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Ric Prado, covert warrior.
While out delivering The Nugget recently, I listened to an episode of the American Spy Museum’s Spycast podcast, featuring Ric Prado. Enrique Prado was a covert CIA operative in Central America in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration sought to build an insurgency to overthrow the Communist Sandinista regime, which had come to power in a revolution against the brutal Somoza government of Nicaragua in 1979.
Prado worked directly with the “Contras” as the counter-revolutionary insurgents were called. In the podcast interview, he praised the Contras as freedom fighters and said he was always 100 percent certain who the “white hats” were in the Central American conflict. The term hearkens back to old-time black-and-white Western movies where the “good guy” was readily distinguished by a white cowboy hat. The “bad guys” wore black hats.
This kind of unambiguous white hats vs. black hats view of the Cold War is not surprising coming from someone of Prado’s background and occupation. His family had fled Cuba in the face of oppression by the regime of Fidel Castro, who came to power in 1959 and swiftly unfurled a red banner and aligned with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. I’ve known a good number of Cubans who had the same experience, and, for them, all Communists are simply the bad guys — black hats — and anyone who opposes them wears the white hat in a very straightforward battle between good and evil.
Some other folks in a position to know can tell you that the Contras were no white-hats. As a friend told me, the hard core that had served Somoza were “the worst of the worst.”
Of course the Sandinistas were no white-hats, either. I vividly recall watching a Sandinista official scream into the face of a young woman at a Glendale Community College symposium back in 1984. She had, with remarkable poise, recounted how Sandinistas had thrown her brother to his death from a helicopter.
The Sandinista bigwig was red in the face, and spittle flew from his mouth as he pounded on a table and yelled:
“We kill people for the right reasons!”
They clearly had their own version of white hats vs. black hats.
Ambiguity is a liability when you’re in a fight; it’s probably necessary to see your adversary as an enemy and your enemy as just plain bad. But a good guys/bad guys paradigm doesn’t serve us well when it comes to politics in a republic, or the evolution and devolution of our culture.
America is in the midst of an identity crisis, seeking to define and redefine who we have been, who we are, and who we aspire to be. Different people have different understandings of the past and aspirations for the future.
For some, America continues to represent what Abraham Lincoln called the “last, best hope of earth,” a beacon of liberty and prosperity. For others, that image is a lie, covering up a dark history of a nation built on slavery and the expropriation of native lands. For some, America always wears a white hat, and they don’t want to hear about the dark things. For some, America wears a black hat, and the light is a flickering deception.
People generally struggle with paradox. It’s hard to recognize that good people can do bad things and that bad people can do good things, or that a national culture can contain within it both the exalted and the base. To quote Lincoln again, Americans have responded to “the better angels of our nature” and gifted the world unprecedented freedom and abundance. Americans have also fallen prey to our demons of prejudice, ignorance and violence. Sometimes our actions have been a tangle of high motives and low self-interest that can never be unwound.
It’s simpler and a lot more comfortable to just see white hats and black hats — but that kind of thinking only feeds our increasingly toxic political tribalism, which has eaten through the social fabric like a corrosive chemical.
If we’re going to navigate the challenges that we can all see ahead of us, we’d better learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable, to challenge our own deeply held assumptions and recognize that we’re not living in a white hat/black hat world — and never were.
Matthew says
The thing about the “America wears black hats” people is that they believe it because of things that are true of any nation. Slavery and conquest were universal. We have only recently gotten to the point where we realize those were bad things. And as the invasion of Ukraine and human trafficking shows that hasn’t stopped them.
From what I have heard of Nicaragua both the Contra’s and the Sandinistas were black hats. That is just sometimes the way it goes.
Ugly Hombre says
“I’ve known a good number of Cubans who had the same experience, and, for them, all Communists are simply the bad guys — black hats — and anyone who opposes them wears the white hat in a very straightforward battle between good and evil.”
Me to and Cambodians, and Chinese and Laotians, Tibetans, Vietnamese, Mongolians. etc.
People who experience Communist rule seem to loath it, people who have not experienced it seem to think its not so bad. Until they get it. And then- its a different story..
“We thought the Czar was bad then we got Stalin””
“We thought the Lamas were bad then we got Khorloogiin Choibalsan”
“We thought Batista was bad ‑then we got Che and Fidel”
“We though Chiang was bad and then we got Mao”
“We thought the King and the royal government was bad and then we got the Pathet Lao”
“We thought the King and the royal government was bad and then we go the Khymer Rouge”
Etc. You know the drill
https://www.xinjiangpolicefiles.org/
My old mentor once told me the difference between the KMT and the Communist was that the KMT might take your money- the Chicom’s wanted your soul. The massive directed insect like terror and destruction, slavery etc used by Communist forces is massive and ongoing- even to this day right, now this hour. This fact imo is cloaked and denied by to many. The world turns away.
That’s a special kind of dark.
Tom Mix says
Nicely done. I’m fond of saying everyone is either a Role Model or an Example. And at some point all of us will be both. The worst of the worst will sometimes do the right thing, even if for the wrong reason. And the Best of the best will do the wrong thing, even if for the right reasons.
Jim P says
It used to be that black hats and white hats could be identified on the larger scale even if the the smaller scale was a blur. The abiding philosophy was that Communists were more than happy to kill if a person interfered with the body politic. Torture, beating, murder, rape, nothing was off-limits if the end result was to supply the state with the worker bee. As ruthless as either side is, no one has ever been able to justify communism as a “moral good”.
What seems to be different in the past 60 odd years is a general loss off an accepted moral compass. Since our “all things can be true for me” culture demands we be forced accept and celebrate the craziest of ideas, everything can now be true at the same time. The law of noncontradiction has become inconvenient and therefore discarded. Men can have babies, women can have penises. There’s no acceptable difference between a fire fighter visiting a kindergarten and drag queen story hour. The past 10 years has seen the flourishing of that notion. Now, there is apparently no greater significance to life than what feels good at the very moment. Certainly a part of the 60s but today it has been legislated.
Right and wrong used to be an accepted norm in the western Judeo-Christian ethos or even those espousing karma, even for the atheist. It was written into our Constitution, The individual mattered. Even if you have no religious views. Without those religious views (ie: made in the image of God) humans are little more than a bag of meat. If your neighbor, therefore, is nothing but a bag of meat then he holds no greater significance to you and you can act like a black hat by the way you treat him, and that’s okay. Black and white hats have nothing to do with it. He has + I want = I take.
Life is cheap because we’ve made it cheap. If there’s a parasitic bag of meat growing inside a person, said bag of meat can be excised it if it interferes with your aspirations. The person wears the white hat because they say it’s white, and you have no right to challenge them. Challenge them and you automatically have a black hat, along with a blackeye!
Ugly Hombre says
“Can’t tell a hen from rooster” used to be a ranch synonym for a jasper that should be watched careful and not given jobs beyound shoveling out the stalls. Now we have them in charge of managing the Republic. Fubar can’t even cover that. Unreal.…
Anti- Communists forces lost in the past because bad as they could be, their was a limit as to actions they would take.
The best example of that is Russia1917. Most all of the major Bolshevik sons of vitches had been jailed and or exiled multiple times by the Czar. Punished with the rule of law and treated for the times- with a degree of leniency.
Not shot dead, tortured to death, families hunted down killed purged etc like the Bolsheviks M.O. Before and after they took power.
Same thing in Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia Etc. The record is clear.
The death toll, the body count, inflicted on the word by Communists in the last century is 100 million plus and raising.
The cadres who are the popes of the insect religion don’t wear black hats.
But their hearts are black as sin.-
Expat says
A long time ago I came to realize that there is very little that is black or white ‑the world is for the most part various shades of grey. But to paint everything white or black limits critical thinking and is lazy at best.
Patriotism is another, it also limits critical thinking and is lazy at best. A large portion of America’s dark history in the last century came from the philosophy that the end justifies the means. And this has been a serious problem for America ever since the CIA was birthed from the OSS. JFK was the first public figure to speak out about the problem.
Unfortunately, the same philosophy pervades American politics and much of society in general. And the philosophy of the end justifying the means puts a set of blinders on our moral compass and steals our soul.
Heading over to the library today to pick up The Devil’s Chessboard — about Dulles and the CIA. He set the table for a lot of nefarious shit — as you know.
Gregory+Walker says
Having served proudly in Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, and with some interesting links to Nicaragua…
And having chatted with Prado prior to his book coming out (we know some of the same folks)…
I found his book of substantial interest and agree, at the same time, with Jim.
As Dave Mason sings it — “Ain’t no good guys. Ain’t no bad guys. We just agree to disagree.”
Whether communists, nationalists, or somewhere in-between it is always the “regular folk” who continue to pay the endless price of “the great game” in Latin America.
“Viva la brigada!”