Rockets were sexy, but nukes were dangerous.

There was a movie in 1947, The Beginning or the End, about dropping bombs on White Sands with airplanes. It was back in the day when that was considered heroic. Truman was portrayed as agonizing over the decision. He did not. And in the movie, leaflets were dropped over Hiroshima two days before, warning of impending doom. They were not.

Today, the film would be considered bad taste, or a security breach. Hollywood pilots had to drop their bomb in White Sands, and it had to blow up at just the right altitude to assure the annihilation of as many people as possible. (Add marching music here.) If a bomb blew up too soon, the bomber would get a lethal dose a radiation and the people on the ground would just get a bad sunburn. If it blew up too late, it would make a deep crater, but wouldn’t kill enough people. A Goldilocks problem. They finally got it to blow up just right, and only days before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki massacres were scheduled to take place. The movie was in black and white, and they added a love story. The hero scored, in the end, and the crowd went wild.

Actually, that’s not true, either. The crowd found the film insipid, mediocre and inaccurate. MGM lost a bunch of money on it. Mushroom clouds just didn’t have the glamor of Achilles and Hector, shirtless with spears and shields, duking it out over Helen of Troy, who spent most of the day naked, eating grapes. Hollywood couldn’t make that work, comrade. No blind poets, no nudity and no spokesmen for the human soul. Just airplanes, bombs and
swag.

But airplanes were on the wane, comrade. Rockets were the thing of the future. Oppenheimer for the payload, but Wernher for the delivery system. Wernher von Braun. The NASA Rocket Man, formerly known as the NAZI Rocket Man. Pay no attention to the rocket man behind the curtain.

Rockets in the ‘60’s were sexy. Soviet and American, they were exotic, anonymous and satisfyingly phallic. But they were not yet capable of intercontinental genocide, not yet. So, for the Soviets, Fidel’s hand-crafted revolution was a strategic windfall. Nikita got very excited about permanently erecting his rockets in Fidel’s backyard, just ninety miles from Miami.

Fidel wanted Soviet rockets on the island. He and Che Guevara were expecting a second Bay of Pigs invasion, better organized and more serious. They wanted to be ready to respond with a 30-megaton thermonuclear surprise. But Fidel thought his finger would be on the button. It was not.

Everything was all right there in the revolutionary handbook, comrade. They tyrant won’t give up his claim to the means of production until he has been totally annihilated. El Che was looking forward to the holocaust. A giant leap forward in the ongoing r/evolutionary process.

Nuclear Armageddon was outside Che’s area of real expertise, perhaps. He knew more about passionate teenagers with machetes in the Sierra Maestra. But he was convinced that, despite the fallout, a little apocalyptic action would open up a unique opportunity for the New Red Dawn. He was a pretty radical guy. And, his family lived pretty far away.

It seems almost funny now. Fidel with nuclear weapons. He considered himself a world-class player. He was very upset when he was not asked to even participate in the negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev in October of ’62. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

He felt castrated. Again. Urban legend confirms that Fidel had only one ball. He lost the other in torture. Sorry, enhanced interrogation techniques. In this case, enhanced in such a way that one would lose a testicle and gain a lifelong commitment to wiping out those who had done that to you. What a great technique.

Torture, like drone strikes and carpet bombing, backfires on a regular basis. Fidel was tortured during the first round of the Cuban revolution, the one they lost. Now, they sing about it. The heroic assault at Moncada. And songs are important, comrade. Most of the Moncada team died, but Fidel survived and started over. With one ball and lots of new friends.

They all had cool names. Fidel means Faithful. (Castro is the first person singular conjugation of the transitive verb castrar, to castrate, in the present indicative. Sorry.) Cienfuegos means a hundred fires. Camilo Cienfuegos died in a fiery plane crash in ’59, several months after the glorious victory. (Most people think it was not an accident.) Che Guevara’s real name was Ernesto. He was, in every way, a testimony to the importance of being earnest.

It was sort of ironic. Well, very ironic. The whole point of the Cuban revolution was to get free of foreign imperialism and win Cuba back for Cubans. To live in brotherhood and peace, all that inspiring stuff. But Cuba escaped American tyranny only to embrace Soviet tyranny.

As fate would have it, comrade, the enemies of the revolution who were not shot at sunrise, went into exile. Most went to Miami. With most of their money. Fidel called them gusanos, (worms) but they were supposed to leave with just the clothes on their backs. Most found ways to smuggle out their dollars and their jewelry, fruit of decades of thuggery, graft and exploitation. I suspect there were dark body cavities and safe deposit boxes In the Caymans involved.

Our Spanish teacher at St. Thomas in Houston loved to tell the story about a false cast. Her father was a doctor for rich white people in La Habana. He wasn’t about to sign up for Fidel’s health care reform. He put a cast on his own arm and headed for the airport. At customs, they were suspicious of the cast. He was expecting that. The officials cut it off and found nothing. Feigning indignance, he went home and put on a new cast. This time, he hid his savings inside. As he left Cuba with his new cast on, customs officials begged him to forgive their prior intrusion.

In Miami, Cuban exiles and their money became very influential. They were the archetypal one-issue voters. And their one issue was to maintain the Cuban blockade, until the island could be properly invaded and restored to former glory for the tropical enjoyment of the wealthy and powerful. Roll the clock back to ’59, sí o sí. With the help of the sí-ay-eh. 

While we are on the subject of bullet-proof Cuban exiles in Miami, Superman comics talked about alternative universes, places where the protons were negatively charged, and the electrons were positively charged. Where kryptonite was red, and Clark Kent was married to Lois Lane. We devoured Superman comics; when we were going through that phase, trying to overcome our own powerless mediocrity. Be it known, however, that contact between this universe and that universe was very dangerous. Explosive, in fact.

And probably possible, within your lifetime, thanks to NASA--and Kennedy's speech at Rice, the one where Ted Sorensen made him say, “we choose to go to the moon in this decade not because it’s easy but because it’s hard”—and Wernher’s rockets. For Kennedy, it was always hard. His treatment for Addison’s disease was a primitive version of what scientists now call boner pills.

NASA was created as a civilian entity. The astronauts were military men, but Eisenhower wanted to separate the institution from Pentagon tentacles. He knew those all too well. The military implications and applications were there, but it was supposed to be independent science and technology. Or, at least, it was supposed to look that way to the untrained eye. Even though the Mercury-Redstone rocket was just an ICBM with an astronaut on top, instead of a bomb.

In Russia, it was different. There was not one space agency. There were several. They competed and collaborated. All were all military and unapologetic about it. They drew their ICBMs on the same chalkboard as their Sputniks and their Vostoks. They were even pretty good at interchangeable parts and pieces. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. And no shame. The Soviet hardware was built cheap, built to last, and built to save international socialism from globalized thermonuclear annihilation, comrade. The first rockets, my fellow Americans, belonged to Hitler.

At Yalta, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill divided up the planet and the rocket program. Since most of the scientists wanted to be forcibly deported to sunny California, most of the Nazi hardware was taken directly to the icy Soviet
Union. That was the reason they had the jump on NASA. They got the rockets. 

But the Americans got Wernher. Wernher Von Braun. He was the Nazi rocket man. The designer. Hitler gave him lots of money and an objective. Hit London with bombs. Wernher really wanted to hit another planet, but what the hell. Target practice, you know. After the war, he got his chance. Sat right there in Mission Control. Houston wasn’t exactly sunny California, but he had some vacation coming.

The Soviets didn’t need the rocket scientists. They had a secret weapon. They had their own rocket scientist, and he knew what he was doing. The Soviet Rocket Man was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. The American payload might have been more dependably catastrophic, but the Soviet delivery system was unsurpassed. Sergei, the man, was known only by his code name, Master Chief Designer. He was a target for assassination.

Some say that the Russians gave up their moon program because of Sergei’s death in 1966. Others admit that the Russians never had a moon program. Sergei knew that the Van Allen Radiation Belts would have killed the cosmonauts. They would have killed the American astronauts, too. If they had ever tried to venture through them. Which, of course, they didn’t.  

But secret Sergei took most of his secrets to the grave. He was a scientific genius. A technological master craftsman. Wernher was an aristocrat with too many preconceived notions. Wernher tried to make his rockets look like rockets in the movies. Sergei designed them like tree trunks with four roots extending outward at the base. They were more stable that way. His space capsules, unsurpassed to date, were spherical. A sphere is more stable than a cone. Any freshman in engineering knows that. Sergei would have found the NASA’s Space Shuttle, with all its high-tech attachments and do-dads, a laughingstock. No wonder it blew up. Twice. 

Chief Master Designer. He was as smart as Wernher, but far more practical. He was a small-town lad from the Ukraine, trained as a carpenter. That gave him a distinct advantage over the chosen-race German nobleman who never got his supremely white hands dirty.

Sergei spent a few years in the Gulag. His comrades were jealous, so they turned him in, accused of disloyal feelings during Stalin’s purges. He had a bad attitude. He was smarter than Stalin, and that was dangerous. He lost all his teeth to scurvy and they beat the crap out of him on the Siberian tundra, but he didn’t die. Rehabilitated in the ‘50’s, with German hardware at his disposal, he designed some great spaceships. He even crashed one on the moon, in 1959. A decade before Apollo 11.

But everything Soviet was secret. They only let the news get out when it was successful, glorious and good propaganda. Like Sputnik 1. That was a huge windfall. The loyal sons of Mother Russia had done the impossible. Orbit and communication, in October of 1957. The next thing was to see if a living thing could survive in space. Sputnik 2 was the dog. That was a month later.

The dog’s name was Laika. She was the first organic payload to orbit the earth. They had launched a couple of dogs before, but they didn’t go very high. They just parachuted back down and survived. Laika, after rigorous months of training, went into orbit. And she was a star. 

A shooting star, in fact. There was no reentry program for Laika. Her space capsule didn’t have a heat shield or a parachute. No pension, no benefits, no dog biscuits. She got the job done, but it was too expensive to bring her back. Still on the chalkboard. The point was to make sure that blast-off, orbit and weightlessness wouldn’t kill a warm-blooded animal of moderate intelligence. Laika barked over the radio, proving she was alive, and then her orbit decayed, and she burned up in the atmosphere on reentry. The heroic picture of Laika wearing her cute little space harness for the glory of Mother Russia was taken before her flight.

In America, Laika was not applauded. She was a wound to national pride. Everywhere else on the planet, Laika was the celebrated (dead) puppy of every proletarian heart. Most were unaware that she had been fried alive for the cause, comrade. 

To this day, dogs the world over are named, Laika. It means noisy barker in Russian. She was a stray, found wandering the streets of Moscow. The Soviets used strays for space travel. It wasn’t to save money, and it wasn’t to recognize the dignity to the huddled masses. It was because they thought that breeding was a capitalist myth—which is true—and that scientifically materialist strays, products of harsh environments, would more easily adapt to the precarious conditions of space travel. Which they did. Sort of like researchers using African orphans to test American vaccines. Which they also did.

In Spanish, laica is a church-lady. (They bark a lot too.) Cosmonauts were sometimes asked if they had seen God up there in the heavens. The ones who came back alive did not, in fact, meet their Maker. It was a Soviet science project, to prove the non-existence of God with an argument that was as ridiculous as medieval scholasticism’s proof that he did exist. Uh, nope, didn’t see him.

Perhaps our little canine church-lady did see God. That sort of mission could make a believer out of the most die-hard Leninist, comrade. Even among human pilots who followed in Laika’s pawprints, it was understood that cosmonaut was a synonym for expendable cannon fodder. Only to be immortalized in the collective memory of the united workers of the world after the universal liberation from the yoke of capitalist exploitation, comrade.