White Lies: Season 2 Trailer

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News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Documentary

4.8 • 11.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2023

⏱️ 3 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1991, a group of men took over a federal prison in rural Alabama. But these men weren't prisoners, they were immigration detainees, all of them from Cuba. And none of them were serving time for a sentence; they were being indefinitely detained. Who were these men? What in the world had brought them from Cuba to a prison in rural Alabama, and what became of them afterward? On the new season of White Lies, hosts Chip Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace set out to find the men who took over the prison and, in the process, unspool a sprawling story of a mass exodus across the sea, back-channel cold war communiques, family separation, and a secret list.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we sued the State Department,
0:05.0	before we snuck into the graveyard of a federal penitentiary,
0:08.5	and before we received the brown paper package that changed everything,
0:13.0	all we had were the photographs.
0:19.0	We'd come across them in a newspaper archive, photos from a prison take over in 1991 in rural Alabama,
0:26.0	and the men standing on the roof of that prison holding a bedsheet that said pray for us.
0:31.0	And the strangest thing about these photos, all the men on the roof were from Cuba.
0:35.0	One, two, three, one, two, three.
0:38.0	I got a message into the public opinion of the United States.
0:41.0	Who were these men on the roof?
0:44.0	What in the world had brought them from Cuba to a prison in rural Alabama,
0:48.0	and what had happened to make them want to take it over?
0:51.0	You know, he just said it was our only option.
0:53.0	We had to do something, and this was the only thing we could think of.
0:57.0	Even though we were hostage and they threatened us and everything,
1:01.0	they still treated us with dignity and respect.
1:05.0	They're not being held because they're charged with a crime.
1:07.0	These people were being indefinitely detained.
1:10.0	Can't just keep these people in jail until they die.
1:12.0	In many cases, we never heard back from them.
1:17.0	It was like it's the earth that's welding.
1:26.0	We came to understand that the story was about a lot more than a prison takeover in Alabama.
	...

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