Everything changes under Fidel.

He abolished all private schools and created state-run schools, which were turned into indoctrination centers.

My parents refused to send me to school once the state took over, and we were getting ready to leave anyway, but I got to see my friend's textbook, and here's a math problem: "Jose Gomez used to pay his scumbag landlord so many pesos per month for rent.

Now that our glorious revolution has implemented the urban reform, he only pays this much.

What percentage savings has our glorious revolution given Jose Gomez?" And every math problem was like that.

In the USA, he will become an academic, an expert on sixteenth-century Geneva, another place, in some ways, of surveillance, conformity, and repression

repressionI knew how Geneva worked because I had lived in a place just like Geneva, where you were carefully watched and severely punished if you broke any rules.

[laughs] This is one of the laws in Geneva.

Today, he goes to the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana to see his hero Gagarin, and his bête noire, Fidel.

There were thousands of people, and I remember standing and watching Gagarin pass by in his convertible on the street.

There was genuine excitement, like when Fidel marched into town.

I was so thrilled to see the world's first cosmonaut.

Poor man was so sunburned.

That's what I noticed.

I said, "Man, I've never seen a sunburn like that."

Castro proceeds to give a speech twice as long, a full three hours.

In fact, they're hoping this might spell the end of him.

It was early morning.

It was before dawn.

I thought it was thunder, but it turned out to be bombs.

The planes were flying very, very low over our house because the airfield they were trying to bomb was no more than 10 blocks away, and our whole house was shaking.

Our neighbor got up on his roof with a pistol and was shooting at the airplanes with a pistol.

Very effective.

Equally unsurprising is Castro's response to the raid.

Carlos fears his school may be the next target.

target.There was quite a bit of kidnapping going on.

There was a Grand Prix in Havana in 1958, believe it or not, and this Argentine driver, Fangio, was kidnapped, and I forget what demands were made, but it was common to, to hear of things like that.

When there was an attack on the presidential palace, the, the school was sur- immediately surrounded by police, and we were all whisked away by parents.

It was a very scary moment because there was a suspicion that the school might be attacked, and the children might be kidnapped.

Even for the children of well-to-do families, it's a traumatic time that they'll never forget.

I went to sleep often hearing shots in the distance or bombs going off.

And I was caught in this gunfight.

At school, he was taught the familiar tales of Spanish rule.

I was taught that Cuba could have been the Garden of Eden, and we were told the story of colonization that all North Americans were also taught.

Europeans had come and tamed these natives who were uncivilized and improved their lives.

But at the very same time, we were taught about the cruelty of the European colonial takeover.

So the legend goes, Hatuey resists Spanish authority to the end.

And before the fire was lit, a priest was trying to get him to convert, said, "Don't you want to go to heaven? If you don't convert, you can't go to heaven." He asked, "Do the Spanish go to heaven?" And the priest said, "Of course they do." He says, "Well, then I'd rather not go to heaven."

And so I'm curious, you, when we first met, when this wild profile of bilocating saints and levitations, et cetera, you said that in our first conversation, one of the most compelling things about these facts is the way that they're gathered and that we can't just ignore these claims as medieval superstition.

Yes.

Well, the ones that I deal with in my book have a special character to them because the ones that I researched are all in the 16th, 17th century, after the Catholic Church established a new, what was for the day, for that time, a scientific or empirical way of testing out the veracity or truth of miracle accounts, and this was done for the canonization inquests that were h- held for anyone who was being promoted as a saint, right? Throughout the Middle Ages, the whole process evolved towards a more kind of empirical way of judging miracle accounts.

But what happened, uh, in the 16th century is that the process was set in place that is actually still used today.

And the simplest way to explain it is that questionnaires were developed for every case.

Questionnaires were circulated to all the people who had known this person, come in contact with them, if these witnesses were still alive, and the questionnaires always had a section on miracles.

"Have you ever seen a miracle associated with this person?" And then would go the description of whatever the miracles were, but the sort of gold seal, that gold seal placed on these questionnaires is that the witnesses had to swear an oath they were telling the truth.

But first off, can you give us a little primer on who was, uh, Sister Maria and, uh, why is she so well-known, and then, you know, what are some of the crazy accounts about her that you document in the book?