House of Sugar
The Bay of Pigs and the CIA/Mafia's Assasination of JFK
by
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San Blas, Cuba Sunday, April 16, 1961 You pompous bastard! Luis Benes was thinking as he glared across the Plaza de Armas at the aristocrat standing in the shade of the belfry of Our Lady of the Assumption with his son, Manuel. No, Luis. I’m the bastard, the mulatto told himself. He ordered his second aguardiente in the open-air Bar Habana at the tolling of the noon bell.
Luis took a drink of the clear cane liquor and stared across the plaza at the Don of San Blas. Carlos Garcia Rangel was dressed in his white linen suit and a wide-brimmed Panama hat that covered his black hair, which was traced with gray at the temples. Carlos, you treat me like sh--. I can’t help it if my life’s been cursed by the sins of Papa and his Negrito mistress who died giving me birth. I have nothing, and with the same father I am entitled to half the Casa del Azucar. Today justice will come, and I will see that you burn in hell.
Don Carlos watched Manuel count the chimes resounding down upon the hostile crowd gathering under the giant majagua tree that anchored the corner of the plaza. "Tomorrow our lives turn into a living hell," Don Carlos said to Father Lopez when the twelfth toll had faded. The old hooked-nose priest gave a fleeting look across the plaza to the crowd gathering in front of the Bar Habana. "The Castro Revolution will pass, Don Carlos. God sees to it that all things political pass with time." "No, Father, this time Fidel Castro defies God. I just pray to live to see the day Manuel tolls the bell our family cast in Spain with a pound of gold and silver to give it a heavenly tone." "Of course, Don Carlos, Next year Manuel will be old enough to be the toller of the bell," the priest replied, smiling down at the husky, green-eyed twelve-year-old. "This church has been the foundation of our family for generations." "And it shall remain so," the priest quickly replied. He took a few steps to help Eduardo, the acne-faced altar boy, tie the bell rope. Gonzalo Martinez Azanza poured Luis a third drink. "Luis, what will you do when Castro confiscates Don Carlos’s property and gives its to the cane cutters?" the bartender known as Gonzo asked his customer. Luis’s grayish eyes narrowed at the bartender’s question. "It’s also my land, asshole," he replied. The light-skinned, kinky-haired mulatto had pronounced Spanish features on a cleanly shaven face that stood out in a crowd. "You’re a dreamer, Luis." "And you’re an asshole," Luis repeated.
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About the Book
House of Sugar
JFK averted political backlash by directing the CIA to shroud the Bay of Pigs fiasco under a cloak of secrecy until it was declassified in 1998. Kennedy’s assassination theory is based upon extensive research of the events leading up to CIA operative Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest. Who orchestrated the CIA/Mafia assassination plot, and for what reasons?
From the author’s interviews with former CIA and military officers, Cuban nationals and exiles, this historical novel reveals the dark side of U.S. foreign policy. It is a shocking account of the CIA’s covert operations to overthrow foreign governments funded, in part, through Mafia drug trafficking.
Follow the saga of Don Carlos Garcia and his children, whose lives were forever changed on the night of April 16, 1961 when they fled their Casa de Azucar to escape the Bay of Pigs invasion. Learn about the CIA’s secret internal factions, its ambivalence toward BBC journalist/agent Holly Woodson, and its readiness to dispose of its agents. This is a tale of the blind ambition, greed, lust, and espionage that was masked under a shroud of patriotism.
The novel’s sequels – House of Deception, House of Sham, and House of Flimflam –cover the Johnson-Clinton presidencies and the U.S. government’s involvement in international drug trafficking.
Sheldon Burton Webster was born in Norton, Virginia in 1944 and now lives in Birmingham, Alabama where he is a practicing CPA and writer. After graduating from Mississippi State University, he served as a captain in the United States Army. Mr. Webster is an avid sportsman, conservationist, and a mountaineer who has climbed three of the world’s seven summits and visited over eighty countries in his quest for adventure. His literary accomplishments include The Betheaden Road, a collection of stories, and the novel, The Voyage of the Encounter.
About the Author
Sheldon Burton Webster was born on August 6, 1944 in Wise County, Virginia and grew up in Starkville, Mississippi where he attended John W. Overstreet Elementary and Starkville High School, graduating in 1962. Webster is a 1966 accounting graduate from Mississippi State University. After serving two years as an Army officer in West Germany, he moved to Birmingham, Alabama to begin his public accounting career with the International firm of Deloitte and Touché. In 1973 he established his public accounting practice that was merged with Borland Benefield CPAs in 1977. He serves as the Executive Vice President and Senior Audit and Consulting partner on a number of clients for one of Alabama’s oldest and most prestigious accounting firms. Webster also serves as President elect Chairman and Treasurer of the Board of Directors of BKR International, an international affiliation of accounting and consulting firms headquartered in New York. BKR International is the world’s 15th largest accounting entity with offices in over three hundred cities with combined professional fees in excess of one-half billion dollars. Webster is a sailor, sportsman and conservationist, and as a mountaineer has climbed eight major mountains, including three of the world’s seven summits. In 1997 he was a member of a near-fatal expedition on Mount McKinley in Alaska with his climbing partner, Robert Dowling, international editor of Business Week Magazine. As a world traveler Webster has visited some eighty foreign countries and has taken many of the world’s internationally acclaimed rail journeys. His most recent was the Reunification Express from Hanoi to Saigon while researching his novel, House of Sugar, a CIA/mafia conspiracy in assassinations and sale of illicit drugs with settings in Cuba and New Orleans. He is currently writing the sequels titled, House of Deception and House of Sham, the CIA’s role drug trafficking in Laos and Vietnam and smuggling cocaine into the United States to fund the Nicaraguan Contras in their civil war with the Marxist Sandinista regime resulting in addiction of the African-American community to crack cocaine. The forth book House of Flimflam is an account of the United States current War on Drugs in Columbia. As an author, Webster has written two other books - a collection of stories about rural Mississippi titled The Betheaden Road, published in 1994; and his first novel, The Voyage of the Encounter, a story revealing greed, guile, lust and revenge on Wall Street with settings in Newport, Bermuda and the Atlantic, released in December, 1998. Webster is married to Susan, and has one adult son and three stepchildren.