Camerado

Sixty-three years ago this month, President John F. Kennedy and Cuban Premier Fidel Castro were each targeted by the American national security state. The young Premier with overthrow and death. The young President with blackmail and betrayal, leading to his death 31 months later.

From 1952 to 1959, Fulgencio Batista was the face of Cuba's comprador class, fronting for what truly controlled the Cuban state and its destiny: U.S. corporations and the American mafia. Even as late as the autumn of '58, these American forces showed no concerns regarding a loss (or slippage) of control.



It was not to be, even though Vice President Richard M. Nixon took significantly more mob money in 1960 than did his opponent, arriving to Nixon via the Teamsters and the Howard Hughes/CIA crime combine.

(How stupid of Zelensky-pimp Francis Coppola to present "the mob" as the real power within the American deep state. "Bigger than U.S. Steel"? Yeah, that's why mob flunkies [among others] were hired to kill the man who defied U.S. Steel in April of '62.)



On New Year's Day 1959, Fidel Castro's revolutionary army at last took Cuba back for Cubans. (In an unfortunate accident, Batista was allowed to flee the island -- with tens of millions of dollars -- and live in exile until 1973.)

In May 1959, the new people's government enacted the Agrarian Reform Law -- limiting the size of farms to 3,000 acres and real estate to 1,000 acres. Any holdings over these limits were expropriated by the government and redistributed to peasants in 70-acre parcels, or held as state-run communes. The law also stipulated that sugar plantations could not be owned by foreigners.

February 1960: the Soviet Union provides Cuba with $100,000,000 in credit and signs an agreement to purchase sugar in exchange for oil.

July 1960: Eisenhower bans all imports of Cuban sugar.

August 1960: Castro nationalizes all U.S. oil refineries, sugar mills, electricity and telephone utilities.

January 3, 1961: lame-duck Ike ends diplomatic relations with Cuba and closes the American embassy in Havana. Two weeks later, he gives his renowned "military-industrial complex" warning speech -- coming from the man who allowed that complex to be formed in the first place, whose foreign policy was hijacked by the Dulles brothers, leading to the overthrow (or attempted overthrow) of democratically-elected governments in Albania, Iran, Laos, Guatemala, Burma, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Indonesia, British Guyana, while refusing to allow free elections in Vietnam. And sometime back in '60 -- not long after JFK accepted the Democratic nomination for President -- Eisenhower, Nixon, Allen Dulles, Henry Luce, John J. McCloy and other American capitalists decided to murder Fidel, his brother Raul, Che, and the revolution itself. Along with hopes for regime decapitation, CIA in that summer of '60 invented the Trinidad Plan: 2,000 anti-Castro "exiles" to land at daybreak on some Cuban shore, backed by American amphibious and air support.

What is now known as the Bay of Pigs invasion (and the Battle of Playa Girón in Cuba) would become new president John F. Kennedy's second Station of the Cross (Laos the previous month was his first), in Kennedy's road toward the Golgotha of Dallas. The same month he made clear his refusal to send American troops to Laos and his support for a neutralist Laotian government including the communist Pathet Lao, Kennedy cancelled CIA's Trinidad, while going along with the criminal invasion itself. The revised plan presented by CIA director Dulles and covert action chief Dick Bissell would land 1,200 "exiles" at night with no American military support, Bissell assuring Kennedy that no American air strikes would be necessary and that disaffected Cubans would join the brigade in a revolt against Castro and the revolution. Kennedy agreed, reserving the right to cancel the invasion at the last minute -- while repeatedly stressing to his intelligence and military commanders that no follow-up support by American troops or American hardware in case things went wrong would occur. He told CIA deputy director Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle would be Mayor of Dallas on 11/22/63) that the Cuban Expeditionary Force (using painted-over CIA airplanes) should be allowed to only launch airstrikes from a strip within the beachhead, an opportunity which never came because the "exiles" were not able to establish one.

The first betrayal by Kennedy's commanders was to insure that no cancellation by him would be possible. CIA's chief military adviser told the anti-Castro Cubans what to do in case of a last minute stoppage of the invasion: "If this happens you come here and make some kind of show, as if you were putting us, the U.S. advisers, in prison, then you go ahead with the program as we have talked about it, and we will give you the whole plan, even if we are your prisoners. Place an armed Brigade solider at each American's door, cut all communications with the outside, until we give the go ahead for when and how to leave for Trampoline base [the invasion's launching point in Nicaragua]." When Attorney General Robert Kennedy later learned of this contingency, he called it by its correct name: "treason."

John F. Kennedy did not stop the invasion. On April 15, 1961, Cuban airfields were bombed by "mystery planes" in order to destroy the revolution’s air force. Eight B-26 bombers attacked airfields at Ciudad Libertad, San Antonio de los Baños and Santiago de Cuba, destroying only a quarter of Cuba's fighter planes. The next day, 1,200 "exiles" landed at Playa Girón, where things began to fall apart immediately.

Kennedy realized he had been drawn into a trap. Daniel Schorr of CBS News attended a Havana conference on the 40th anniversary of the invasion:

"The CIA overlords of the invasion -- director Dulles and his deputy Bissell -- had their own plan of how to bring the United States into the conflict. It appears they never really expected an uprising against Castro, when the liberators landed. What they did expect was that the invaders would establish and secure a beachhead, announce the creation of a counterrevolutionary government, and appeal for aid from the United States and the Organization of American States. The presumption was that President Kennedy, who had emphatically banned direct U.S. involvement, would be forced by public opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots. American forces, probably Marines, would come in to expand the beachhead. In effect, Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed."

Kennedy was shocked by the trap: send in American combat troops to rescue the brave "exiles" or suffer a humiliating defeat before the whole world, the first by an American president since Pearl Harbor. CIA was shocked by his refusal to invade. After three days of fighting, the invading force was defeated by the Cuban army. In Havana, ten counterrevolutionaries were executed for treason. Two CIA agents captured a few days before the invasion were executed. All 1,200 "exiles" were captured or killed. The Battle of Playa Girón was a total victory for the Castro revolution, and for anti-American nationalist forces across the globe.

Kennedy was furious. He told aides Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, after it was over: "They were sure I'd give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the Essex [the Navy carrier waiting to launch airstrikes]. They couldn't believe that a new President like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong."

And he took steps. He created National Security Action Memorandum 55, stripping all military operations from CIA and handing them to the Pentagon. He cut CIA's budgets (in ever-increasing amounts) for years 1962, '63, and '64. He told his aides he wanted to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." "I have learned one thing from this business [the Bay of Pigs] -- that is, we will have to deal with CIA. . . no one has dealt with CIA."

He fired the four principal planners of the invasion: Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Richard Bissell, Deputy Director General Charles Cabell, and "executive action" commander William Harvey.

Dulles would later return to run the Warren Commission. And toward the end of his life, in an interview with Harper's Magazine writer Willie Morris, Dulles said something unprompted (and with vehemence): "That little Kennedy. . . He really thought he was President. He thought he was a God."

Far from thinking he was a God, John F. Kennedy lived with a raven on his shoulder. From an early age, death was his companion: lying in bed with scarlet fever as a boy, a chronic blood condition in boarding school, ulcers and colitis at Harvard, crippling back problems intensified by war injuries which plagued him until the end of his life, the early deaths of his older siblings Joe and Kathleen. Death was always a step away. He did not fear it.

What Kennedy came to fear, especially after the Bay of Pigs and the new knowledge of what he was up against, was not his own death, but the death of humanity -- by a nuclear war regularly pushed or willingly risked by most of his own national security state. Not long after the humiliations of the failed Cuban invasion, his secretary Evelyn Lincoln found a piece of paper fallen from his desk, with two lines in Kennedy's handwriting:

"I know there is a God and I see a storm coming.
If He has a place for me, I believe that I am ready."

The Cuban invasion forced upon him a terrible knowledge: that he was imprisoned by the demands of his own government. John F. Kennedy rebelled against the economic, political, and even spiritual powers which made up the walls of that prison. In the short span of his presidency, he compromised with those powers in many ways. (Allowing the Cuban invasion to go ahead was perhaps the worst compromise.) But in the end, especially though all of '63, he stood his ground -- and took the bullets.

Two days after his total defeat at Playa Girón, John Kennedy held a press conference:



The same day as the conference, in the first public appearance since the invasion, Fidel Castro formally declared the Cuban revolution as "socialist."

Sixty-thtee years later, it still is.

Happy Passsover

415

Takagi-san -- absolutely the best. 

 

Victory (for now)

End the Genocide State

 

Death to Amalek

Scott Ritter calls out The Devil.

Cheap Grace

 

The great Ed Curtin on the latest Hollywood celebration of yet another traumatized Jew:

Someday I will die and I wonder why, a mystery I have been contemplating since I was young. That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.

Trinity has shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has enkindled my days.

Sick minds play sick word games as they inflict pain and death. They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gadget,” as if it were an innocent little toy. They took and blasphemed the Christian mystery of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were. They thought they were the chosen gods.

Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.

Where are they now? Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Where are the just and the unjust?

Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their doomsday machines for a rerun, the final first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living?

Joe Biden, the second Roman Catholic president, while mocking the essence of Jesus’s message, pushes the world toward a nuclear holocaust, unlike JFK, the first Catholic president, who was assassinated by CIA for pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War.

But to be born at a time and place when your country’s leaders were denouncing their German and Japanese enemies as savage war criminals while execrably emulating them and then outdoing them is something else again. With Operation Paperclip following World War II, the United States government secretly brought 2,000 or more Nazi war criminals into the U.S. to run our government’s military, intelligence, space, chemical, and biological warfare programs. We became Nazis.

There are always excuses for such moral corruption. When during WWII the U.S. firebombed almost all Japanese cities, Dresden and Cologne in Germany, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in gratuitously savage attacks, these were justified and even celebrated as necessary to defeat evil enemies. Just as Nazi war criminals were welcomed into the U.S. government under the aegis of Allen Dulles who became the longest running CIA director and the key to JFK’s assassination and coverup, the diabolic war crimes of the U.S. were swept away as acts of a moral nation fighting a good war.  What has followed are decades of U.S. war crimes from Korea through Vietnam and Iraq, etc.  A very long list.

The English dramatist Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Address, put it bluntly:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force  for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Nothing could be truer. When in 2014 the U.S. engineered the coup in Ukraine (coups being an American specialty), it allied itself with neo-Nazi forces to oppose Russia. This alliance should have shocked no one; it is the American way. Back in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting death squads in Central America, Ronald Reagan told the world that “The Contras are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.”  Now the Ukrainian president Zelensky is feted as a great hero, Biden telling him in an Oval Office visit that “it’s an honor to be by your side.”  Such alliances are not anomalies but the crude reality of U. S. history.

But let me return to “Trinity,” the ultimate weapon of mass destruction since I was reading a recent article about it.

Kai Bird, the coauthor of  American Prometheus, the book that inspired the new film Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist credited as “the father of the atomic bomb” and the man who named the first atomic bomb Trinity, has written an Op Ed piece in The New York Times titled, “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” This article is an example of how history can be slyly used to distort the present for political purposes. In typical NY Times fashion, Bird tells certain truths while concealing, distorting, and falsifying others.

Oppenheimer was not a tragic figure. He was a hubristic scientist who cared only about getting ahead and who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to maybe restrain itself in the future.  Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical or big tech industries to regulate themselves.

Bird rightly says that Oppenheimer did not regret his work inventing the atomic bomb, and he correctly points out the injustice of his being maligned and stripped of his security clearance in 1954 in a secret hearing by a vote of 2 to 1 of a security panel of The Atomic Energy Commission for having communist associations. “Celebrated in 1945 as the ‘father of the atomic bomb,’” Bird writes, “nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.”  A “victim,” one should add, who named names to save his own skin, much like Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and similar ilk.

But tucked within his article, Bird tells us: “Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.” By which he means poor little officials like Anthony Fauci who were maligned when they gave the public correct scientific information.  Absurd.  Fauci and other government “civil servants” misinformed the public and lied over and over again, but Bird implies they too were "tragic figures" like Oppenheimer.

He writes:

We stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation. Our politicians need to listen more to technology innovators like Sam Altman and quantum physicists like Kip Thorne and Michio Kaku.

Here too he urges “us” to listen to the very people responsible for Artificial Intelligence, just as “we” should have listened to Oppenheimer after he brought us the atomic bomb. Implicit here is the belief that science just marches progressively on and on and there’s no stopping it; and when dangerous technologies emerge from scientists’ work, we should just trust them to control them. Nowhere does Bird suggest that scientists have a moral obligation before the fact to not pursue a certain line of research because of its grave possible consequences.

Finally, and most importantly, Bird begins his concluding paragraph with these words:

Today, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are a stark reminder that we can never be complacent about living with nuclear weapons.

Nothing but gutter U.S. propaganda. The U.S. has provoked and fueled the war in Ukraine, broken all nuclear weapon treaties, surrounded Russia with military bases, stationed nuclear weapons in Europe, engaged in nuclear blackmail with its first strike policy and threats, etc. Putin has said in response that if – and only if – the very existence of the Russian state and land is threatened with extinction would the use of nuclear weapons be considered.

“Barely six weeks after the Hiroshima-Nagsaki bombings,” Michel Chossudovsky tells us, “the US War Department [Pentagon] issued  a blueprint  (September 15, 1945) to ‘Wipe  the Soviet Union off the Map’ (66 cities with 204 atomic bombs), when the US and the USSR were allies. This infamous project is confirmed by declassified documents.”

Back to Bird, who, in writing a piece about Oppenheimer’s “tragedy” and defending science, has also subtly defended a trinity of other matters: the government “science” on Covid, the transformative power coming from AI, and the U.S. propaganda about Russia and nuclear weapons. No mention of JFK’s call to abolish nuclear weapons. This is how the “paper of record” does its job.

And now the upcoming plunge into night for day with the solar eclipse is the next great big thing to see. A plunge into the heart of darkness that is apposite to the dark heart of U.S. foreign policy with its ruthless power, craven terror, and pride in killing.  It is uncanny how the darkness of social life today is reflected in the promotion of a natural event as if it were a must-see film that has just won the Oscar.

It is understandable why in retrospect the great Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s first report from Hiroshima was so widely censored and why he was for many years portrayed as a communist dupe, even as twenty years later his honest reports from Vietnam were so important for those interested in the truth that the mainstream media blacked them all out.  The exposure of America’s ongoing war crimes was for decades blamed on communist influence, just as today it is blamed on Russian propaganda.

But now it’s time for a Hollywood flick to give us crocodile tears from the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The imprisoned and executed German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison before he was executed by Hitler for opposing Hitler’s mass atrocities, called such subtle self-glorification “cheap grace.” It is grace we bestow on ourselves, forgiveness without requiring repentance, feats of self-glorification mastered by Hollywood.

A biopic of one man is a far cry from Wilfred Burchett’s article, The Atomic Plague: “I write this as a warning to the world.”  But then the Academy Awards’ ongoing support for Ukraine (and its refusal to condemn the ongoing Zionist genocide in Gaza) in its U.S. proxy war against Russia – a war rooted in the 2014 U.S. engineered coup and NATO’s encircling of Russia – is just the opposite: a provocation that makes nuclear war much more likely.  It’s a sick celebrity game. Anyone who would give the name Trinity to the site where the first bomb was exploded had a sick mind.

Oppenheimer, which excludes scenes from the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but includes one wherein scientists rapturously celebrate with flag waving the exploding of the bomb over Hiroshima, recently opened in Japan. The New York Times(!) published a piece about the opening that contains various Japanese reactions, including one from Yujin Yaguchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, that accurately raises a fundamental issue: the film “celebrates a group of white male scientists who really enjoyed their privilege and their love of political power. We should focus more on why such a rather one-sided story of white men continues to attract such attention and adulation in the U.S. and what it says about the current politics and the larger politics of memory in the U.S (and elsewhere).”

Exactly. The issue is political, not aesthetic. Why it is good to see some flickering images and not others? Why is night for day and the blocking out of the sun by an eclipse so good but the reminder that we are on the edge of a nuclear eclipse because of the policies of our dark-hearted leaders is not?

Chase the light!  As Oliver Stone writes in his memoir, “One of the first basic lessons in filming is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing. . . .”

It’s true in life as well. We live in the flicker.

So if we are to celebrate the dawn of a new day on earth, paradoxical and contradictory as it might sound, we do need to look into the darkness – the heart of the darkest and demonic crimes committed by our heartless leaders – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the genocide in Gaza, the escalating and expanding war in the Middle East, and the U.S proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, to name just a few.

And if the contemplation of the eclipse of the sun disturbs you enough to impel you to do so, a quick peek won’t hurt.

Girl II

What a wonderful word. Defamed and discarded along the road toward the Corporatist takeover of feminism, then restored to mean quite the opposite of its original sense (girlzzzz = Skanks with Attitude), it embodies a nature yielding, but only toward for what it yearns. Modest and proud; somewhat lost and incomplete. Warm; earnest; open. Seeing the glass as half-full rather than half-empty. Wondrous. Kind. Fetching. And a warrior.

Here's a classic: the young Elinor Donahue in a funny, moving and very lovely episode of FKB, "Betty Hates Carter" from Christmas Week 1955. (That's Robert Easton as the goofy and very lucky object of affection.)

Girl

Please let it stop raining!

Stan Getz and the Gilbertos 60 years on. . . .

Minor Meeting

Major, actually. Sonny Clark on piano, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Clifford Jordan on tenor, Pete LaRoca on drums -- March 29, 1959.

Easter in the Land of Satan

Did you notice this morning how Google, which marks every "achievement" since time began so long as it is not one by a white straight Christian male, can't even acknowledge Easter with any sort of graphic? Nope, just two tiny words.

 

And did you notice how brain-dead vegetable Biden -- as fake a Catholic as has ever existed -- announced that today is not Easter Sunday? No, rather it is Transgender Visibility Day.

Life

The greatest ending to a 20th-Century movie, the most moving, the most profound.

A beloved wife, mother, daughter and sister has died in childbirth. Her surviving younger daughter asks her uncle -- who believes he is Jesus Christ -- to bring her back from the dead. He does, and the mother returns with new, and terrible, understanding.



A brilliant essay by Chris Fujiwara on the Dreyer masterpiece.

Cui Bono

It was CIA/MI6. Of course, it was CIA/MI6.

 

Vinyl

WKRP in Cincinnati (1978 - 82) has been lost to us. A late-60s spirit fighting the crest of pre-Reaganism, the show premiered only weeks after the California passage of Proposition 13 -- the tolling bell of our Big Dark to come (a Big Dark now lasting over 40 years). Reagan would, literally, kill it. Episodes considered outrageous by members of The Administration caused complaints to be made personally to the always whorish Bill Paley. CBS immediately gave WKRP's skulduggery the ax.

And CBS is still giving it the ax. The first season DVD release was beheaded: "Music rights are too expensive" say the Viacom Vampires, especially for a politically progressive series set inside a small rock-and-roll radio station. Most songs were eliminated or replaced by synthesizer versions. Because of a fan boycott, there have been, and will be, no more releases. Good for the fans.

The Reaganistas went particularly bananas over "Who is Gordon Sims?" -- featuring the great Tim Reid. (Reid's strangled-in-its-crib masterpiece Frank's Place [1987 - 88] has also been disappeared due to "music clearance" issues.) Through the looking-glass: "Who is Gordon Sims?" is a peek into a moment when one could get and keep a job without feeling like the FBI was closing in.

(Due to some fine people on the internet, the episode is restored, complete, with original sound and songs.)

Monsters