The Sandoz Collection by Sandoz Diego Cerveza (best short books to read .TXT) 📖

of reform, for the trees of dissent. The land we know as Russia is well known for its Bolshoi, but at this juncture in the crossroads of time, the Bolsheviks were tired of the bullshit.

This was the also the age of the restless revolutionary pamphleteer. The graphic mimeo minions.

The Bolsheviks cranked up the volume of a message of a socialist utopia and the words were pouring from the printed pages of proletarian produced pamphlets propelled by propaganda on Viagra that ran as thick, and as it turns out, as red, as a hemophiliacs blood. The proletarian psyche was now psyched, ripe as peaches to taste the fruit of revolt, they were in effect..."Hot to Trotsky"....Lenin raised the flag, led the charge and pitched battles broke out in the streets ...in the end, twists and turns later, a minor Civil War added as a punctuation mark, the Czar and his loyal royal family were rounded up and, no good way to put this,...disposed of, ok, killed, in revolutionary fashion..every revolutionary action is designed to prevent a reactionary reaction....the country had been at war in Europe for years, WWI, and they were shell shocked, the people had had enough and the result is that the incarcerated royal family was imprisoned and cell shot.

Good Golly Miss Gulag! The Gulags dot the landscape in the 1920's and 1930's, so many houses and hotels on a Monopoly game board. Arrests and trials, propelled by patent paranoia, the jails filled quickly like a backed up sewer with imaginary enemies, real enemies, socialists, trade union leaders, clergy, military, and plain old peasantry arrested capriciously and filling the cells to capacity. Eventually Stalin turns from the Man of Steel to worm food and does the world a favor by dying, and the Soviet Union gets Kruschevfied on a communist cold war cross and eventually Gorbachev'd into a Russian version of "democracy."

The Cold War, replaced the Hot War. Nuclear annihilation seemed a reality, looming darkly on a mushroom shaped hopeless, helpless horizon. America was doing the math and the domino effect of multiplying communism was adding up in Korea, China, Vietnam and of course on our very doorstep, 90 miles off shore in Cuba. All of this kept America in a state of holocaustic anxiety, and the film Dr. Strangelove, strangely enough, doctor Kubrick, summed up all our fears in one cinematic package that still stands on it's own black and white merits today.

The Iron Curtain came down hard on the stage of the Eastern European theater at the close of the war, the Big One, Number Two, one of many wars to end all wars. Eastern Europe had traded in fascism for communism, and soon, revolts within the revolt erupted as Hungary was hungry for democratic reform and the freedom fighters of Czechoslovakia where Chzechmated with a show of force and tanks.

The race for space, nuclear arms superiority, spheres of political influence, Two bully nations set out to carve up the world like an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey, but the Soviets were out rumbled and out rubled in the Texas Death Match of national defense, but mostly, the revolution failed due to decades of military paranoia, political purges and racial pogroms.There were too many Five Year Plans that extended into ten years; too many Politburo and Dumas fat cats setting themselves up as revolutionary royalty, creating a worse class system then the one they had replaced. The communist cure, became the cancer instead, but by the 1980's paranoia paved the way to perestroika. The Gulag system crashed to the ground like the Twin Towers to a rubble of glasnost and Gorbachev, and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down at Checkpoint Charlie like a truckload of tinker toys and East could finally meet West.


Cuba. When it comes to government overthrows..this one is the sexy tits and ass floor show of revolutions....and proved that in on a third world island nation, when it comes to revolution...there is no business like show business...Cuba...a most sexy and sensuous Soviet satellite. A Caribbean island paradise of carnal pleasures, where pussy and politics go hand in hand along with the rum soaked bacchanals since the United States hijacked it during the Spanish-American War in 1898. An outlandishly flamboyant island nation of sexy, curvaceous and long leggedy African heritaged females, dressed as plumed dancers on brightly lit casino stages, next door to premium grade heavenly whorehouses in decadent old Havana with a stable full of sex floor shows involving everything from one on one on one lesbianism to Hi Yo Silver beastiality....giddyup! It was the private American play land of brothels, good times, and bad gangsters, like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, and Third World American hand picked hand puppet leaders, like Juan Bautista, who was America's Howdy Doody on a string and a devoted fetishista for a fashionable form of facism.

The mob made Cuba an offer it couldn't refuse in the 1950's. The rich got richer, and the poor once again, got poorer. The country was as ripe as a field of sugar cane for revolution, when cabana's would give way to Companero's and beach bums would make way for beach bombs. It was time for the Mafioso to make room for the Marxists and Lansky to surrender to Lenin. It had been a long struggle, but on New Years Eve, 1959.....the island nation of Cuba began it's long trek on the Kremlin Brick Road to take it's place 90 miles off shore to become the Soviet suppository poised to ram up the ideological ass of the Ugly American.

Revolucion had been brewing slowly for years in the hands of the Cuban maestros of the masses ...Fidel Castro, his brother Raoul and there brother in arms, former South American doctor, Ernesto Guevara...or Che as he is commonly referred to on t-shirts in head shops around the world right next to the bong pipes. Together, they managed to orchestrate the overthrow of the Bautista regime to a raging hot, hot, hot calypso beat. The beat was loud, ten plus decibels at least, as the record spun, one revolution at a time at a speed of 33 revolutions per minute, and Castros message was crystal clear, and pure High Fidel-ity.

Castro, enamored with American sports, baseball, hotdogs and all things America, wanted to play ball with the "free" world, and I use that term loosely, so he went to New York to speak to the United Nations, and to countries including the United States for some sort of cooperative agreement to work together with the new Peoples Republic. That very term, A Peoples Republic is repulsive and repugnant to the likes of Uncle Sam (of the people, for the people and by the people)...but if Big Brother can call the shots, that is a different story, but Castro wasn't about to let them extend the control they used to enjoy over his new country, so the U.S. began it's bully tactics to back Castro down.

So, Castro goes next door to the Soviet Union to borrow a cup of political sugar and the Kremlin was only too happy to accommodate him. To America, Cuba was a piss ant third world county, but to those cagey KGB types in Russia, they envisioned a giant erector set of armed nuclear missiles strategically aimed at America Thus began the arduous Cuban Missile Crisis and an untold number of bungled CIA led assassination attempts against Castro, and the conspiracy theories only multiply from there like rabbits. Just ask Oliver Stone.

The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight in the Mid 1980's and the economic umbilical chord to Cuba was severely severed. Cuba's economy faltered, and that damned American embargo is still imbecilic ally in place. Vacationing Canadians and economics minded Europeans on business trips go there all the time, but Americans are still banned from visiting or doing business in this land of 20,000,000 potential consumers. Which is the type of halted reasoning that marks the time when the clock stopped, as America heads into the future with geriatric politics 50 years old, proving that a democracy with Alzheimer’s doesn't always work either when there are no term limits...America....no country for old men.

So, in theory the Cuban Revolution worked, although held together today with economic duct tape lo these many years later. It has become the Rolling Stones of revolution. Today, Cuba is struggling, but getting by, and the political climate is changing. The rest of the world has thrown open it's doors and windows, and although Kennedy was cut down, and all the other presidents dead or retired...Fidel marches on like a Timex watch...he takes a licking but keeps on ticking...he is also president of a country that, thanks to a slow economy and the need to hold onto everything and waste not, want not, things like old cars abound. Chevy's, Buicks, Nomads, Woody's, ponderously ply the ornamental balcony'd streets of hood ornament Havana and internal combustion Cuba has become one massive V-8 under the hood, power to the people classic car show on wheels! Hot cars Hav-an-a blast!


The Sleeping Red Giant of China. More than mere Mao. It's a melting pot of proletarian posturing on everything from Taiwan to the Manchurian Candidates vacation hot spot of North Korea (yes, another revolution/Civil War that is holding America at bay to this day..the Forgotten War. Stalemate.) The I-ching Chiang Nationalists had to partner with the Maoists to fight the Japanese...lets face it, it takes three to tango in the Sino-Japanese war.

Once the common enemy, Japan was defeated, by the Nationalist and Communist forces of the Chinese schizo-political two headed Medusa....America backed Chiang...until it got bored and eventually pulled the rug out from under the defeat feet of Mr. and Mrs. Spare Change Chiang. At this point, Papa Ooh Mao Mao moved into the driver’s seat of power...while the Chiangs thumbed a ride to tie one on in Taiwan.

Little Red Guards, Little Red Books, Little Red Stars (looking strangely today like a Macy's Christmas ad)...and an atrocious taste in clothing that would never be seen on Project Runway...spare, sparse and utilitarian...Chinese revolutionary clothing are the epitome of what is found at a clearance sale in the basement of a Salvation Army Mission in downtown Gary, Indiana...that is about as low on the skid row fashion scale as you can go,.... red-rags for the rag-tags. That is part of the reason that America only gives lip service to human rights violations in China, as opposed to attacking them as we like to do to other countries...You can't fight a war with imperialism effectively if you're not accessorized properly. Capitalists like a nattily dressed adversary to spar with.

Now if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...take that Little Red Book...it ain't Steinbeck, it aint Hemmingway, but it's a best seller in China and outsells the bible by billions in the Mao-belt. The Counter Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, c'mon, how many revolutions within a revolution do you need? Or to put it differently, how many revolutions does it take to screw in a light bulb?

China today has gotten orgasmic and has taken to a body politic of copulation between communism and capitalism in a big way, fiduciary fornication, marketing and selling and manufacturing just about anything and everything you can find in home or office. It's a definite Yin-Yang thang. China no longer says "phooey," to Hong Kong, chop suey economics, is embracing its import/export foreign trade fornication superiority over the United States. I received a American Flag pin recently from some misguided VFW post for a journalistic piece I did on their Voice of Democracy program, I still don't know why, .anyway...I unwrapped it from it's plastic and looked at the back...yep, Made in China! Irony for Imperialism, eh?