Reading My Parents' Stasi File
Lukas opens the series with the file that started it: 212 pages on his mother and father, compiled by a neighbour they trusted. He reads from it, and then calls the neighbour's daughter.
Thirteen Days on a Cuban Radio
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Show notes
October 1962 from a radio hut
Orlando was a conscript radio operator at a Cuban army post west of Havana during the missile crisis. He heard the traffic, saw the Soviet convoys and was told, more than once, that an American invasion would come by morning. Lukas interviewed him in Havana over two afternoons.
- Cuba in 1962 before the crisis, as a nineteen-year-old saw it
- What the radio traffic sounded like and what he understood of it
- The Soviet soldiers at the next post and the rum they traded
- The night of October 27 and the morning after
- How Cubans remember the crisis compared to Americans and Russians
Spanish passages translated in the transcript. Orlando asked that his surname not be used.
Transcript
Welcome back to Dead Drops and Dial Tones, I am Lukas Brandt. In October 1962 the world came closer to nuclear war than at any time before or since, and most of the people who tell that story were in Washington or Moscow. This episode is told from a radio hut west of Havana. Orlando was nineteen, a conscript operator, and for thirteen days he sat with headphones on listening to traffic he only partly understood, watching Soviet convoys pass on the road, and being told at least twice that the Americans would land by morning. He is eighty-two now. I spent two afternoons with him in Havana, and we talk about the sounds, the rumours, the rum traded with the Soviet soldiers at the next post, and the night of October 27 when he was sure it was over. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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