“Just before the drastic change of a presidential election, a democratic state is at it’s most fluid and mobile. Just as it requires little energy to keep a car going, once it has started; it is also easier to propel a free country into chaos, just before an election. Afterwards people settle back to ‘wait and see’ and it is hard to move them then.”- Ed Butler: Revolution is my Profession

One morning I’m watching ESPN’s “Mike & Mike” and they broke away from their usual discussion of the previous night’s sports events to talk about President Obama’s trip to Cuba. In what will now go down as one of Obama’s most notable achievements is his lifting the almost ancient and grossly-outdated Cuban Embargo. Suddenly an angry voice blasts above my feelings of change you can light a Partagas to, I don’t immediately recognize the voice, but I recognize the tone very very well; the familiar frequency of cracker-ostracization. On this occasion it was encased in the person of Dan Le Batard: “What are we getting back (some good ass smokes dufus)? What are the Cuban people getting (not you thankfully)? Because even the most adamant of exiles will tell you they’re okay with all of this if the Cuban people are going to suffer less, but they do not believe that a government built on lies and on killing will give us anything!”

It’s no mystery to me this kind of mock-outrage was to be expected, however Le Batard is not just another bitter voice from the white right outpost. Both his parents and grandparents are from the island nation, it’s just his choice of words… about a government “built on lies and killing.” Oh never mind. Of course this has to do with the President’s late-March visit to Cuba along with Major League Baseball. Le Batard MLB is not thinking of you or your folks, they really aren’t thinking of wetbacks, they’re thinking greenbacks. Don’t be surprised of any major league expansion teams in both Cuba and the Dominican Republic. On the political side this all had to do with a change in trade policy that Obama told Congress to begin working on as early as January 21, 2015 (there was also an equally outdated embargo of sales of lethal weapons to one-time enemy Vietnam that he called for on 3/16). Recently a mid-October (14th) story in the New York Times reported trade policies being relaxed even further. This sweeping expansion promised to last far beyond his administration, “setting forth a new US policy to lift the Cold War trade embargo and end a half-century of clandestine plotting against Cuba’s government,”… that was before the last election of course, (ahem).

“A half-century of clandestine plotting?” You mean those stories about the US intelligence 600 or so attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro were true? Understand one thing, regarding most of those clips of old Cuban evictees or their offspring, those people were not angels. They still mad because they were white people having a good time at the expense of native Cubans. While they were busy gambling, partying, and soliciting, Castro was turning servants into soldiers, and maids into militants, black and brown. So all that boo-hooing I hear from them today fails to make me dig my dusty violin set out the closet.

There was always more to Castro’s story than some of us felt the major American news was telling us. Some of it good, some of it bad. Few people have survived so many murder attempts to both his life and character. Was Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz an angel? Hell no! It's just that the buffoonery of the US made him look like one. When Castro took control of Cuba, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill him. In order to prevent the hit from being linked to the US government, the agency contacted American mob leaders who lost the most money from their shutdown of Cuban casinos. It’s important to know that the mob in New York was known as the Mafia, and in Chicago they were called the “Outfit.” It was known already how the outfit already controlled Hollywood’s unions and of course Las Vegas’ casinos. Soon after they would set their sites on Havana, Cuba. At some point the US-backed Fulgencio Batista appointed Meyer Lansky as an Advisor on Gambling Reform (a move akin to appointing Charles Manson as head of Scientology, or as if things weren’t bad enough).

According to author Charles Brandt (“I Heard you Paint Houses”) during that time period the-then ruling heads of the five families of New York City, Buffalo, and Chicago were the decision-makers for the rest of the nation’s organized crime families. No decision however was made without Russell Bufalino. The CIA went to Bufalino, and Sam “Momo” Giancana of Chicago with a plan to murder Castro. They would hold meetings in Las Vegas. Few to this day realize it was Batista who legalized the Communist Party, but since Castro eliminated gambling, prostitution etc., in Cuba, communism became the best excuse America had against the new leaders who booted so many whites off the island.

Bufalino was very powerful then. He was known as the boss of organized crime in Upstate New York (yes including Buffalo), parts of New Jersey, New England, and Northeast PA, except for Philadelphia. He lived in the Scranton-Wilkes Barre PA, area. The plot to kill Castro failed and at worst over time attracted so many individuals that it's believed that it morphed into the plot the assassinate Eisenhower’s successor Kennedy. There’s a school of thought that the Kennedy murder was a scheme to make it look as if it was planned by Castro due to his ties to Lee Harvey Oswald. That this failure to kill Castro led to JFK’s death is just another theory on the pile of variables that will haunt the US for a long time. Oddly enough the same man who along with Joe Kennedy helped his son John F. Kennedy get elected; Sam Giancana, is also the same man who helped get him killed.

Castro lived more than a full life having reached 90. He lived to see his county’s ostracization fade into the Cold War scrap heap, however he or Raul feel about Obama. When you hear any of those exiles and old heads complaining about their treatment and ouster, ask them about Lansky, Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Bob Mayhew. And ask them is it communism they really hate, or is it wounded pride? I hear crickets.