The CIA War Against Cuba

test one two well it is very nice to finally be here at Iowa State it was the fall of 1990 in fact when I was going to come planning to come and in actual fact I was not in Nicaragua deaf I was in Madrid where I lived at the time it happened that these conditions had been laid on by the Bush administration for the release of the of the aid which Nicaragua needed so desperately and one of the conditions was the revocation by the gemoro government of my passport and I had been waiting for something to happen ever since the elections in February and the the taking of office by Violeta Chamorro as president in May I believe it was of 1990 nothing happened and as part of the organization of the peace movement in the United States to oppose the coming war in the Gulf I was going to be traveling around for about eight weeks and here going to different places including coming here but about five days I think it was before I was to leave and come over here to the States from Madrid I had a call from New York from a friend in the Nicaraguan mission to the United Nations and he told me he had just seen a diplomatic circular which had gone around to all the Nicaraguan missions informing them that my Nicaraguan passport had been invalidated and so I had to cancel that trip because I didn't have a document to get back into Spain at the end of the trip they can't keep me out of the United States I don't need a passport to come in and the passport question is interesting because it shows you that type of power that the government has in 1979 just after the beginning of the hostage crisis in Iran the Carter Administration revoked my passport the actual revocation had to be signed by the secretary of state who was then Cyrus Vance but the man who was really responsible is the current Secretary of State one Christopher because he was the on Iran during the crisis for the Carter Administration that didn't mean I couldn't travel though because early on just weeks after my passport my US passport was revoked I received a letter from Marsh Bishop the leader of the Grenadian Revolution and this letter was an invitation to go to the first anniversary celebrations of the Grenadian revolution the overthrow of the Gary dictatorship there and with that letter he sent me a Grenadian passport and so I had a passport from Grenada to travel all over Western Europe to the Caribbean Central America I used it to go to Canada also and it happened that at the moment of the invasion of Grenada the Bush reagan-bush invasion I was at a solidarity conference in Managua in fact I gave a speech on behalf of the US delegation to this conference and I spoke to the Sandinistas at the time I said you know as soon as Regan can get a caretaker government put in down there there's really going to invalidate my Grenadian passport and they say told me of course they will and we know you need a document to travel we want you to be able to come back here to Nicaragua often I had already been there many times I worked quite closely with them to prepare the defenses for that they needed for the for their own protection against the CIA operations which were surely coming they're like the Contras and various other things and they said we want you to be able to come back we know you have to have a document we're going to give you a Nicaraguan passport so they gave me a Nicaraguan passport and I went back to Spain then I came back on the first coffee picking Brigade remember that started up in December of 1983 and then I was back from time to time after that in any case that travel document problem finally was resolved I now have something from the Germans which is known as they rise a document or a travel document it's not a passport but it gets me back into Germany and so each time when I come to the states I landed Kennedy or this time it was Atlanta and I give this little card to the immigration inspector and I have to go back to the office and fill out a form it's been going on now for six years and I must have filled out 20 of these forms it's full of blocks it's a whole page size and it's your name date in place of birth where you live what your occupation is why you don't have a document where you don't have a passport and what flight you came on that kind of thing the very bottom in bold it says I promise to pay within 30 days the sum of $100 for this waiver it's a waiver for the to the regulation that requires a valid passport to come into the country and so I have to fill that out in order to go on to take another flight or to go into the city if it's New York whatever whatever and from the very start though I knew that was illegal because bill worthy who's been very active in solidarity matters of religion near Boston his case went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot charge a US citizen to come into the country and so what I do is to the consternation of these officials because they cannot stand to have their forms defaced you know I write on the diagonal all across it like that I say this is illegal this is unconstitutional I will never pay $100 and I always took my lawyer's office on Park Avenue in New York as the place they should collect as I'm writing across without without exception these people are standing like this they can't believe that I would do this to their form and I can just see them getting nervous I don't even look up at them I just do it and I know what they're going through and it's kind of a game but anyway the point of the story is that they have never tried to collect one time that $100 even though every time I've I've had to sign it it's to get going because they know also that is that it's unconstitutional it's illegal well anyway I want to clarify one thing about what Jess said just now and that is about the exposures of the CIA's operations in personnel I can this could be a long story but I'm going to make it very short and that is that early on when I decided to write a book I decided on my own that it would not be enough simply to describe what the CIA does but it would be additionally very important to include that people who do these things abroad meaning the local people who are their names are available the CIA people and so forth it was not exposure by the way for the sake of simple exposure of secrets or people who are working secretly not at all there was a purpose to this and that was to provide a better understanding a better understanding of what we do abroad as a nation a society a country because a country's foreign policy is based is a direct product of its domestic system and one way that we can understand our domestic system in the United States better is to understand as well as possible what we do abroad and especially the secret things that we do involve the things that the government doesn't want people to know about and that is the purpose of the exposure of what the CIA does and the people who do it I think that's an important thing because there's been a lot of controversy around the exposure that I have made and I want people to understand the the purpose of it from the very beginning well I come to you tonight as a person who worked in the CIA for almost 12 years and who did a lot of damage to Cuba and the Cuban Revolution I spent eight years no yes eight years but in Latin America and I was working most of that time against Cuba and the Cuban presence in Latin America and also their supporters throughout Latin America but the good news is that my ideas about u.s. foreign policy and the role of the CIA changed and for more than twenty years now I have been working actively in solidarity with Cuba not only with Cuba with with some of the African movements with Nicaragua Grenada and so forth and what I have tried to do is put my experience at their disposal too so that they could better protect themselves from these types of activities which I'm going to describe right now one of the ways to understand CIA and a very good way to understand the situation in Latin America is to examine the case of Cuba the Revolution which Jeff mentioned in 1953 was not an isolated offense in fact it wasn't really even a revolution it was the beginning of a revolution in a sense and it was the continuing continuing of a revolutionary tradition that goes back very far in Cuba you know the the 18th century elite the educated elite were affected by the ideas of the Enlightenment just like the founding fathers in the United States and in the Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere Mexico Central America South America liberation movements or independence movements developed and by 1820 1825 almost all the former's but all of Spanish colonies were independent they had defeated Spain militarily not so with the case of Cuba and Puerto Rico the Spaniards were able to retain control and power in those two islands and well Cuba is concerned the United States was quite happy that Cuba continued to be a colony of Spain the fear in the United States at that time was and this is in the first half of view of the 19th century was that Cuba might become a haven for runaway slaves from plantations in the south you know the first presidents were all from the southern states and the the administration's in Washington under these southern presidents was quite content to see Hubert remained a colony of Spain I think it was Madison wasn't it I or was it could have been Monroe I think it was Madison who made the famous statement about Cuba eventually falling into the Union like a ripe fruit in the 1850s I think it was the United States offered to buy Cuba from Spain and the price they offered was so low that the Spaniards considered it an insult and continued their colonial administration there was a ten-year war for independence in Cuba begun in 1968 by famous men now released his slaves and began a ten-year struggle for independence which failed and it ended in defeat but then along came Jose Marti the father of Cuban independence really the recognized figure now and he had been cracking stone in a Spanish prison for his independence activities as a student he eventually served his time was released came to the United States organized a political movement political party called the Cuban revolutionary party and they determined to recommence the struggle for independence from Spain and so martini and the others they land in 1895 to began this independence struggle again within about a month marty is dead killed by in battle by the spaniards and the struggle then goes on until finally they have the Spanish defeated by 1898 but that's the point where McKinley and the first press decide they need a war and they send their battleship Maine down to make a port call in Havana there there's a mysterious explosion it blows up hundreds of sailors are killed it goes to the bottom and then the Hearst papers trumpet the need for a war against Spain and they get it the u.s. intervenes in the war and provides the end blow against the Spaniards the Cubans had already defeated them but then the US Army took over the island in fact at the end they wouldn't even allow the Cuban rebel forces or independence forces to go into the cities with the defeat of the Spanish in the withdrawal of the Spanish they wanted no manifestation of Cuban nationalism and so the US military occupied Cuba for four years from 1898 to 1902 and in 1902 they granted a kind of pseudo independence to Cuba with a constitution that included a clause called the Platt Amendment named after also a plaque the senator who had gotten this through Congress as a condition for independence the Cubans had to write into their Constitution that the United States of America has the right to unilaterally intervene in Cuba at any time it wishes for the protection of US lives and property or simply for the restoration of order the Cubans lived with this humiliation for about three decades into the 1930s at least when it was they adopted a new constitution without that Platt Amendment but Cuban the meantime was converted into a kind of a floating plantation for the United States one of the principal residences in Cuba from the United States was the Mafia others were in agriculture and Industry the best and the biggest landed properties were u.s. owned Ament most of the sugar mills were US owned the cane fields were us own the plantations the utilities the transportation electricity telephones all of these were owned by the United States u.s. banks were in there like the Citibank from New York which was all over Latin America this was a situation in the early 1950s when a young lawyer Fidel Castro organized a new independence movement which had a definite program including a a genuine independence from the United States and the first blow in that was the assault on moncada many of you I'm sure know this history but I'm going to review it very quickly for those who don't Fidel organized a group of about 120 people including two women and they thought they might be able to spark an uprising all over Cuba against the military dictatorship of the time it was led this military dictatorship by a former military officer through Hensel Batista who had overthrown the civilian government in 1952 a government headed by a president Carlos Rio at the attack came on the 26th of July of 1953 and everything that could go wrong went wrong Fidel's Buick stalled and a lot of other things happened and in 30 minutes it was all over total failure the Patito forces took a lot of them captive in the first couple of days he executed 61 of the group and the church intervened to save the others including Fidel they were put on trial sent convicted and sentenced to long prison terms you know about 15 years I think but his defense he was his own defense lawyer his defense of himself at the moncada trial became one of the classic political statements of Latin American history it is called the English strength translation of it is history will absolve me and in this he quoted from the Greeks he quoted from Thomas Aquinas he quoted from the enlightenment philosophers on the right of an oppressed people to revolt against tyranny and later on in prison and the Isle of Pines this is his large island south of the western part of the island he rewrote his defense statement on little pieces of cigarette paper and smuggled them out to his supporters on the outside and they eventually put it off together in a unified coherent way and it became a book and it is still one of the most widely sold books in Cuba I mention it because the whole program of the Cuban Revolution is contained in this defense statement the independence from the United States the social justice provisions the rights of women for example the end to racism the availability of education to everyone equally the expansion of medical services to apply to or to be available to everyone all of these programs are the Cuban Ellucian are in their agrarian reform is another one and so everybody knew what the movement stood for once we tell speech was circulated and the movement itself became known as the 26th of July Movement after the date of the assault on Moncada well the supporters of Fidel and the others on the outside organized an amnesty campaign and within less than two years from the assault on Moncada they were all free and with that's May 1955 and then a couple of months later the leadership with Fidel are in Mexico in exile and there they continue to plan and to train and to acquire weapons and get money it happens that in September of 1956 just a couple of months after I had graduated from the University of no University of Notre Dame Fidel swam across the Rio Grande disguised as a wetback he swam over to McAllen Texas where he met with Carlos Clio the former president the one who had been overthrown by Batista and Proprio by then had become a very rich man he was a super millionaire with 50 to 100 million dollars it all come from payoffs from the Mafia and from other forms of graft in any case by the time their conversation ended prio had agreed to give Fidel $100,000 Fidel swam back to Mexico and then with that money which eventually arrived they continued to buy weapons and they bought a yacht which they would used to sail back to Cuba to reinitiate the struggle against the Batista dictatorship which was of course supported by the United States well my life has been entwined with Cuba since I was a child because in Tampa Florida where in the 19th century there had developed an important cigar manufacturing industry it was an offshoot of the Cuban cigar industry almost all the tobacco came from Cuba and my playmates as a child were the children of some of them of the cigar factory owners I a very privileged childhood my father was a successful businessman and it was kind of like the country club atmosphere in which I grew up our house that that back yard backed on to the green of the exclusive Golf Club of Tampa of course which we remembers and my sister and I went to the best private schools we had all the privileges and with the background like that there can be you can understand how I might have gone into the CIA after university but what happened was a couple of months before I was to graduate and get my undergraduate degree the CIA sent a recruiter out to talk to me and asked me to join I declined for the moment because I was going to go into law school but that didn't that didn't last for very long because the draft was about to get me what happens is also in 1956 the CIA established for the Batista dictatorship a secret police it was known as Brock B RAC Brock are the Spanish initials for bureau for the repression of communist activities that was a good cover because in actual fact Batista use this secret police which became very famous for its torture and murders political murders but these two used it for the repression of all of his political opponents not justice communists well the brac was organized just about that time when I graduated from college and uh and when if he don't hits one of the Rio Grande we've gone back and they found in Mexico a yacht on the coast the gulf coast of Mexico a yacht called grandma and this yacht was owned by an American who lived in Mexico City and Fidel paid him $20,000 for the yacht it needed a lot of work because after the hurricane a couple of years before it had gone to the bottom and his staying down there for quite some time they eventually raised it but it needed a lot of work before they could use it to sail for Oriente province all the way to the extreme eastern end of the island they were working on it but they had to leave precipitously because the Mexican authorities started to close in on them they had a couple of defectors Batista was on to what they were planning to do and he had started maritime and air patrols over that area between Mexico and and Cuba and so one night in late November 1956 sorry yeah 56 they sailed from Tucson on the Mexican coast in a storm and the voyage to oriented to Cuba was one nightmare continuous nightmare of seasickness of diarrhea the food ran out the water ran out they would because of the storms they were 2 or 3 days late getting weather to where they were going and it ended in a shipwreck they instead of landing up the coast where they were supposed to they managed several miles away on a ground on a mud flap and so they all had to get out of the boat and walk through hip deep mud leaving all their weapons and stores behind and on shore they were swallowed up in an enormous mangrove swamp it looked on it looks just like moncada all over again well they survived and got out of that swamp and in the end of the 82 who sailed on the grandma 12:3 group to flee they all the others were either killed or captured because Batista's Army and Air Force were on them from the very beginning 82 by the way sailed I mentioned and the boat which was built of wood in 1944 I think was built to hold a maximum of 25 people so you can imagine how it was with 82 with all these weapons and so forth and stores well they eventually regrouped these 12 men and they made it up into the Sierra Maestra mountains on the southern southeastern coast of Cuba these were twelve men beginning to struggle against an army of 40,000 I mention all this because it's quite incredible that they were able to survive and do what they did that is defeat this army but within two years they had conquered the war they achieved the support of the peasantry of the mountains and of Oriente province and all sorts of people came to join them out there in the mountains they came down out of the mountains in 1958 and by December of that year they had at Easter pretty well defeated well I made my first trip to Cuba in January 1957 just not even quite one month after they had landed at in Oriente with the Gunma and already in Havana where I had savored the Cuban music and the food and the dance so forth and device as well and I remember very well from that trip the presidential palace were parties to worked and lived it was surrounded with barbed wire of gun emplacements sandbags and so forth well that was the thing that really put me into the CIA because I came back from that trip my first trip abroad I liked it so much that the desire for adventure and for travel and so forth that was irresistible and I wrote back to the CIA saying I would I'm ready I'd like to come in now and six months later I was in the CIA heading from headquarters in Washington down to Texas for one year's training in the Air Force I came out of there with the brand-new second lieutenant went out to a Fighter Squadron in Cal halation California where I was an intelligence officer for a year then back to Washington to begin the CIA's year-long training program for operations officers it's now the late summer of 1959 well the Revolution had had succeeded Batista had flown into exile in the Dominican Republic on December 31st of 1958 and on the 1st of January the celebrations of the time for the revolution began the 1st of January ever since has been the big ceremony or celebration of the triumphs every year on January 1st these celebrations built up and built up and built up at the beginning in January 1959 as Fidel on the other leadership across the island from town to town city to city from oriented toward the west toward Havana and a week after Batista had flown the country Fidel and the others arrived to a tumultuous reception and rally of support in Havana it was the largest political rally ever seen in Cuba and as any cuban will tell you who was involved from that early period or who has studied the revolution that was only the beginning the easy part was the overthrow of Batista the hard part was just about to start meaning revolutionary development turning out teachers to expand education turning out doctors to expand the medical services defending from all of these attacks and aggression from the United States which they knew perfectly what was coming so the real struggle then began with the with the taking over of power in January 1959 and that fall I and this long training course or this one-year training course the first few months from September until the end of the year of 1959 we were all in Washington in CIA classrooms studying the national security bureaucracy in Washington of the CIA structure and missions and so forth and then in early January we began our operational training that is how to run clandestine operations and this was done at a secret CIA base which until then had never been revealed as a CIA base they Krypton M or a codeword for this base was isolation and everybody referred to it as the as the farm it was in fact Camp Peary supposedly a Navy base Starling outside Williamsburg Virginia along the edge of a river it was a strange base because it was writing divided into all these compartmented sections there was an airstrip there there was an area for pressure training and they should drops and air resupply drops there were areas for explosives training there were gunnery ranges up for all sorts of weapons there was an area where there was a replica of an East European border with triple barbed wire fences and guard posts and dogs and electrified wire and so forth there were all these different parts with it and when we got down there we were told we were not the only trainees at the base we were a group about 55 by the way for that year of which they I think about five only were women that policy changed years later a lot more women are brought in now as operations officers but then they were very few we're down there beginning our operations training and they tell us to ignore the aircrafts that are coming in and land taking off at odd hours of the night there are these other trainees that we will never meet and we will never see and they will never see us they are not even to know that they are in the United States and so don't throw out any don't throw down any cigarette wrappers packages for example in our area we had classrooms we had an officer's club we had a baseball diamond we had a gym for martial arts training and of course we went through this course for about seven months while we were there we were certain that these other trainees some of them at least were Cubans who were being trained to take action against Cuba because everybody knew that the CIA had been called upon to to take action against Cuba the relations had become strange from the very beginning between the United States and Cuba they began with justice for the Batista murderers and torturers this had been announced before Batista was ever overthrown and they started with our guys meaning the black people and the other security services which were supported by the CIA under this party's two dictatorship in fact the repression got so bad during the latter part of the Batista tyranny that in September 1950 and eight just before Batista was completely defeated the Inspector General of the CIA went down to Havana on a special trip to see the chief of broch he had been one of the people earlier who had set up Rock in 1956 so he went down in 58 to tell the chief of broch to start backing off to coolin and especially on this question of political repression well it didn't happen and it got worse and worse and finally Batista had lost all of his political support everything that he had ever had and that's one of the reasons why he completely his regime collapsed but in January the trials began they were televised and they were public and they were held in the sports Coliseum or sports arena in Havana - it's an indoor sports palace and these were seen in the United States as circus show trials and Wayne Morris the the liberal from Oregon got up in the Senate and denounced them and called for an end to the Cuban bloodbath he might very well done it on behalf the CIA but the Cubans responded that they were going to continue until every last one of those criminals was was tried well the chief of brac had gotten away he had flown over to Miami and was safe but the deputy chief was captured and this man had been the principal liaison officer of this secret police block with the CIA offices in the US Embassy in Havana and he was tried and sentenced to death as soon as the sentence was passed the CIA intervened with Che Guevara went to che and said can you stop this death penalty or will you do this for us they didn't do it directly they did it through a third party and che said we are going to execute this man for either of two reasons one that he's a murderer and a torturer or two that he is an agent of the United States and he was executed the next morning the CIA chief of station there in Havana on hearing this said this is a declaration of war and so that is the beginning of the Cuban problems with the United States are the trials of these people who were involved in the political repression before the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship by March only three months after the triumph of the revolution and this is from the documentation that's come that's that's now available the National Security Council and Eisenhower were discussing ways to overthrow this government and replace it with people who were more mean to US interests and US desires that's only three months after the triumph well the CIA then was called upon to start training saboteurs people in explosives creating an underground engaging in propaganda against the revolution the main themes of course and these were continued for years was that the revolution had been betrayed that Batista was terrible but the Revolution itself had been betrayed and eventually that it was taken over by communists and so forth but this is happening very early on the very first year and by the end of 1959 the CIA is flying these what they call black overflights they're illegal over flights with cargo planes and they were dropping all sorts of supplies to a growing rebellion of contra revolutionary movement in the S cambrai mountains which is this rugged mountain chain on the South Central Coast this was before 1958 9:00 was over well as I mentioned that we were down at the farm by early 1960 and in March of that year we've down to three months but in March of that year 1960 Eisenhower signed the plan which would lead to the Bay of Pigs catastrophe and this was a plan to overthrow the revolution it had four parts to it one of them was to organize a unified political leadership outside Cuba and this they did in Miami with the so-called revolutionary Democratic Front the coordinator of which was Tony de Verona who had been the prime minister under the in the pre old government overthrown by Batista and 52 they also were called upon to initiate propaganda broadcasts and other propaganda activities directed or targeted at Cubans in Cuba one of the first projects or one of the first things that got going was radio swine this was a transmitter on Swan Island which is a Honduran possession in the Caribbean and it was full-time ante or counter revolutionary propaganda written all by the CIA the the corporation which supposedly owned radio Swann was based in New York City it was called Gibraltar steamship corporation never owned a boat but it was just a simple in front for the CIA for this operation one of the other parts of this program was to recruit and train an invasion force and that became Brigade to 506 they were they were recruited in Cuba and in Miami about 2,000 taken to guatemalan partly in Florida and then taken to Guatemala to a special camp built for the purpose in the western highlands and there they were trained through 1960 in the summer of 1960 I finished that training course and as there was so much emphasis on Latin America at the time because we were called upon in the CIA to to break and to to neutralize the influence of the Cuban Revolution which was so strong all over Latin America in May of 1959 you know Fidel announced one of the promises from before from the mountains and that was a very endure for the glory land tenure you know is the burning issue in Latin America it has always been that way since the conquest and it is known as the lucky frontier meaning frontier problem a lot of India being the expansive properties grazing lands and others many times large proportions of which are not even used a lie fallow these are owned by families or small in narrow interests the mini frontier problem is the proliferation of small plots that are so small that they are economically unviable for families and the rest of it is that there is a huge huge present tree in Latin America that has no land this is the burning question in Latin America because of the large peasant populations there who are marginalized from the ordinary lives of the country and who have no hope at all well the Cubans had the same problem and in May 1959 with the first agrarian reform they wiped out once and for all lotta fun dia in Cuba this affected us own lands because the best and the biggest properties were us owned and that was an another big step toward problems with the United States it didn't wipe out private property by any means it simply limited the size of the properties that could be held by any one individual or or company and it was generous but it was a fraction of these huge ranches and other properties that were owned by the United States and by large by Cuban large landowners anyway by by the summer of 1960 when I was assigned to the Western Hemisphere Division I was sent to the Venezuela desk the policy was that any new trainee just out of the program had to spend a year at least in headquarters on some kind of like they've considered it on-the-job training before you could be considered for an overseas overseas posting and naturally I was very eager and wanted to go overseas as quickly as I could but to my surprise into everybody else's supplies all of my friends and the fellow classmates there which I was not even working one month in headquarters after the training program when I was called in the division Chiefs office and asked if I would like to take a job which was open down in South America of course I could not say yes fast enough and I went into full-time Spanish training I had Spanish as matter of fact in high school in college but I went with a tutor full-time to be able to take over agents in Equador that was the country to which i was assigned as soon as I got down there and I integrated to the Department of State as a US diplomat a foreign service officer and before the year was out in early December 1960 I was down in Quito Ecuador in the US Embassy and I was taking over my first secret operations for the CIA I was all of 25 years old well down there at that time and into January and February we knew that evasion and invasion was coming but we didn't know when we were out of the loop in terms of the timing in January of 1961 just as he was turning over the presidency to Kennedy Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in anticipation anticipation of the invasion and he turned over the whole Cuban thing to - in fact Nixon did it because Nixon was the point man in the Eisenhower administration on Cuba and the whole question was turned over to Kennedy and eventually by April 15th or come April it looked like it was going to be coming pretty quick because the bloomingdales of Havana a big department store called El Encanto place where I had been in fact and visited when I was there in 57 it burned to the ground and there was other sabotage that was happening as a way of building up to the invasion I'll go back for just a second on assassinations because in that summer of 1960 when I finished the training course the CIA began their efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro was under the March Eisenhower plan and the plan was to use the Mafia you know the Mafia had controlled all of the rights in Cuba they had controlled the casinos and the numbers games and the drugs and the prostitution and they had been driven out of Cuba by the revolution early on they closed the casinos they took ten or twelve thousand prostitutes off the streets and sent them to be trained in textile manufacturing and so the Mafia had a lot to gain if it could get a toehold back in Cuba with the overthrow of the Revolution and so the CIA went to the Mafia went to Sam Giancana in Chicago the bomb of the boss in Chicago and his principal lieutenant Johnny Roselli and also to Santos Trafficante from my hometown in Tampa who had controlled the he'd been in charge of the all the stuff in Cuba the CIA gave some poison pills to Johnny Roselli who in turn gave them to Tony de Verona in Miami he was the coordinator of the political unified political front the FDR or frd and he Verona then gave them to some Cubans who were getting them who were going to get them into Fidel's food at a restaurant where he and Raul his brother the number two person and shade ate from time to time and this was the trio of Fidel Raul and che who were the Korean perennial candidates or targets for assassination by the CIA through many years for many years to come well the plan was to assassinate Fidel on the eve of the invasion and it wasn't one of the absolute conditions for success but that was the planet of course they weren't able to carried off but on April 15th we knew that it was coming because to b-26s these are twin engine light bombers of World War two vintage painted with the Cuban Air Force symbols landed in Florida one in Key West and one in Miami and there they claimed to be pilots defecting from the Cuban Air Force then actual fact were part of the Exile Air Force that the CIA had trained over in Nicaragua it was a period of the Somoza dictatorship you know and he did anything we ask and so the CIA set up a base at the Puerto Cabezas Airport vertical bases being the main Nicaraguan port on the Atlantic or Caribbean side and this base was given the by the CIA Happy Valley and there they trained Cuban pilots that gave them about 17 or 18 b-26s they gave them some c-54 transport planes and I think that was about the size of it these defecting pilots had been part of a force of nine or ten b-26s who raided the cuban air bases to try to wipe out with the mission of wiping out Castro's Air Force because one of the absolute conditions for success of this invasion was going to be a superiority over the beach at the Bay of Pigs which was the designated site for the landing they were coming over in six ships six or so ships and they had to hold a beachhead for 72 hours at the end of 72 hours the CIA would fly him the political leadership there was a small airstrip at the Bay of Pigs and they would fly in the political leadership from opa-locka a small marine base outside Miami and the CIA had these people under arrest there really they were being held incommunicado at the time of the invasion and they were to be flown in after 72 hours they would declare a government in arms they would be recognized recognized by the United States and then they would call on the US Marines for the United States for help and that would come in the form of a marine invasion the Marines were on ships just across the horizon at the time well the u2 for photography from Sunday the day after this April 15th ray showed that they had not gotten all of the Cuban Air Force they still had three i think t 33 trainers with machine guns they had about four British made sea furies which were a single-engine light fighter bombers and I think they had one b-26 left they had about eight planes left think over the first raid was so great especially at the United Nation it was totally transparent nobody believed that these were defectors from the Cuban Air Force that Kennedy did could not stand that he did not want to have the heat of another another second-rate prior to the invasion or the landing he said they could of course fly show support support once the landing had taken place but this decision of Kennedy's was one of the principal reasons why the invasion was a total failure in any case by the time these this first raid had occurred the ships had already left Puerto Cabezas with the invading force about 1,500 strong they had been flown from the basin Guatemala down to Puerto Cabezas where they got on the ships and the ships were loaded with weapons of all sorts with provisions everything they needed for those 72 hours or so coming up the ship's got through the designated area just after midnight on April 17th two days later and about one o'clock in the morning the landing craft began to go ashore well word got back to Havana and Fidel began sending large militia units and regular military toward the beach or toward that area it was surrounded by a very big swamp with only one Road coming in it was called the Siena the Cienega they sapota and so it was going to be pretty easy to defend with the artillery pieces and the mortars and so forth that the invasion force had but at the first light of dawn the Cuban Air Force took off and they began sinking the ships they sank all the major ships one of them was still a battalion of men on board and all the major weapons and the provisions went to the bottom and those ships that were not sunk were dispersed and so this landing force of Brigade two 506 was left on the beach alone within 72 hours it was all over the Cubans had taken I think around 1,400 prisoners and the whole thing was at an end Kennedy the next year in 1962 and cember ransomed there had been negotiations from the time of the Bay of Pigs on for ransom of the prisoners and Kennedy had finally sent a shipment of 52 million dollars worth of medicines and food to Cuba for the for the ransom and then the Cubans released these prisoners and they went back to the United States and many of them carried on long careers in terrorism of all sorts against against Cuban interests in various places including the murder of Cuban diplomats including the bombing bombing of the Cubano airliner in 1976 with 73 people aboard all of whom perished well I was in Ecuador at the time and I don't have enough time to go into all the things we did but our job our fundamental purpose there was too late the Cuban Revolution by inducing countries throughout Latin America or forcing them when necessary to break diplomatic and commercial relations with Cuba and to take repressive action against Cuba supporters in whatever country it happened to be and in Ecuador we fomented the overthrow of a government which was elected in 1960 it was overthrown in November of 1961 because the president would not break with Cuba the price President came in and he too would not break with Cuba so in early 1962 we organized we were we were a propaganda barajas were constant and overwhelming but these presidents refused and so we organized a series of bombings of churches in early 1962 of Catholic churches the most important ones around the country first there would be one here and there and we always left behind people this was done through right-wing political groups that were working with us we left behind propaganda from Cuba's main youth support group in Ecuador the revolutionary union of Ecuadorian youth and the bombs were not very strong they were noise bombs they didn't do much damage but they were perfect for creating headlines and for then bringing mass demonstrations out onto the streets in support of the Catholic Church and against Cuba and we fomented these bombings excuse me various places the major cities and they culminated in March 1962 with the bomb at the house the residence of the Cardinal in Quito he of course was not sleeping there that night but that too was headlines and we financed one of the largest demonstrations in the history of the capital city Quito through the political parties on the right they sent out trucks and buses and brought in casinos by the tens of thousands and what happened what we knew would happen did happen the main garrison in the south of the country at cuenca revolted and they gave the president of 72 hours to great with cuba he preferred the president preferred the prison presidential palace over exile in panama and so he broke with cuba and we had achieved what we were after the same president though refused to apply repression to the left even following the break with cuba and so we kept up all of these operations against him a whole series of provocative provocations in 1963 leading to another overthrow of the government and this time we got what we wanted which was a military junta and a military dictatorship within days of that all of these supporters of cuba and everyone on the left hundreds of people were arrested and in jail prison after the Bay of Pigs it's interesting to know it's important to know in fact that Kennedy decided to continue the war against Cuba right after the Bay of Pigs disaster Kennedy reported appointed and a commission to investigate what had gone wrong under general Maxwell Taylor his principal military advisor at the time and Taylor issued issued his report in June of 1961 in which it concluded he concluded and the whole committee concluded that the United States cannot in the long run live with the Cuban Revolution as a neighbor new ways have got to be found to overthrow the Revolution and so the CIA and other agencies formed a committee to write up a new plan which Kennedy approved in November 1961 justices first overthrow in Ecuador was happening and that became known as Operation Mongoose the men chosen to lead it was General Edward Lansdale who had become a legend in the CIA for his work in the Philippines and in Vietnam he had been sent to Vietnam to put down the Huq rebellion in the early 1950s and Huck bellhops were the principal resistance movement to the Japanese occupation of the Philippines they were communists and they laid down their weapons and went into politics after the war and were elected to the Philippine legislature in 1946 but they were not allowed to take their seats and political repression began against them just as a very similar thing happened in Greece in other places Korea South Korea and so they took the hills again and began the armed struggle it was fairly successful in Central Luzon and Lansdale was sent him to put it down and he did he was very successful and his man Ramon Magsaysay was elected president I mean he got him elected he was the CIA man and they bought the elections for him in 1953 Lansdale was then sent to vietnam to create popular support and a sort of a functioning country out of South Vietnam that had resulted from the temporary partition of Vietnam in 1954 which the United States made permanent he tried to form a political party for support to the gym regime and all these different operations with women's organizations with media with police and so forth and they failed and the failure of those secret CIA operations Michigan State University by the way was one of the principal factors there in training a police force in the nineteen fifties in south vietnam that was the cover in any case they failed and the failure was what required the introduction of military advisers in vietnam and then eventually the entire army of more than 500,000 very important to remember that the vietnam war came on the heels of failed CIA secret covered operations in Vietnam well in Cuba this operation Mongoose continued the assassination plots against Fidel Castro and Raul and Che and called for the overthrow of the another invasion and the overthrow of the Cuban government and revolution by October 1962 this was the date in the plan and the Cubans who had known everything about the Bay of Pigs practically but they had so effectively infiltrated the Exile community they had excellent intelligence and security services we respected them highly because of their level of effectiveness they had been working in this since the practically since Moncada and so they were there were services which were highly effective person responsible for that was Ramiro valdés who was the Minister of the Interior for for more than 15 years anyway they knew about this plan to overthrow the revolution by October 1962 and that is exactly what brought on the missile crisis because they went to the Soviets and the Soviets agreed to put intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba as a defense against this coming a fault from the United States and that is what led of course to the missile crisis of October 1962 and the only time that the world has come really very close within a hair of nuclear conflagration there's another example of what happens from these covered operations well I had I had come back to the United States for home leave at the end of 1963 I was transferring down to Uruguay where I would be in charge of Cuban operations and it was the station's highest priority there the Uruguayan's had refused to break diplomatic relations with Cuba and I went down there in April just as the CIA's operations to overthrow the civilian government in Brazil succeeded and there there was a from that on there was a that time on there was a 20-year military dictatorship institutionalization of torture and so forth in Brazil political assassinations to several within six months of my arrival in Ecuador I mean of early we had engineered the break and diplomatic diplomatic relations between Uruguay and Cuba in that year 1964 we succeeded in what we've set out to do in 1959 that is bring about the breaker diplomatic relations with Cuba by every latin-american country there was only one exception and that was Mexico Mexico is the only country that never broke with Cuba we carried on all kinds of other activities against Cubert recruiting their people were when they came through there I recruited for example a member of the Cuban national sugar board and from Cuba he reported to us on everything about the crop about the planting about the growth about the harvest about their marketing activities abroad and we could of course take steps all along the way it's getting to be 9:15 and I don't think I should go on very much longer but I do want to mention that biological warfare was another thing used against Cuba and as a matter of fact you know the cute Fidel survived as we all know these its assassination attempts the early the the investigation by the Senate of the CIA in the mid-1970s under Frank Church the democratic of Iowa Idaho came up with eight different CIA assassination plots against Fidel through the 60s I think but the Cuban government itself has presented the United States government with the evidence of more than 30 assassination plots through 1987 so they were continuing off and on all through the years Johnson well one thing that people should know also I think make a mental note of this in late November 1963 Kennedy sent a friend of his John Donyell the editor of nouvel Observateur said magazine published in Paris it's kind of like a French new Newsweek he sent him to as a secret emissary to Fidel to discuss ways in which relations with the United States between between the United States and Cuba might be relaxed and improved the kind of limited daytime he had made this decision during the course of 1963 following the Cuban Missile Crisis and John Donyell was sitting in Fidel's office discussing this when the person the staff person came in with the first news for Fidel that Kennedy had been assassinated that very same day November 22nd 1963 the CIA in Paris and this was Desmond Fitzgerald man I knew who is one of the highest officials in the key in the Cuban operations of the Cuban task force he passed a murder weapon to a Cuban whose name was Rolando Cabella in Paris it was a hypodermic syringe disguised as a ballpoint pen and it was to be loaded with a poison called black Li 40 and this man Phu Bella had access to Vidal he had been a student leader and he was official in the government with access to defeat al he was to stick him with this pin with this - Dermott and he never did it of course but he was eventually caught and sentenced I believe to 30 years in prison he was to be executed if he died personally intervened because he had they have been friends and he ain't got 30 years instead of the party Don but anyway that is a something which I think reflects or or touches on the Kennedy assassination in any case Johnson when he came into office made the remark that he had not known that we were carrying on a murder incorporated in the Caribbean and he in fact stopped the assassination attempts against Fidel partly I guess because of the Kennedy assassination but then they were started up again by Nixon who also started again started meteorological warfare against Cuba they seeded clouds over non agricultural areas causing downpours so there would be no rain over the cane fields there was also biological warfare at that time I was in Cuba on my first trip to Cuba following my resignation from the CIA in 1968 and if anybody wants to know just ask me during the discussion period about what happened to me and why I left and my ideas changed so dramatically but in 1971 I was in Cuba when the Cubans were slaughtering more than 500,000 pigs and pork is one of the main sources of protein in the Cuban diet but the CIA had introduced African swine fever that year and it spread all over the island African swine fever the first outbreak in the Western Hemisphere in this century and it was a CIA operation under Nixon Nixon reinitiated the assassination plots against Fidel he had of course been as I mentioned the man who supervised the anti Cuban operations during the end of the Eisenhower administration well we all know that the Cuban operations of the CIA boomeranged on Nixon because they were CIA trained people who were arrested Bergling the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington and so Nixon you know you remember he was so paranoid that he bugged himself and when the courts finally pried loose those tapes there was Nixon telling Haldeman his chief of staff right after the break-in and the arrest we've got to keep this contained we've got to cover this up it all leads back to the Bay of Pigs meaning Nixon's connections with the assassination of plots plots and the Mafia he had other connections with the Mafia through bebe rebozo and and other others of his cronies so that is why he decided had to cover it up and that eventually cost him his presidency Ford continued these activities he had George Bush as his CIA chief during Bush's watch Orlando Letelier that was assassinated on Embassy Row in Washington he had been the Chilean ambassador under IND to Washington he had also been Chilean defense minister for a while and he was a leader of the Chilean exile community in the United States his car was blown up and Cuban exiles trained by the CIA were involved in it and of course a week late no two weeks later the Cubano airliner was bombed after taking off from Barbados on his way back to Havana that was Ford and bush then under Carter things relaxed and Carter allowed the Cubans to establish a diplomatic mission in Washington and you at the State Department established a intersection in Havana for the first time since Eisenhower broken in 1961 these were not official embassies they were sections of other embassies of the Swiss Embassy in technically speaking it was the United States intersection of the Swiss Embassy in Havana and Washington technically it was the Cuban intersection of the Czech Embassy but in fact they were de facto embassies carrying on all the functions of that Embassy does and as an example while continuing with Carter and I'll get to this other point continued with Carter relations were relaxed they lifted the travel ban but in 1979 the Republicans got all over him led by the senator this right-wing ideologue from Florida senator Stone who made a big thing of a supposed sudden discovery of a Soviet combat Brigade in Cuba some of you will remember that the existence of this brigade in Cuba was known since the Missile Crisis but the Republicans made a thing about it and Carter was forced to to harden relations with cue and that is when the big military buildup began remember that Reagan simply continued and augmented and that was with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan but anyway relations with Cuba again soured and of course when Reagan and Bush came in in 1981 they got even worse and we know all know the latest outrage in this 35 year war against Cuba distorted Chile bill in which the United States has passed a law in which we presume to control and influence the regulate the trade of other countries basically because that law makes it a crime for any us-based that is any us any subsidiary of a us-based multinational corporation GM GE whatever it makes the claim for them to deal with Cuba to trade with Cuba and these subsidiaries of US companies had been trading with Cuba all along despite the the economic blockade and the trade was worth something like seven or eight hundred million dollars to Cuba before the law was passed it happened at Bush knowing it was against international law was against it but candidate Clinton in the spring of 1992 was running out of money in fact he had run out of money and he was hard up to continue the primary campaigns and so he goes down to Miami and he makes public statements with the right-wing Cubans around the Cuban national fountain Cuban American national foundation for Hamas and that group of quasi Nazis and he came out very strong in favor of the Tour de chelly bill which had not been passed yet the Cubans gave him $100,000 I believe and so he was able to continue with that Cuban money and he's beholden to the Cubans now it was eventually passed by Congress and George Bush signed it into law despite the fact that he was against it Canada has passed a law making a crime for any person in Canada to adhere to that US law the Mexicans have done the same the British have come out saying we will react very strongly to any company the British chartered company that adheres to US law and so have the French and various others so it has limited appeal to our closest allies but in any case it's passed and that is the latest cockroach I wanted to mention to you something about the effectiveness of the Cuban intelligence and intelligence and security services they have been very effective all through the years but one of the let's say the most effective and moving demonstration of their effectiveness occurred in the summer of 1987 in early July the Cuban foreign ministry delivered a diplomatic note to the US intersection in Havana saying that they were beginning that day and eleven part television series on subversive operations and espionage run out of the very intersection in Havana and so there was this eleven part series starting in early July on these operations run out of the intersection there were 27 to whom the CIA were running from the intersection believing they were working for the CIA where in actual fact they had been working for Cuban security from the very beginning 26 Cubans and one Italian the average number of years that these people had been working for the CIA for the Cubans was 15 years one had worked for them for 21 years and all of them had passed the lie detector test various times the programs were interviewed with interviews with these people telling about the experiences what they were called upon to do how much money they were paid and so forth but they were interspersed with film clips from hidden cameras of the American diplomats or the CIA men really from the US intersection there servicing dead-drops and for example they had one a man with his wife with a business picnic basket on a Sunday going out and parking their car in a an isolated spot and to get out of the car they look all around they carry the picnic picnic basket over into a very heavily vegetated area and then they plant of a they bury stuff in their communications equipment I think it was that time and then they come back with pictures back picking past it they look all around they get back in the car and they go off and all these stuff was filmed they had their hours of it from hidden cameras and so they got these CIA people on film doing these things I want to give you the he was the reaction of the United States to this this series the State Department replied about a week after this series started with the diplomatic note which said this program is and this is a quote from the diplomatic note another manifestation of the hostile environment with the government which the government of Cuba has created for United States diplomatic representatives in Havana this statement went on to denounce these programs as quote outrageous unwarranted surveillance and that the people identified in the programs another quote have been subjected to irreparable harm through this public slander the government of the United States will hold the government of Cuba strictly accountable if these quote-unquote revelations should lead to any violence against the persons whose names and reputations have been so recklessly abused in particular the security of the seven people who are still in Havana because there were seven people still working in the intersection who were in these films taken secretly anyway that's the same sort of sort of ridiculous outrageous indignation that they showed last week isn't it when the the Aldrich Ames case came out they could not believe that the Russians would do such a thing to the United States as to defend themselves yeah totally 100% defensive you know there was no aggressive factor of the United States they were getting information about what the United States was doing to screw them the Russians right and the United States is so indignant I could not believe it when I saw those calls in Congress for an end to aid well I'm gonna end here and simply mention this that we all know or I hope you know that Cuba is going through what they call a special period the last four or five years their capacity to import has collapsed it's dropped by 80% the transportation public transportation has been cut back by 70% their industry is operating at less than 50% capacity they are practically in a calamitous way there now and that is all the more reason why they need our support and our solidarity they are going through this period though with every indication that they're going to survive you know they have not had to close one single clinic one of the great achievements is that they have more doctors per capita than any other country in the world they have more teachers than any other country of the world per capita and they have not had to close one school the result I could not believe it in 1993 despite this calamity they were able to reduce reduce infant mortality from ten point two to nine point four that is deaths of one thousand live births that's one of the main indicators you know of public health and that is at a par with the United States and all the developed world and they do this on a per capita annual income of one thousand five hundred dollars according to the CIA's World Factbook for 1993-1994 1,500 dollars compared to twenty two thousand five hundred per capita income for the United States and in their life expectancy right now a male born has a life expectancy in Cuba of nine of seventy four years the United States seven to two years women in Cuba seventy-nine women in the United States 1792 so they have been successful certainly compared to the rest of Latin America and you cannot take him out of that context the Cuban Revolution and what's happened in Cuba and their form of government and so forth has got to be considered I think always within the context of Latin America well the other aspect of my trip here now and this is this is the last thing I want to say is that I am inviting you inviting people all over to come to Cuba in June the last week of June on the next travel challenge organized by global exchange my my tour just now has been organized in part by global exchange in San Francisco Tony Neumann is now going to speak to you about what global exchange is all about and what they're doing but they are sending people to Cuba in defiance of the ban on travel to Cuba they sent a group in October which he will tell you about and I am going to be on the group that with the group that goes in in late June the last week of June I'll fly it directly from Germany to from Hamburg to Havana and with that I'm going to turn it over to Tony Newman and I want to thank you all very very much for coming out here on Friday night and for your attention thank you