WEIRD AND MORE WEIRD EVENTS IN THE USA

CURRENT events in the USA bring to mind the last days of the CIA invasion of Cuba back in the 60s. There was the swirl of absolute BS at that time, with guns lined up on American beaches, tales of brave pilots who had escaped with their lives and their planes from Cuba, mysterious references to code phrases using symbolic language about "the fish", there was a bunch of news items every day. But in the last days, just as we heard about the landing in the Bay of Pigs, it seemed nothing could stop the news stories about Cuban farmers running down to the beach to attack the CIA troops (actually mercenaries) with long knives used to cut sugar cane erupting out of the Radio.

But that was the weird thing. In the very media that was carrying the American propaganda line we also saw each of these stories burned to a crisp within hours. The most spectacular was the way newsmen at Miami stormed over the story of the brave pilots and tore it to shreds in 6 hours, with a series of news flashes to the radio and TV audience as each item emerged from the furious struggle of truth against fiction. I remember so clearly how one newsman went out to look at one of the escaping planes and denounced the story after he had seen the calibre of the bullet holes stitched across the belly of one plane.

But all this came to a riveting climax late one night as a newsman came on the radio, broadcasting from New York, and it was one of the main media network corporations. I heard the words, strong and clear coming over the radio from a studio high in a New York building: "....it is now believed the entire operation was organized, financed, and led by the CIA...". The news reader sounded confident, as though he stood at the head of a very large organization, and this that he spoke was the "word". I guess in retrospect he did, and it was.

And that was it, since the whole murderous attempt to wrench the history of Cuba away from the people and hand it back to US commercial interests and gangsters foundered in a furious episode of hand to hand combat on a Cuban beach. We later saw footage of flashing knives and bodies floating in the surf, we heard on the radio many voices crying "We are with you Fidele" (as later translations identified) and saw people not dressed like soldiers running in small groups down the beach as the invaders tried to swim away.


Well the Cubans were surely very brave and very, very together. But look, at the American media, it worked very well on that occasion. And there was something about the way it worked, so much like a storm tide swelling up the beach in powerful wave after wave, that is much like what is starting up now in the USA. Maybe there is something about human history we completely miss with our restless search to nail down the facts and lay them out in proper order before we announce conclusions. We have to do this, it is our duty as human beings, and this task well done becomes the foundation of true history. But there are times, as Thomas Paine said, that "try men's souls" and I think this is when the big waves come roaring up the beach.

Decline and fall of the CIA invasion was far more significant to me than the Missile Crisis, which seemed staged on all sides like an opera, All very predictable and after the first days a bit boring.


But the Bay of Pigs was something else. And I suspect, well, I hope, we are moving very quickly into another one of those historical moments when murder, and the truth will out. The great lie that is being fostered now is that there is any reason at all for the USA to invade, or more likely, bomb Iran. There is large and reasonable suspicion that there is a plan to use nuclear weapons, the very thing that Bush claimed he wished to invade Iraq to stop the use of , weapons of mass destruction. We need a high tide of truth about Bush, the USA, the truly destructive role of Israel, and an accounting for the millions that have been slaughtered by the US doomed pursuit of Empire, and we need the truth to to come out now.


And surely the Cubans are entitled, at long last, to recovery of their property at Guantanamo. There is a need to destroy all the recent constructions there,and for the ground to be plowed with salt. I hope that time comes soon as well. But that needs a big change in American policy, so I guess it has to be a very big wave indeed.