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Class is in session. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Unlearn 16. Class is in session. Guys. Today we're going to go to Cuba. We're going to go to Cuba because I honestly believe that the more that I do these back histories, and I. And I do mean very old pieces of historical data that people have kind of gleamed on or have little bits and pieces, the more that you can see the whole picture, the more you can understand how the international system works, the more you can understand the United States's role, the more you can understand the driving force that is either colonialism or imperialism. And again, I don't think I can make all the judgments in the world. In. In all fairness, I think it's. I think it's very easy to judge the countries that sit in those powerful positions the way that I tend to judge the United States. However, here's the problem, and this has always been the case. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I firmly believe that. I firmly believe that having a multitude of middle powers makes a lot more sense in an international system in order to have one that promotes more peace, more stability, more. More. More significant progress in the future. When we have superpowers. When we have superpowers, they tend to be the ones that are wielding so much power with no care, with no concern, with no serious expectation of a backlash, and they do so with impunity. And that's because the rest of the countries can't formulate enough of a stance in order to stand firmly opposed. We decide who the good guys and the bad guys are. We make our stances and. And we solidify our alliances, and those alliances don't always benefit everybody else. And I'm going to be very, very honest. Superpowers maybe have brought great things to this world, but I promise you, they have brought great things with great uncertainty, with an imbalance of power and a lack of justice that will catch up to us all. And the only reason I'm not sitting here condemning Canada as. As hard as other countries, because we never sat in the seat. I want to be clear about that. Okay, so what I want to talk about today is Cuba. I'm going to go back to. I can't go so far back. Spain colonized Cuba for all intents and purposes and wiped out the entirety of their indigenous population. There are no people indigenous to Cuba because Spain wiped them. Spain colonized and wiped them out so completely that Cuba was Spanish by all, all means, all right? And as Cuba was a colony of Spain, eventually, as do all colonies, they want freedom, not necessarily Freedom, because they don't have any alliances or similarities with their colonial masters, but because especially when you fill it with people from the country at which you are the masters of, those people understand the rights, the freedoms and the. The demands that they should be allowed to have. How do you think you got the United States of America? You got the United States of America because you had a bunch of British people, very wealthy British people, go over, start a bunch of businesses, make a bunch of money, and then watch it all leave the colony knowing full well what their rights were. So I'm going to skip ahead from colonization, from the slaughter, from. And I'm going to skip right until 1898, which was the Spanish American War. So in 1898, Spain wanted to, or, sorry, Cuba wanted to have their independence, okay, from Spain. So they fought against Spain to develop their independence. Now here's the best part. In order to gain their independence, they leaned in 89, 1889, heavily on a very geographically close and economically aware United States of America. Okay? You got to know that in 1898, America's really starting to come into their own, right? They're starting to pretend to be this. You have the Monroe Doctrine. We're going to free everybody. We're going to take care of everybody as long as our interests are there. And Cuba's 90 miles off the coast of Florida, so their interests are clear. Their proximity to the United States is impressive, and what's on the island is actually quite impressive as well. So the United States free them, and as soon as they gain their independence, the United States then occupies them until 1902. Why? Well, a couple reasons. Number one, they're now a colony of the United States, full stop. Full stop. And by. I mean what I mean by a colony, because it's not in the pure sense anymore. The United States did something and has been doing something that is quite brilliant that the British Empire never did. The British Empire colonized with their military, then their education, then their. Their language, then their. All of their culture, right? They went full send into each at some point. The sun never sat, like never set on the British Empire because they own 25% of the known world. The United States understood that colonizing militarily and occupying places and forming governments and establishing a level of control and thus actual connection to those people and then a dependency or a responsibility to that population that was too expensive. There was no need to colonize like that. The better way, the cleaner way, the cheaper way was to descend McDonald's. And I mean that with no disrespect to McDonald's. I mean, maybe a little bit, but I mean that in a metaphoric way. Meaning I am going to send business owners, business leaders. I am going to send individuals that want to make a boatload of money. I am going to send them to these places. They are going to establish an imperialistic connection. Just wait till I talk about what goes on in South America. They're going to establish an imperialistic connection. And that imperialistic connection is going to allow the majority the lion's share of the natural resources and the money to be siphoned from that particular territory, head back to the United States. All while under the illusion the pretense everybody's doing really, really well. We're just making money, we're just good capitalists here. Everybody be on their day. So the United States occupy Cuba and they make Cuba include something called the Platt Amendment in their constitution. And the Platt Amendment basically guarantees the United States the right to intervene at any point into Cuban affairs, to restrict foreign policies, to make the right deals, to be a protecting force of Cuba in the international system. Technically they colonized them. They colonized them without ever having to put a single dollar or a single individual on Cuban territory. They virtually said, we're your daddy now. Right? And as they did this, the Cuban people did not benefit. So what ends up happening is the United States ends up forming these incredible ties with, with Cuba. And they send businessmen over to the sugar plantations, tobacco plantations, mining plantations, they, they owned utility companies. U.S. business leaders basically were the entire Cuban economy. And all of the lion's shares of the profits went right out of Cuba and into American business owners pockets. Now that's only going to last for so long because the people of a country are going to start to, to have an issue with and take issue with, rightly so that the places they're working at, the places they depend on, the places that are integral to their everyday lives and their job, they're not actually making money. It's not making Cuba any better. It's barely paying them a livable wage while siphoning out the lion's share of the profits out of country. And so what ends up happening is the United States through this particular mess, ends up supporting dictatorial regimes such as the Batista regime, not the cool baseball player that the Blue Jays used to have. They end up supporting this level of dictator and, and corrupt business leader that has made ties and has made connections with American businessmen in order to bolster, in order to protect, in order to solidify their power and their economic interest in Cuba, all the while oppressing the rest of the actual Cuban people below. This doesn't last for long, right? Now, did it make the United States a boatload of money? Of course it did. Of course it did. And are some people going to say, well, they weren't Spanish colony or Spanish colony because that was happening to them? Sure. But again, it's like cheer trading baseball cards. Who owns Cuba now? So all of this injustice leads to the Revolution 1959, led by Castro. Now we can debate communism and capitalism all we want. We can talk about how. How Castro did some good things, how he eventually turned into this horrible dictator again. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I promise you that is true. No matter if you're talking about a capitalist or a communist. The reason why the revolution happened is what we should be focused on. Because the people of a country were so, so angry and so desperate to kick out the regime that was oppressing them and benefiting a foreign country. They were willing to take anybody who was going to step in next any other form of economic, sort of structure that would then be imposed upon them. They didn't care. They were sitting in a place where this wasn't a viable, useful system. Desperate people will do anything. And what I want to get at here is, as we go through this whole thing, when you allow any country, the United States included, to wield a foreign policy with absolutely no check or balance on said foreign policy, when, when the only two people playing in the sandbox are going to be the Soviets and the. And the Americans, and they're going to fight about as we're going to get to the Cold War. They're going to fight about what Cold War issue is more, you know, beneficial to them. The people will rebel. So Castro has a revolution, turns it to communism. Here's what he does. And here's the worst part, obviously, to all Americans and all American business owners. He nationalizes all of those things they own. He takes it all away, billions of dollars. He takes it all away. It is no longer yours. It was sold out. You stole it. You took us at a weak point. You took our natural resources. You installed a dictator to oppress us. So you would continue to be able to siphon this out. Now, the Americans upset, the American government upset, the American business leaders upset. And we all know which one has more power there in order to force new political leadership. So they put immediate. They sever trade, they sever all diplomatic relations. They put huge embargoes on Cuba. And you know what that does instantaneously it pushes, it drives Cuba in order to find other alliances. And in 1959, guess who they're going to find? They're going to find the Soviet Union. Now this is only going to be made worse with the Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA led a Bay of Pigs invasion, attempts to overthrow Castro. It's an utter disaster. It's another disaster for a couple reasons. Eisenhower orders it. JFK then comes into power, doesn't want to send air support but sends the men anyways. They get absolutely decimated. But this action by the United States in order to overthrow and topple a publicly windfall like a leader that the public supports on mass is going to push them into the hands and into the, the protection of the Soviet Union in opposition to the United States. Now let's, let's also clarify dead in the middle of the Cold War. The Cold War is a battle and I'm going to say this for the people at back because heaven help me if people don't understand this. The Cold War is a battle of economic ideology, not political. Meaning the United States would support many a dictatorship as long as they were capitalist loved. Batista has loved dictator after dictator as long as they play by the right capitalist rules which include allowing American business interests back into the country to take over the resources they once took in the first place. And this battle back and forth will culminate in the Cuban missile crisis 1962. Now the Cuban Missile Crisis is one of my, I don't want to say favorite because that sounds horrible because it was terrifying. But as a time period there's a, there's a movie called the Thirteen Days. Thirteen Days and it's based on Rob, Robert McNamara's actual journal. So it's, it's very relatively true to life from what I've read and it really documents what went on during that particular crisis. So to, to sum up, Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of Florida, everybody's terrified about nuclear weapons. The United States still to this day the only country to ever drop nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Right after that, the Soviet Union procures, invents, has a nuclear arsenal on their own. And you start seeing a huge nuclear arms race be built up between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. The, the Soviet Union now is trying to place nuclear missiles in strategic locations in order to make them, you know, a true threat to the United States. Now when JFK steps into the ring, he wants to de escalate all of the nuclear armament he wants. He's considered to Be soft on Communism, which people don't like. He gets on the phone with Khrushchev, has a line put in the Oval Office in order to have a direct link, to try to minimize the expansionist nature of the Cold War and especially minimize the explosive nature of nuclear proliferation. And at some point, he's sitting in a cabinet meeting, and I'm not going to specify dates and whatever because I don't know how much that matters. We get wound up in dates and times and we miss the bigger picture. At some point, somebody says, Khrushchev, the Soviets are putting nuclear warheads on Cuban soil. This is an intelligence gathering. He says, there's no way. He gets on phone with Khrushchev. Khrushchev talks him out of it, says, absolutely not, Mr. President. Kennedy sits in front of his cabinet and says, I just spoke to Khrushchev. He assures me there are no nuclear weapons on Cuban soil. You have nothing to be worried about. He vouches for Khrushchev to his own cabinet, and in a very short order, you have spy flip plane photos put directly on his desk that show Khrushchev was lying. And there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 nuclear missiles being offloaded from a Soviet warship onto Cuban soil. Kennedy gets this. Now we understand the damage to a. To an ego that has made a statement, and it made a very public one, right? So Kennedy, at this point, and there's also obviously the threat of nuclear war, and it was very real and probably never as real before or since than, than during the 13 days. So, so all of this is happening and he's. He's livid. He's like, that's it. Bomb them. Do whatever you got to do. Get them done. Let's go. Let's go. Bobby Kennedy, from all reports, is the guy that calms him down. Bobby Kennedy's his brother, uses attorney General. He says, you can't do that. You fire, they fire, we all lose. We need another option. So he talks Kennedy into building a naval blockade around Cuba. In my head, I think Red Rover, but it's probably a little bit more of a game of chicken. If you don't know what Red Rover is, you're not living in the right, you know, generation. Pony up, give it a go. It's a horribly dangerous game that kids play. So he puts warships all around Cuba, tells Khrushchev, take your missiles out of Cuba or else. You then have this 13 days of build up. You also have Khrushchev, who's also working the same line, but Back at his own cabinet meeting, back at his own table, back with his own people telling him he's being soft on the United States and this capitalist pigs, Right, the same thing barbs going on over in the Kremlin as going on in the United States. And what does this guy do? He packs up another warship, sends it off and says, we'll see. He's going to try to call their bluff. So in comes a Soviet warship and the blockade is set up. Now, this is probably the closest to nuclear war the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to, because the United States and the Soviet Union are very used to fighting proxy wars, but not proxy war, meaning you have two countries fighting on your behalf, that you fund, that maybe you arm, but you don't arm with nuclear weapons. And you sort of use them as a giant game of risk. Laugh about it with your friends later as you try to take over more and more territory. So as this Soviet ships coming closer, the war, the American warships are here. We know we. I wasn't alive in 1962. Just so everybody knows. But everybody knows that if one of those ships fire, they're both armed with nuclear weapons. We're all done. They fire, we fire. Everybody is done. So everybody is terrified of that. But also understanding you can't blink. This is why it's more like chicken. I don't know if you've ever seen, like the outsiders. You have car A, driving a car B. They put their pink slips on the line and they drive at each other until one turns away. The first guy to turn away, he loses his car. I can't believe they've been betting cars in the 1950s, but that's happening. What's inside the point. So this particular incident felt very much like that. Who is going to turn first? Is the United States going to make way and allow the warship through, or is the warship going to turn around? And they get, from what I understand, within a football field's length. It's not very far of each other. And at the very last conceivable moment, the Soviet ship turns around. And as they turn around in that moment, in my opinion, the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. They should have called it a day right then, because from 1962 on, they lost their pink slip. And I mean that literally and metaphorically because every Soviet person wanted a pair of Levi's jeans. Their economy started to dive into the toilet. Stolen, increased the amount. Not stolen, sorry. The regime increased the amount of, of purges and, and totalitarian dictatorships. They expanded. They were losing industrial control. Everything was on a downward slope as the. The bigger that they got. Because right in that moment, the whole world watched the USR USSR blink. And in all fairness, and I can wrap this up to Putin, guess who was around. You got it. Maybe not during the Cuban Missile Crisis, although he would have been, but. Right, he would have been around. But he was around during the death of the Soviet Union and that embarrassment. It wasn't a military death. It wasn't this grand war that happened. It was this slow suffocating. You lose because your way of life was worse and what you tried to do was dismissed. It's worse than losing on the battlefield. It is losing the political face value. It is losing the cultural game that the United States played better. Again, I think Levi's pretty much helped them win that war, but nonetheless, probably a little bit of the rock genre as well. So you have the Soviet Union turning away, and now here's where it gets interesting. You then have. You then have the Soviet Union turning away and Khrushchev agrees to remove these missiles, puts them all in a boat, makes a big deal about it, sends it back to the Soviet Union. The United States flex. Everything is great, except. Except for the fact that eventually we find out another great documentary called the Fog of War. Eventually we find out that those were only the handful of weapons that they caught, that the Soviet Union had been seditiously putting weapons there for a very long time. And there was many stockpiles all around the Cuban island that the United States had no idea about and sat very comfortably for the duration of the Cold War. Now, the hypocrisy of all of this, and this is where we have to understand the foundations of these issues. During the time the United States, with all of their righteous indignation about how dare they tip the scales of balance, how dare they get so close to our border and threaten us at the exact same moment. The United States already had Jupiter missiles, nuclear missiles in Turkey pointed at the Soviet Union within striking distance. Same moment, same weaponry, same capacity, same tactical and strategic advantage. Yet we almost came this close to an actual nuclear war because the playing field was about to get leveled and the United States wouldn't stand for it. Now the United States won. And again, guys, you have to understand, in no way, shape or form am I advocating for the elevation or for the, the, the brilliance or the, the character of the Soviet Union under any leadership. You understand? I am not advocating that, but I am saying that you can't be the good guy for too long. You can't have the good guy image for too long. When you're built on a mound of hypocrisy, when you're built on, on when you, when you claim to be just. When you claim to be the. The better of the adversary, when you claim to be the better place in this world, you can't sit there and ignore the means with which you've gained your political, economic and military power. You can deny it, but the chickens, what do they say? They always come home to watch tv? Something like that. I've watched videos, every, watched videos of everybody during that crisis. And these little kids hiding under their desks, covering their head. And I watch those and think, did they think that was going to help? Did the powers that exist actually tell these children that if the countries were to go to nuclear war, that sitting under your wooden desk and covering your head was somehow going to stop you from being cooked as though you were in a microwave? Because then I fast forward to today, right, you have bigger sanctions after the Soviet Union collapses. You, you would think it would lessen, but it doesn't. They don't stop being communists, but they're still angry, right? You have Obama trying to open things up, and now you have the Trump administration reversing everything that, that hack that he did. Why? Well, the very strong underpinning of we used to own it, I want it back. That is our money, our territory in our sphere of influence. Any de escalation that has happened has happened from, from Trump's perspective, from weak presidencies that aren't willing to stand up and take what is America's. Now, you have to understand that all of this taking is what got us this close to a nuclear war. That all of the. It is mine, not yours. We don't care about empowering the people. We really don't care about democratic reform and what democracy is and what the people of that region want. There have been many, many presidents, Secretaries of defense and Secretaries of State that have made asinine. Kissinger was one of my favorites. I'm going to mess up this quote because I can't remember it exactly. He said something to the effect of, we will not let a country fall to communism due to the stupidity of its own. When you don't have justice as your foundation, when you're exerting foreign policy with literally no check or balance based on what the US has to say. And all of this guys really went out the window come 1991, 1991, you have the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of The Soviet Union. The only person sitting at the head of this table anymore is the United States of America. The Soviet Union. The United States of America, at the height of the arms race, had built up enough nuclear arsenal that they could both kill the world 10 times over. When the Soviet Union collapsed, where do you think those nuclear weapons went? When the, when nuclear weapons start to degenerate, where do you think they put them? I mean, I think in Superman 4, maybe Superman 3, he wrapped them all up into some mess and threw him into the sun. I don't advocate that. I don't know what it would do to the sun, but I'm guessing we don't have that potential power because as they start to degenerate, as they disintegrate, they start to off gas, they start. They start to leach into the surrounding systems. From what I understand, a lot of them are placed in huge concrete cement pillars or cinder blocks and dropped into the ocean. Did nobody see Godzilla? This is what I say by. And this is what I mean when I say means will matter. They just might not matter today when you think you've won, but I promise you, they're going to matter. 10, 20, 30 years down the line when your chickens come home to roost. Ah, that's the same. That's what I'm talking about. And what's going on right now as Trump is looking to who he can take and how he can take them. It is no different than Manifest Destiny of 1812. It is no different than the ideas that the American Constitution, for freedom and justice and power to the people, and all of that only applies to US Citizens, that the President is allowed. And when I say allowed, there literally is nobody to stop. When Trump said the only thing that can stop him is his morality. Here's the reality of that, here's the truth bomb that nobody wants to hear. He's not wrong. Nobody else has said it, but he's not wrong. Because no other country and no other group of countries have been or are willing to stand in their way because they know their military and economic power. He's not wrong there. The UN is not an international body that has a military capacity. It is not a supra. I'll do a whole thing on the un it is not a supranational organization. If it was our democracy, kind of takes a fly, right? If we've established the UN as being stronger, better, more wise than our government, then the laws we pass don't mean anything unless the UN Agrees. First rule, the UN Kind of likes everybody Sovereign. Sovereign nations get to decide what goes on in their own territorial integrity. Now, there's rules about what you can do. There's international law. But international law only has cause and effect if people are willing to back it up or if the country themselves, whoever's in trouble with the international law, is willing to succumb to international economic, military, or social pressures. Guess what? The military. The United States isn't. There's no international police force. Judge Dredd isn't knocking on Trump's door saying, you, I can't do a Sylvester Stallone. Right? So if there's no international police and the power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the United States is no longer under this administration, and, to be honest, under others as well. We can talk about Obama and dropping bombs in Syria. We can talk about Clinton and what he didn't do during the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is a disaster. There's lots of people to talk about. But the reality is, is that Trump is saying all the quiet parts out loud. And he's doing it brazenly, and he's doing it ridiculously. And what he's doing is he's pointing out that the United States is only for freedom and democracy in the United States. The only obligation that government has is to the people within the United States. That's it. The United States has no constitutional obligation to do what's right for this world. And the only thing that's standing in their way, or should be standing in their way, is a bunch of other countries with armies behind them that say no more. And since they're not willing or capable of doing it, the only person stopping the United States in its foreign policy, Donald Trump or whoever sitting in the Presidential house at that particular time. He's not wrong. This is the flaw in our international system. This is the. This is the. The broken link in the chain. This is the reality. We used to have superpowers that would balance each other out. We no longer have that now. Do I see the rise of different superpowers? Sure. Absolutely. But the rise of them are still feeding into the narrative and the idea of what the biggest kid in the room has to say. And, you know, there's that old adage like, the craziest person in the room sets the tone. Everybody is going to accommodate the craziest person in the room because the craziest has the most will, and the most will wins the day. Period. He or she who has the most will to do the dangerous, crazy thing will win. It really isn't about military power, it really isn't about economic might. It is the will. And what worries me about the international system and the international climate right now is the United States could send in the military and the US Military wins. But what everybody's forgetting about is there's lots of people in desperate, desperate situations who have nothing to lose. The United States has a lot to lose. Men and women in the United States army have a lot to lose. When you have nothing to lose, you will do anything. Your will is bigger. When your will is bigger, you will do more horrific, more damaging, more, more surprising things. The way the United States won the Revolutionary War was guerrilla warfare. Their homelands, they were willing to do everything. They broke all sorts of battle rules, codes of conduct, the rules of war, which I can barely get out because it always sounds hypocritical anyways. Why would you think that lesser nations that don't have the power, that don't have the military might, that are more desperate, won't do whatever is necessary in order to fight a battle they might not ever win? They might not ever get to the head of the table. But how many hundreds and thousands and possibly millions of people will they take down while they try? That's what he's creating. And the history that I gave you is the precursor. The history that I gave you is the proof of the injustice of it all. Of the shaky foundations through which we have built international law, and we have been given and accepted the illusion that certain countries, albeit the United States at this particular moment, who sits at the head of the table, is somehow morally, ethically, culturally superior. And I would say to you this, they might seem to be all of those things because they won. And the only difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is who won. Thanks so much for hanging out with me, guys. I will see you next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. Dismissed.