[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abrumrad. This is Radiolab. Robert's traveling today, so it's just me. And today we have a very different kind of story than we've ever done. It comes from a journalist and filmmaker named Luis Trellis, and an interesting thing kind of happened as we were reporting this.

TIM HOWARD: It sounds pretty clear.

LUIS TRELLIS: Yeah.

TIM: It's gotta be a landline.

JAD: Luis and one of our producers, Tim Howard, had called up this guy Vladimir Ceballos, who is a filmmaker himself. Cuban guy, exile. And the interview happened to be just a few hours after Obama had made that big announcement.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba, in the most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.]

JAD: That happened just before the interview.

TIM: Hello, is this Vladimir?

RECORDER: Hey, we're recording.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Yes, it's Vladimir.

TIM: Vladimir, how are you doing? This is Tim in New York. And we also have Luis.

LUIS: Hi Vlad. It's Luis.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: How are you, Luis?

LUIS: Good, good.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: How about the news, no?

LUIS: Yeah. Amazing news, right?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I was crying.

LUIS: [laughs]

TIM: Really?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Yeah. I was crying, man.

LUIS: Yeah.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: First of all, you know, I've been here in the United States for 20 years, and I never think that I was gonna see this day, you know?

TIM: Really?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: We will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Because it has been 50 year—53 years since the United States, you know, broke the diplomatic relationship with Cuba.

TIM: Yeah.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And nothing happened in Cuba, you know? Everything is the same. Now everything is gonna change.

JAD: Today, a collaboration with a fantastic program, Radio Ambulante. Luis Trellis comes to us from them. This is a story that predates the stuff you've been hearing in the news. In many ways, it's maybe a tiny dark preamble to all of that stuff. It's a story about Cuba, the power of music, and a group of Cuban kids who decide to opt out in this crazy way that when Luis Trellis told us about it, we almost couldn't believe.

LUIS: So the reason we called up Vladi is that we wanted to hear the backstory of all of this.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Well, I was born in Pinar del Río in 1964.

TIM: Tell me about what it was like for you to be a kid.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: [laughs] I was happy because in Cuba we didn't have any information. We didn't have any communication with anybody outside Cuba. And everything that we received, it was the news that they government want to give to us.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fidel Castro: [speaking Spanish]]

TIM: He remembers listening to endless Fidel Castro speeches on the radio.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I remember when I was a kid in elementary school, all the time they were teaching us that Russia was the big country in the world, the big economy. And everything that we would hope is to be like them.

TIM: Yeah.

LUIS: It was a given that he would get in line every year to get his toy.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: You know, I only got three toys every year.

JAD: Because of rationing?

LUIS: Exactly. And then every week, he and his folks would wake up, they would go to the nearest church.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: To throw eggs at the church building.

TIM: Throw eggs at the church?

LUIS: Why?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Because we didn't believe in God. That the government, they didn't believe in God, you know?

LUIS: That's how you showed you were a good revolutionary, and Vladimir was just being a good boy. But when he turns 14, there comes a day when a friend takes him aside and shows him a video of Led Zeppelin.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I remember that day. I remember like ...

LUIS: Do you remember what Led Zeppelin song it was?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: "Kashmir."

LUIS: "Kashmir!"

TIM: Oh, yeah!

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Yeah, "Kashmir." It was my first time that I hear rock and roll music.

TIM: How did it make you feel when you heard Kashmir?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Whoa! Different. You know, you see Robert Plant and you see Jimmy Page with those long hair and the moves that they had. And the thing that they say, it was really different. And because of that, you know, I was completely changed. Completely changed my life. Let me tell you, completely changed my life.

LUIS: He's not sure why, but in that moment ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I went from a good example to freak. I went to friki. I went to friki.

JAD: What is friki?

LUIS: So Frikis are what Cubans called the most extreme metal heads, hard rock, punk rockers.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: We start wearing dirty clothes, clothes with holes, and long hair.

LUIS: Problem was ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: The Cuban radio station didn't put any rock music. I remember when I was 19 years old, 20 years old, my father gave me a Russian radio. And it was a good FM. We went to the roof of some friends because on those roof, you can listen to the station from Florida. Oh man, we listened to the Rolling Stones, "Sympathy With the Devil." "Hello baby!" Man! Barry Manilow. We were excited to listen Barry Manilow. After that, I didn't like it. No, but in the beginning, everything that came from there in English, it was good, you know? Because I don't know, that kind of music give us another door.

LUIS: So Vladi's walking around with ripped jeans, long hair. And that's fine. It's a normal youth rebellion. But then in the late '80s, everything changes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ronald Reagan: Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: The Wall went down.

[NEWS CLIP: The Berlin Wall. They are here in the thousands, they are here in the tens of thousands.]

LUIS: And in reaction, the Castro government dug in.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Fidel says, "Socialism or death!"

[NEWS CLIP: His slogan is painted freshly all over Havana: Socialism or death.

LUIS: Suddenly music you listened to became very ideological, and if you listened to rock, you were listening to the enemy of the Cuban state: the United States.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: The government created a police presence in every neighborhood, every five blocks.

LUIS: And Vladimir says if the police found you and you had long hair?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: They'd beat us, kick us.

LUIS: Send you away to work, cutting sugarcane in the cane fields.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Just like that. Boom!

LUIS: In school, they'd often cut your hair against your will.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: It was abuse.

JAD: And just to jump in, this is the point in the story where things take a very—no other way to say it, a very punk rock turn, because into this cultural war?

LUIS: Steps a guy named ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Papo.

LUIS: Papo.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: We name him Papo La Bala.

BOB ARELLANO: Papo La Bala. You know, Papo the bullet. I really want to say that he tried to embody that. That kind of bullet to your brain, that wake up.

LUIS: That's Bob Arellano. He's a professor at Southern Oregon University. He went several times in the '90s to Cuba to interview Papo, who he calls the Kurt Cobain of the Frikis.

BOB ARELLANO: Yeah. He looked very intense. He was cocky and confident and just charismatic.

LUIS: Super tall.

JESUS DIAZ: Skinny.

LUIS HERNANDEZ: Yeah. He always wear an American flag.

JESUS DIAZ: Oh yeah, yeah. Like a bandana.

LUIS HERNANDEZ: He use only ...

LUIS: Those are two friends of Papos, Jesus Diaz and Luis Hernandez, who was also a bandmate of his.

LUIS HERNANDEZ: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: So Luis remembers the first time he met Papo, and it was on a night that a Communist Party meeting was taking place right outside his house.

LUIS HERNANDEZ: Outside the building. And when Papo's coming, he's coming in a bicycle. And we—his head, a flag, United States flag. And when he's coming ...

LUIS: On his head?

LUIS HERNANDEZ: Yeah. My father, my father going down. [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: Your father, when he saw him come with the American flag on his head ...

LUIS HERNANDEZ: Yeah. [speaking Spanish] "Are you crazy? Taking your flag out of your head." Papo say "Why?" And everyone outside the building, silence.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Papo was a weird guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: You can see video of Papo because Vladimir shot a documentary in 1994 where he interviewed Papo and some of the other Frikis. And in that documentary, Papo talks about growing up poor.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Father is an alcoholic. Mother, abandoned.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: By age 14, he's in the streets and a few years later he makes a decision that's really at the heart of this story.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: Just to set it up so that you can understand the context.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: What happened was that in 1989, I think. Or 1990 ...

LUIS: Somewhere around there, the Cuban government is fighting in Angola. It's backing a leftist liberation movement, and it's kind of a proxy war with the United States. And in the late '80s, Cuban soldiers start coming back home.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And some soldiers from the Cuban army, they were in Africa, they came with HIV. HIV positive. And because of that, the government has all the people in Cuba tested with HIV.

LUIS: If you belong to a high risk group, you were tested.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: They went to your place of work. They went to your apartment, they went to the school, they went to everybody.

LUIS: Wow!

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I remember. They went to my work and they test everybody over there in the radio station. 50 people over there.

LUIS: Wow.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: "Give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood, give me your blood."

LUIS: Vladi says they would come in, take your blood. And if they found that you were positive ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: The police came, put you in the police car and go straight to the sanitorium.

JAD: They just locked you up?

LUIS: Yeah.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And I remember one day I was talking to him ...

LUIS: Papo and his wife.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Papo said, [speaking Spanish]. "I want to live free. Look, they're kicking me out. They're beating me out. They don't want me to live like a rocker here. They are doing a lot of things to me. I'm going to do a lot of things to them." And he told me, "Look, I went to this rock concert in Villa Clara.

LUIS: Papo told him, "I met up with these other rockers. They were HIV positive and I went and took a syringe, drew some blood from their arm and I put the needle in my own arm."

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: "And I jam myself with HIV."

LUIS: Whoa!

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: "I gave myself with blood contaminated with HIV, you know?" And I look at him, and said, "Man, do you know what you did? Do you know what are you doing? You're going to die, man!" And he said to me, "I don't care."

TIM: That's crazy, though.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: That's crazy!

TIM: He knew for sure that when he did that, that he—that that was a death sentence?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: For him, yes. He knows.

LUIS: Vladimir's not quite sure that the others that came after Papo really knew what they were doing, but Papo knew.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Remember, he says "Socialism or death." And Papo said to me, "Death is a door. When you don't have any more doors to open, death is a door."

JAD: Coming up. That door gets wider. Others walk through. And for at least a beat, they find something besides death—something quite the opposite.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one.]

[LUIS: Hi, my name is Luis Trellis, and Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End this message.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abrumad. This is Radiolab.

LUIS: Yes. One two, one two. Mic check.

JAD: That's Luis Trellis of Radio Ambulante. Let's go back to his story about Cuba and music in the late '80s and '90s. And so far, a dude has made a crazy decision—dude named Papo—to inject himself with HIV.

JAD: Would you call it a protest?

LUIS: I think Papo would have called it a protest, but not the guys that came after.

JAD: This is at a moment when there was a cultural war happening between the Castro government and anyone it deemed 'antisocial,' which included kids with long hair who listened to rock. And it was also a moment where if you were found to be HIV positive in Cuba, you were forcibly quarantined.

LUIS: So Papo injects himself and he gets sent to the sanitarium.

JAD: And can you describe that place? Like, what did he find?

LUIS: Well, he found a beautiful place in the middle of the Pinar Del Río countryside.

JAD: Really?

LUIS: It's full of palm trees. Very green, very lush. Farm animals roaming in.

JAD: Huh. And you went there?

LUIS: Yes. Yes, I was there. I was there. And there are still farm animals over there. [laughs] Actually, they were roaming, a couple of cows and chickens. It's like kind of an idyllic place. So I went there to visit the last two rockers that still remain in the place, Gerson Govea and his wife Yohandra. And they're kind of like the keepers of all that went down in there, the memories.

JAD: Uh-huh.

LUIS: So I spent a couple of days with them, and they walked me around. And it's full of, like, these little housing units.

JAD: And you're saying this place was idyllic even back then?

LUIS: Yeah. Gerson and Yohandra are walking me through it and they're like, "Okay, so we would be walking around here 10 years ago and Nirvana would be coming out of here."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Yohandra Cardoso: [speaking Spanish]]

LUIS: "Metallica would be coming out of the next house."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Yohandra Cardoso: [speaking Spanish]]

JAD: No kidding!

LUIS: Yeah! So it was like a headbangers' ball in Pinar Del Río, you know?

JAD: Wait, but why? I mean, how come they were able to have that freedom in the sanitarium but not outside?

LUIS: Initially, the sanitarium system was under the military, and it was more of a gulag. But in the late '80s, early '90s the sanitariums went from the military being in charge to the Ministry of Health and Medicine.

JAD: Huh!

LUIS: And these were by all accounts, very progressive doctors, very concerned about their patients. They gave them all the food and medicine they needed and they were like, "You want to rock out? Go ahead!"

JAD: Huh! So it's like a prison but it was also kind of a little bubble of freedom.

LUIS: Yeah. And strangely enough, they soon found out that they even had power, power they didn't have before. Vladi told me this story, the patients inside the sanitarium could go out every 21 days for a day trip, and some of the Frikis would go out, and just by flashing their ID cards that said they were AIDS patients, police would leave them alone.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I remember on two or three occasions, that the police came after, and one of them has a syringe.

LUIS: A syringe?

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: A syringe full of blood.

BOB ARELLANO: And Vladi says the guy took out the blood and waved it at the police.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And said, "You want to come to me? Come on, come to me." And they were afraid of that.

LUIS: And so word began to spread about what life was like inside the sanitarium. And you have to keep in mind that outside, Cuba was falling apart.

[NEWS CLIP: Hard economic times in Cuba. The government today tightened bread rationing and raised egg prices. It blamed delays in Soviet shipments to Cuba.]

LUIS: Almost overnight, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba was left without the massive subsidies it used to get. That meant ...

[NEWS CLIP: Long lines for bread. Short tempers.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: We were suffering.

LUIS: Vladimir Ceballos, who never actually lived inside the sanitarium, he says that people outside were going hungry. And he himself ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: I was weighing like a hundred pounds, 98 pounds.

JAD: Oh my God!

LUIS: And as things just kept getting worse ...

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: You see like ...

[NEWS CLIP: Hungry, sunburned, dehydrated.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: ... 50,000 people leave Cuba.

[NEWS CLIP: They managed to escape on a raft and make it to the Florida keys. These days, more Cubans than ever are taking the risk.]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: It was the big crisis, you know, in the Clinton era. But ...

LUIS: If you were in the Sanitorium, you were fine.

BOB ARELLANO: Yeah. Just being able to get milk and an egg and beans.

LUIS: Bob Arellano says that that was a big motivation for a lot of kids.

BOB ARELLANO: Yes, I'm not gonna be harassed. Yes, I'm free. And yes, I also get meals.

LUIS: And it went from being a couple of self injectors, a couple of dozen self injectors to being hundreds.

JAD: Whoa! And did the government know that this was happening?

LUIS: Well, there's this Swedish documentary from the time. It's called "¡Socialismo o muerte!" and in it there's this bishop of Havana ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, ¡Socialismo o muerte!: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: His last name is Cespedes. And he says that he met some of the kids that were injecting themselves with AIDS, and that at a state dinner he approached Fidel. He told him ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, ¡Socialismo o muerte!: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: ... that these kids, they're injecting themselves. And Fidel couldn't believe it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, ¡Socialismo o muerte!: [speaking Spanish]

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And then after that, in the pharmacy, they don't sell syringe anymore. They put a law that injecting self with HIV, you're going to spend eight years in prison.

LUIS: But it didn't matter.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: It was like a movement. It was like a movement.

LUIS: And all of a sudden you have all these bands forming across the island in different sanitariums. In the biggest one of them all, in Santiago de Las Vegas, which is like a half hour, 45 minutes South of Havana, you have the first group that gets formed, it's called VIH, which translates to HIV. But then in center of the island, in this town called Santa Clara. You had the Cuban punk band, Eskoria. And Eskoria translates as ...

BOB ARELLANO: 'Scum,' right? Escoria.

LUIS: And according to Bob, if you look back to the '80s, the people who were fleeing Cuba ...

BOB ARELLANO: The balseros, the rafters, one of the responses of the Cuban government were billboards that said, "Que vaya la escoria. Se vaya." "Let the scum leave." So to call yourself Eskoria, to call yourself scum, that is punk rock.

JAD: And were these bands big outside the sanitorium too?

LUIS: Eskoria is—I mean, you can't talk about Cuban punk without—I mean Eskoria is like ...

JAD: So their tapes got out or something.

LUIS: Yeah, totally.

JAD: And what happens next? I mean, these bands are forming, kids are self injecting. Does it just keep growing and growing?

LUIS: Yeah. There's tape of Gerson and Yohandra saying that it got to be so fashionable that kids started to think that in order to be a Friki you had to have AIDS.

JAD: Really?

LUIS: Yeah. No, there was some tape of Yohandra saying ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Yohandra Cardoso: [speaking Spanish]

LUIS: ... which is, "And the kids were saying that if you really wanted to be a rocker in that time, you had to have AIDS."

BOB ARELLANO: It's like the fact that it went from 10 or 20 to 200 or more was obviously like this kind of just joiner phenomenon of, like, "That's so cool, I'm gonna do it too." There was even talk among some of the young people I met, of thinking that, oh, eventually Fidel and those guys will find a cure.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: They're gonna find a cure for this.

BOB ARELLANO: Cuba, with one of the best health care systems in the Western hemisphere.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: We're gonna live forever. Then everything started to change when the first of them died.

LUIS: According to Vladi, the first kid that died in Pinar del Río was a guy named Manuel. We don't know his last name or his age.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: He was the first. And when the second die and when the third die, everything stop.

BOB ARELLANO: At one point in Vladi's documentary, which was made in 1994, Papo says that in two years about 18 people died.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: And when they start seeing how you die, because you don't die like a normal person who had a heart attack or anything, no. You transform yourself.

LUIS: A lot of them went blind. Then they went insane. They started getting opportunistic diseases. You know how AIDS works.

VLADIMIR CEBALLOS: Seeing that, this time thinking about what they did.

JAD: Did kids start saying they wished they hadn't done this?

LUIS: Well, when you see Vladi's documentary and that Swedish documentary, ¡Socialismo o muerte!, which was made in 1995, you definitely see the kids having deep regrets. You have one of them saying, "I regret this. I regret it a million times."

LUIS: How about Papo?

BOB ARELLANO: Well, I don't—I never heard Papo ever question that he had done it.

LUIS: And in that Swedish documentary, there's a scene towards the end where you see Papo, and he's clearly sick. He's rail thin, his face is swollen. And we see him stepping into an evangelical church. He's wearing a Nirvana t-shirt, but he's become a fervent Christian.

JAD: Really?

LUIS: He's found this community of evangelical Christians that accepts AIDS patients. And he's still taunting the government because he says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]]

LUIS: ... he's still a rocker, and that he thinks that Christ is the perfect communist. If more communists were like the Christians, that would be perfect. It's interesting though, because in that last video we also see him taking English classes and he's saying like, "You know, the other patients in the sanitarium, they're, like, sick like me. They won't go out at night. They won't rock out 'til the early morning. But I'm like, 'This is my life.'"

JAD: So he was sort of defiant to the end.

LUIS: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Papo La Bala: [speaking Spanish]]

LUIS: And a few months later, according to Gerson, Papo started to bleed out from his mouth and eyes. He had a parasite in his brain. He became violent, and he died from that disease.

JAD: God. Part of me wonders like, is this strong and fierce or is it just dumb and sad? And maybe fear. It's also like, I can't figure out how to feel about this.

LUIS: Yeah. Well I think it can be all those things, right? It was dumb and stupid and immature, and it was also nihilistic and anarchic.

JAD: And do you think in the end it had any impact?

LUIS: Well, that's hard to say. It must have. It must have.

JAD: Here's how Luis puts it: not even five years after Papo died, things did start to shift in Cuba. Make it of what you will, but December 8, 2000, Castro unveils a statue of John Lennon. That same year, Bob Arellano and a bunch of rock musicians ...

BOB ARELLANO: Including Will Oldham, David Pajo

JAD: ... they're given permission to play a bunch of rock shows in Cuba out in the open. And at one of those shows in Pinar Del Río ...

BOB ARELLANO: They announced, "Listen, we're going to send out this next number to Papo La Bala and the Frikis."

LUIS: And everyone sang along.

JAD: Now it would be impossible to draw any kind of cause and effect and say one thing led to another. That would be ridiculous. But Luis says that back when the Frikis were streaming into the sanitorium ...

LUIS: Cuba wasn't changing back then. It started to change precisely because of a hundred gestures big and small.

JAD: He says around Cuba at that moment, there are all of these tiny, mostly silent protests taking hold.

LUIS: And then you have the Maleconazo, which was like the first serious civil disobedience that Castro had in '94 where just a mob in Havana rose up because they were so tired of the power outages. They were angry at their poor living conditions. They were leaving the city in rafts by the thousands, by the hundreds. Castro literally had to come down to the Cuban Malecon, the beautiful seaside road that circles around Havana, and he literally had to talk the mob down.

JAD: So at this moment, you know, late '80s, early '90s ...

LUIS: There's this breeding ground of discontent all over Cuba, and I think the self-injector movement is the best crystallization we have of that.

JAD: It's like this sort of a thousand points of light, and this is the brightest point.

LUIS: Right.

JAD: Or the darkest point, frankly.

LUIS: Right, exactly.

JAD: Huge thank you to Luis Trellis of Radio Ambulante. We were thrilled to collaborate with Radio Ambulante, and a thank you to Daniel Alarcon for making that collaboration possible. If you don't know Radio Ambulante, check them out. Radioambulante.org. They tell these incredible stories from around the Spanish-speaking world in Spanish. There are some very hard-hitting stories. Radioambulante.org. We'll also point you to them at Radiolab.org. Also, they've created a Spanish version, a Spanish-language version of this story, which goes in a different direction. It goes into way more depth into Luis's visit to Cuba, and the story of Gerson and Yohandra, the last two remaining self-infected Frikis. And we may just put that story in our podcast feed for the Spanish speakers out there who want to hear their story. Thank you to Vladimir Ceballos and Bob Arellano for use of their documentaries. This story was produced by Tim Howard, who I'm very sad to say is leaving us this week.

JAD: Tim, we love you. We wish you the best. We had production support from Matt Kielty and Andy Mills, and original music from Alio Die and the Cuban punk bands, HIV and Eskoria. Robert Krulwich, will be back next podcast. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: You have two new messages. Message one.]

[BOB ARELLANO: Hey, this is Bob Arellano calling from lovely Talent, Oregon. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[LUIS: Our staff includes Brenna Farrell ...]

[BOB ARELLANO: Brenna Farrell ...]

[LUIS: Ellen Horne ...]

[BOB ARELLANO: Dylan Keefe ...]

[LUIS: The great Matt Kielty ...]

[BOB ARELLANO: Lynn Levy, Andy Mills ...]

[LUIS: Latif Nasser ...]

[BOB ARELLANO: Malissa O'Donnell, Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler and Jamie York. With help from Danny Lewis and Kelly Prime.]

[LUIS: Our fact checker for this episode was Michelle Harris. Special thanks to Bob Adriano, Vladimir Ceballos and the Swedish TV channel SVT for use of the documentary ¡Socialismo o muerte! And of course, these credits wouldn't be complete without a great, amazing shout out to the great Tim Howard. Okay. Bye. Adios amigo!]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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