White Lies: The Excludables

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NPR

News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Documentary

4.8 • 11.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2023

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In our final episode of the season, we start researching the names on the secret list of 2,746 Cuban excludables. What we find confirms many of our suspicions about the arbitrariness of how the U.S. government created the list. Our reporting takes us — where else? — to Cuba, to finally track down the men on the roof and hear them tell their own stories. What had they hoped to find in this country and what had they found instead? Finally, our journey takes us to one last interview in a high rise in Vancouver, Canada, where we hear from the man who led the uprising at Talladega, and made the decision to take to the prison's roof to display banners made from bedsheets that read, Pray for Us and Please Media: Justice, Freedom, or Death. Want to hear the first episode of Embedded's next series a week before everyone else? Sign up for Embedded+ at plus.npr.org/embedded.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Previously on White Lives.
0:05.0	In many cases, we never heard back from them.
0:09.0	It was like it was the Earth at Swelvin.
0:11.0	There was a list, and I've always wondered what happened to the ones.
0:15.0	But as you know, it's impossible to find out.
0:19.0	His name is Jorge Luis Marquez Medina.
0:22.0	I would want to find out what happened.
0:24.0	You know, he just got a wonder.
0:27.0	This is the list.
0:28.0	We have a list.
0:29.0	We're holding the list.
0:30.0	What do we do with the list now that we have it?
0:38.0	When a source sent us the secret list,
0:40.0	drawn up in 1984, the 2,746 Mario Cubans,
0:44.0	the US government wanted to deport back to Cuba,
0:47.0	the first thing we did was to confirm many of our suspicions.
0:50.0	Dozens and dozens of cases we'd read about,
0:53.0	and interviewed people about, were there on the list.
0:55.0	People who arrived in 1980 and were never released from custody.
0:58.0	People suspected, but never charged with a crime in the US.
1:02.0	People acquitted of crimes, who nevertheless found themselves detained by the INS.
1:06.0	People who spent only a few months in jail for a minor crime like marijuana possession,
	...

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