title card:
Madison cranes
These two sand hill cranes wandering around the Office Depot parking lot, next to Tacos El cucuy, in Madison.
Of the 612 American plots against Castro between 1959-93 (CIA TARGETS FIDEL pg. 8) which appear in the CIA IG report (1967), my favorite is the Thallium salts in the shoes because it is non-fatal. The agency thought Fidel's revolutionary power was embedded in his beard so they planned to sprinkle a depilation agent into his shoes en route from their nightly shine.
The behavioral psychologists had pull within the agency, it seems. They target Fidel's persona and hobbies beyond the beard. They poison cigars. They plan to booby trap sea shells where he skin dives. They plan to gift him a skin diving suit laced with toxins. They hope to dose him with hallucinogens while he gives a regular radio speech. They put a hypodermic needle in a ballpoint pen which becomes associated with a 40% nicotine pesticide. The agency contracts with mafiosos and party traitors to assassinate the revolutionary leader.
This CIA foreign policy was indicative of early development--global, idealistic, absurd, invulnerable and unaccountable--alongside other international assassinations (alluded to in the text) like Patrice Lumumba. These were justified by the Cold War struggle against Communism. The agency has matured over the last half century, increasing in size funding and purview. Every public release of classified agency documents from Operation Mongoose to MK ULTRA to Operation Mockingbird to the modern Timber Sycamore reveal the historic roots of a modern covert project unwittingly funded by the purported democratic republic of America.
There is a modern implication to the covert profiteering off American taxpayers which was perfected in the fifties. Mossad, the Israeli CIA analogue, has (it seems) run an operation on the Americans and have joined the CIA at the money faucet (tax payer trough) alongside corporate welfare bums, think tank experts and the less intelligent pieces of military industry.
The formal integration of Israeli defense industries into the American system is a bi-partisan bill called US-Israel FUTURES Act of 2026. [1] With this the de facto colonial relationship between the two nations has become de jure. The flow of tax monies has gone toward Israel, which has not reciprocated with colonial spoils. this indicates Tel Aviv is the metropole of the post NATO empire instead of Washington or New York.
The implications of adopting an actively genocidal territory has clarified the geopolitical fissures widening between US (Israel, rules based neoliberal puppets) and law based BRICS. The declining hegemon is destined for the Thucydides Trap (Herman Wouk, 1980; Graham Allison 2015; Xi Jinping 2014 and 26) against the inevitable upsurging BRICS. The later has seen forty years of domestic infrastructural development while the former has completely deindustrialized.
The intelligence agencies are one tool which is currently being employed in this ideological conflict. Any media or text which is currently available for domestic consumption could be a produced or edited by some agent only a few generations removed of the CIA adventurists of the Bay of Pigs period. These people appeal to synecdoche "the mention of a part when the whole is to be understood" (CIA TARGETS FIDEL, 26) to manipulate public opinion and serve oligarchy.
The modern BRICS counter-point doesn't need a propagandist sheen. The increased material well being of citizens adds to social cohesion and international stature. Trench coated agents don't need to manipulate the public to favor FDR's New Deal, Lenin's New Economic Policy and Mao's Great Leap Forward. It is when the redistribution goes the other way--toward the casino bosses, plantation owners and cruise ship docks--that the agencies have to step in and redirect the democratic impulse.
Tacos El cucuy is a middling food truck with meh prices. They have good specials, the food is fresh, al Pastor tacos are good and the staff are friendly as can be.
notes:
[1] The US-Israel FUTURES Act was proposed by Sens. Budd and Gillibrand and Rep. Jackson. Part of this act--the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative (aka Section 224 and Section 219)--was added to the National Defense Authorization Act (2027). It was stripped from the 2027 NDAA in July after some political backlash. The Israel Lobby continues to promote the integration of the two country's military industries.
sources:
CIA TARGTS FIDEL: Secret 1967 CIA Inspector General's Report on plots to assassinate Fidel Castro (declassified: 1994) Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 1996.