Back to Cuba

“What do you want me to do—make them all Jews?”

                                                   Desi Arnaz

I just returned home from Miami where I was pleased to see so much compliance with federal guidelines related to CDC. The Cuban influence is clearly present and my timing was great since I started a book about the Mafia, JFK, Castro, and Sinatra by Thomas Maier. There was much more to feast my eyes on. The first hundred or so pages should make one think of the “Golden Shower” as the author repeatedly tells US that the Mafia knew it had something on Jack Kennedy. The whole history supports a quick conclusion about Donald Trump which is getting particularly close to the assessment that we have been learning from the press, intelligence, and even from the Don himself. How many times have I described Trump as a capo in the past?

My target audience right now should be the people of Florida who delivered victory to Trump in 2020 in that state and who should find out more and more about the Trump-DeSantis Connection which is corrupt in its own way. The corruption back in the 1960s was all over our nation as the heads of crime families worked closely with law enforcement and the F.B.I. continued to have its head in the sand as it did back in the 1930s when Hitler could have taken over America. J. Edgar Hoover and his F.B.I. were hostile to the C.I.A. much the way that England’s intelligence network contributed to very positive things and to double agents working with the Nazis in France and other places. A full exposé is needed today of what is going on.

On a personal note, I loved the movie Robin and His Seven Hoods that Sinatra starred in and the song My Kind of Town (Chicago is) was a big hit in it. Sinatra played a crime boss. Sammy David, Jr. had an amazing dance routine on a bar in that moment that topped the charts. I later got to know on the phone and in person one of Sammy’s best friends who was a pallbearer at Sammy’s funeral. Mark Warren was the first African American to win an Emmy for directing. What was the show? It was Laugh In which starred Rowan and Martin. Dan Rowan is featured in the book since he was having a love affair with one of the girlfriend of one of big Mafia heads and Rowan terminated that affair with Phyllis McGuire because he didn’t want to end up in a lake. My family loved the McGuire sisters in the 1950s and Her Sugar in the evening was Sam Giancana.

Castro survived tons of assassination plots, but the C.I.A. was intent on doing him in by using bond methods, James Bond. It didn’t work, obviously. Richard Nixon knew about this stuff as he was briefed as part of the Eisenhower White House. The Bay of Pigs-Assassination combo did not include a mojito and failed badly. Fewer than 1.500 Cuban nationals in exile surely counted on support internally which never showed up and this did not resemble in any way the great resistance in France during World War II against the occupation by the Nazis. There were potentially 400,000 Cubans to face. And Nixon regretted staying on the sidelines instead of speaking out to Kennedy and we regretted more about Nixon later on after he replaced JBJ.

Castro probably would have been a great friend of JFK had he been a Batista-like dictator who was just ready and willing to rubout Batista, but he soon sided with the communists after taking over. The Mafia had lost its casinos in Havana to Castro and wanted to take him out, but they also knew that they had the early “golden shower” claim on Kennedy whose family gathered often in Palm Beach, Florida and knew Mafia leaders. Joe Kennedy would have loved Castro if Castro had not been a communist, I think. What do you think? And with much better political and economic relations between Kennedy and Castro, they most certainly could have shared some of the same  women. Marilín Monroe would have been a great nightclub act in the San Souci before being fidel to Castro in the executive suite. And she could have gone to the john for an hour or so to join Jack in another room. Two candles burned out among the three and Castro won.

Singing the song High Hopes, Sinatra had high hopes for Kennedy and was a major part of his campaign. And he won at the craps table in November 1960. The road appeared to be wide open for the Mafia through all of this. And sixty years later, the Cubans have little or nothing to show for all of this as they listen to intense party rhetoric. How on earth can the most powerful nation in the world and even recently with that orange haired strongman not deliver Cuba back to its people in exile and those who have had high hopes all those years? Back in the 1960s it was the Soviet Union, the atomic bomb, and the threat of World War III. Today there is no Soviet Union, but there is no puttin’ around with Putin, the atomic bomb it has, and the threat of World War III. It’s insane, just insane.

Sinatra became animated at the strong objections of Sam Giancana to the television show The Untouchables and talked about killing its producer. In a confrontation with that producer, Desi Arnaz of Desilu Productions famous for I Love Lucy and a giant in television in its day, Sinatra calmed down and could not even punch a man who had been his pal for years. Those strong objections were over the portrayal of Italians in organized crime who were hunted down by Eliot Ness of the F.B.I. played by Robert Stack.

Cubans, for example, were allowed in the United States in large numbers and there were elected officials ready to exclude Latin Americans from entering the United States. Southern Democrats with isolationist Republicans along with some others were the problem. By 1965 under Lyndon Johnson that changed. That doesn’t mean that those Cubans and their relatives absolutely owe the Democratic Party because there is much more going on today than that. It does mean knowing that history, much more history, and paying close attention to the candidates. All of us deserve much better, whether or not we are well informed. But we should try to be much better informed about matters of politics, particularly the immense amount of conspiracy theories taking place.

I must share one more important piece of information to explain where things went wrong and continue to go wrong. Back in the 1960s the two Mafioso cited were men who never completed more than the sixth grade and one was an “illegal” resident of our nation who was afraid of being deported. In Palestine, it was written in the last week, that the youth doing much of the protesting and causing or committing violence are uneducated and live under poverty in communities with easy access to drugs. Crime in America has been generated by gangs including the gangs of the Central American Triangle of nations. I had the plan to diminish all that fifteen years ago and nobody listened to me. I did telephone conference calls with people from Chicago to bring about badly needed change there through education. The so-called progressives there and elsewhere, without their realizing it, are just as bad as conservatives and Repugnicans who seem to only desire “law and order” and no “open border” for our nation. We have had very bad leadership for generations and we can expect more until we have an open national forum on what is needed. And I can tell you that some of these messages have been blocked repeatedly by our nation’s press which could have and should have done much more.

As a quick example of change that is needed, I call upon the White House now to address these critical issues with the United Nations and expect to see action sometime this year. I should have had such a conference at the United Nations years ago as I brought it up with a man who was the former ambassador of El Salvador to the United Nations. This important initiative, too, should be addressed with the presidents of those nations and Mexico immediately.

And Back to Cuba did not work under The Donald, that strongman who accomplished very little with his strong rhetoric.