know, like there's no fucking, there's no street light on, because it's uh it's, there's no power, you know, and it's just, it's so.
[01:36:51]  It's so fucking insane to me and you can't go to work.
[01:36:54]  And then if you do go to work, you can't, you can't get home.
[01:36:56]  It's just like everything seems to take longer and be worse.
[01:37:00]  And to me, I guess, as a Cuban, like what, what do you think that the, the intention here is right?
[01:37:05]  Oh that's, that's very obvious.
[01:37:07]  Uh, you know, if anything, this has made what the U.s policy has always been uh, more transparent, because for a while there, us politicians would tell you, well, we have sanctions in place that affect the government.
[01:37:20]  They're not affecting the Cuban people, which was always a lie.
[01:37:23]  Yeah, but that's what they said, you know, and they could justify it and whatever.
[01:37:27]  But there's no way to justify an oil blockade and say, Say, well, this is affecting the government, because this is obviously affecting, first and foremost, the majority, or I would say the totality of the people.
[01:37:40]  Absolutely.
[01:37:40]  Okay.
[01:37:41]  Now, the point is simple.
[01:37:42]  It's to create conditions bad enough that the people will rise up and have regime change.
[01:37:48]  This is regime change through starvation.
[01:37:51]  Simple as that.
[01:37:52]  It has always been, but now it's more obvious than ever.
[01:37:56]  I think this is the simple, harshest sanction that the United States has ever imposed on Cuba.
[01:38:03]  And we're talking about their hundreds in a row, but this one is simply the toughest one.
[01:38:08]  And the closest to what the goal has always been.
[01:38:10]  Let's bring the country to collapse and let's let the people rise from that to a new government.
[01:38:18]  That's what they're trying to do.
[01:38:19]  It doesn't seem like a plan that really would work to me because it seems like it would just everyone would just be really poor and fucked up and starving.
[01:38:26]  And then it seems like there would be just like chaos and anarchy.
[01:38:29]  But it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't really make a revolution that kind of just makes everything suck and some bare semblance of control from something that resembles some kind of government, but like everything's so degrading and fucked up that like it doesn't even matter.
[01:38:42]  I mean, it's just, it's bizarre to me because it doesn't follow.
[01:38:45]  I can't even think of a time where this kind of external pressure on a country has created conditions that have led to some kind of revolution that have made the country what?
[01:38:55]  Like, you know, making this into like one of the Florida keys?
[01:38:57]  Like, it doesn't like, it doesn't really follow even logically.
[01:39:00]  It seems just like this intense regime of collective punishment.
[01:39:05]  Oh, that's the other way around.
[01:39:06]  That's what it is.
[01:39:07]  I mean, UN experts have called it that.
[01:39:09]  Hopefully, this is collective punishment.
[01:39:11]  This is an act of war.
[01:39:13]  I don't think people articulate it like this, and it's frustrating to me.
[01:39:16]  Yeah.
[01:39:17]  Look, there are no bombs falling on Havana, but that does not mean that the United States is not at war with Cuba.
[01:39:22]  It is at war with Cuba, and there are casualties to this war right now.
[01:39:26]  So this is war, you know, and it's fucking killing people.
[01:39:30]  But about what you're saying, I'm not sure if I agree with you 100%.
[01:39:36]  Because look, the worse the conditions are on the ground, obviously the popularity of the government does take a turn to the side.
[01:39:44]  Of course, because people, obviously, if you're hungry and if you need shit and you look to your government to solve your problems.
[01:39:51]  And then when your government doesn't, you are not happy about them.
[01:39:54]  Yeah.
[01:39:55]  So that's happening here a lot.
[01:39:56]  I don't, I think, you know, obviously the Cuban government is perhaps at its most unpopular time in history.
[01:40:02]  It has been as the crisis gets deeper and deeper.
[01:40:04]  However, I do think that a lot of those people that would oppose the government last year, this year would be more nuanced about their opposition.
[01:40:13]  Because they understand that there's this external factor that is so big that there's no way they can point to the Cuban government alone and say, well, it's your fault.
[01:40:23]  Even those that are stunched in their opposition to the government have to admit that this is coming from the outside.
[01:40:31]  So, yeah, that's it.
[01:40:34]  Yeah, I mean, that's what's sort of so you even the reporting on this in terms of a lot of the mainstream U.S. media, you know, it almost makes it seem like the electrical failures here, the giant nationwide blackouts, which I think that people really got to get through your head of what that fucking means.
[01:40:54]  Nationwide blackouts are the result of some corrupt bureaucrat in some Communist Party headquarters room, as opposed to the very, the obvious reality that this has to do with a massive lack of fuel.
[01:41:09]  Because here's the thing.

=== External Sabotage Accusations (04:47) ===

[01:41:10]  Even if the fucking, some part of the power grid goes down, which often has cascading effects, a guy might not be able to get to the power grid from his, you know what I mean?
[01:41:18]  Like, you might not be able to send the workers out somewhere because there's no fucking fuel for the cars.
[01:41:24]  And it's just so, you know, it is so, it seems so transparently obvious that it makes sense that people would even, again, like you say, staunch oppositionists would have sort of a more nuanced view on this because there's no mask in it at all.
[01:41:39]  You know, it's just, how does it, how does it, how does it just make you feel?
[01:41:43]  This is a kind of classic man on the street question, but like, no, no, I get it.
[01:41:48]  Look, man, it's outrageous.
[01:41:49]  Yeah.
[01:41:49]  There's no other way around it.
[01:41:50]  It's not just like the measuring itself.
[01:41:53]  Trump's way to articulate it.
[01:41:55]  Yeah.
[01:41:55]  Like this guy comes out and says, you know, said, I'm going to take Cuba.
[01:42:02]  Simple, easy as that.
[01:42:04]  We know what that means.
[01:42:06]  In the context of Venezuela, in the context of Iran, for the first time in my life, I'm scared I'm bombed.
[01:42:16]  Last year, if you'd asked me, do you think this is a possibility?
[01:42:19]  I would have laughed.
[01:42:20]  I was like, no, of course not.
[01:42:22]  No, the U.S. is not going to go to war with Cuba.
[01:42:23]  Would they do that?
[01:42:24]  No, no, of course not.
[01:42:26]  That's not me right now.
[01:42:27]  Me right now is terrified.
[01:42:31]  It's terrified.
[01:42:32]  I live meters away from a military unit.
[01:42:35]  And back in back when Maduro's abduction happened, I remember because it was the first time it dawned on us that this was a real possibility.
[01:42:45]  And I was at home with my wife, and we were basically going through the rooms of the house thinking which one we had a best shot of surviving a bombing.
[01:42:57]  Yeah.
[01:42:58]  By the end of that conversation, we're looking at each other like, this is real.
[01:43:03]  Yeah.
[01:43:03]  Can you believe we're having this conversation?
[01:43:08]  Because it never crossed my mind that it would be a possibility.
[01:43:11]  Yeah.
[01:43:12]  So, man, outrageous doesn't cover it.
[01:43:14]  Outrageous doesn't cover it.
[01:43:16]  Because I've never felt more powerless than right now.
[01:43:21]  I feel like my life was looking one way three months ago.
[01:43:25]  I had this plan for me and everything.
[01:43:28]  And then some guy says there's no fuel coming into the country.
[01:43:32]  And then your life changes.
[01:43:34]  Yeah.
[01:43:34]  It's like you can't do anything about that.
[01:43:39]  Honestly, I struggle to put it in words.
[01:43:41]  I really do.
[01:43:43]  I don't.
[01:43:44]  Yeah.
[01:43:44]  Sorry.
[01:43:45]  I mean, I can't imagine.
[01:43:47]  It's just one of those things.
[01:43:50]  I guess the close I can think of is like when someone very close to you dies, and in the immediateness of that, you know, obviously it's like a one-to-one comparison, but the immediateness of that, it's hard to even comprehend anything else.
[01:44:00]  You know what I mean?
[01:44:02]  That infects kind of every thought that you have, whether it's about that thing or not.
[01:44:07]  It just, it's in everything.
[01:44:08]  And yeah, I mean, it's baffling to me.
[01:44:13]  It's not baffling to me.
[01:44:14]  I don't know why I said that.
[01:44:16]  But it's, I just hate it because it's one of those things that's being done.
[01:44:22]  I don't even really know who, in whose name this is being done.
[01:44:25]  Trump is just sort of taking it.
[01:44:27]  It's being done in the name of me, apparently.
[01:44:29]  Yeah, I guess it's not.
[01:44:29]  And that's what they're saying, no?
[01:44:31]  Yeah.
[01:44:31]  We're doing this for the Cuban people.
[01:44:33]  We're starving the Cuban people to death on the name of the Cuban people.
[01:44:37]  That's what they're saying.
[01:44:37]  That's literally what they're saying.
[01:44:40]  You know, like what I, what I, what, what is even more outrageous to me is that they don't articulate exactly like that.
[01:44:45]  Because, okay, so they'll say, we're doing this for the sake of the Cuban people.
[01:44:50]  But they won't say exactly what that looks like.
[01:44:53]  Yeah.
[01:44:53]  Okay.
[01:44:53]  So they'd say, we're going to help the Cuban people by making their lives so miserable that they won't have any other alternative than rise up, rest their lives, and start over.
[01:45:06]  That's literally what this oil embargo is and what the embargo has always been.
[01:45:11]  Start over and pay $1.5 billion or whatever to Office Depot.
[01:45:14]  That's the other thing, too.
[01:45:16]  Yeah, that too, of course.
[01:45:18]  God, well, thank you for sitting down with us.
[01:45:20]  If you What do you have to say to the American people?
[01:45:28]  It's up to you to solve it.
[01:45:31]  Me as a Cuban, I'm powerless about what's going on.
[01:45:37]  Believe me, I don't feel comfortable with admitting that.
[01:45:41]  But what am I supposed to do?
[01:45:43]  If you're one of those Americans that wants me to go out on the street and take arms against my government, then you're a fucking asshole.
[01:45:49]  Okay?
[01:45:50]  This is something that your government is doing to my people.
[01:45:53]  So this is your responsibility.
[01:45:56]  Fucking do something.

=== Powerless Cuban Voices (00:30) ===

[01:45:58]  Daniel, thank you very much.
[01:46:09]  All right.
[01:46:11]  Well, once again, shout out to Belly the Beast, Daniel Works, and shout out to Reed and Liz and everybody.
[01:46:19]  And it's a fantastic organization.
[01:46:21]  But I embrace.
[01:46:22]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[01:46:24]  I'm Liz.
[01:46:25]  And this has been Trunan.
[01:46:26]  We will see you next time.
[01:46:28]  Bye-bye.