> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mikeholman.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # (The Necessary Men) Prologue: La Negociación - URL: https://www.mikeholman.com/the-necessary-men-prologue-la-negociacion/ - Published: 2026-09-12T02:47:19.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-12T02:47:19.000Z - Description: Former Cuban Army colonel Manuel Cabrillo negotiates the transition of his country to the status of a full-on narco-state with Cuban president Manolo Candela. - Author: Scott McKay - Tags: Miguel Cabrillo, Manolo Candela, Havana, The Necessary Men *Havana, Cuba – February 11, 2026* 0:00 /0:32 1× **Cabrillo and Candela negotiate at sunset.* “Cienfuegos,” said Cabrillo. “Cienfuegos?” came the response. “This is madness. No. The answer must be no. Not on these terms.” Manuel Lopez Alejandro Cabrillo, retired colonel in the *Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias* \- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba – sighed and rolled his eyes before taking a sip from the water glass in front of him. He’d been listening for an hour to Manolo Candela, the President of the country, as he made demands of Cabrillo’s current employers. Cabrillo rejected none; the demands were absurd, ridiculous and largely petty. Candela was very clearly to be the last president the Republic of Cuba – or at least this iteration of it – would have. And Cabrillo’s current employers knew it. They had sent him here to negotiate with this fussy, professorial bureaucrat who had nevertheless schemed and brutalized his way to the top of Cuba’s communist government largely because both sides were desperate, and both sides knew the clock would soon run out. And getting the best possible deal while there was still sand in the hourglass was what both sides needed. For Candela, it was obvious, Cabrillo’s current employers were a lifeline. Not for the country, of course; there would be no positive solution for the people of Cuba. The government couldn’t keep the power on, food rations were getting tighter, the economy – including the tourist economy which Cuba had recently been banking on – was in utter collapse. There were riots in the streets often, which Candela was putting down with greater and greater brutality. The prisons were filling with dissidents while emptying of hardened criminals, and Cabrillo knew that was a sign of the end stage of a regime losing its legitimacy. What Cuba did offer, though, was worthwhile to Cabrillo’s current employers. Manuel Cabrillo hadn’t so much retired his job in the FAR as acknowledged that it had gone away. He’d been stationed in Venezuela and installed in the *Ejército Bolivariano*, the Venezuelan army, as a field commander, as had thousands of other Cuban military and intelligence officers during the Madeira regime there. Cabrillo had led troops in battle, including in Madeira’s ill-fated war against Venezuela’s neighbor Guyana; he’d been captured on a destroyed runway in a little town called Mahdia, a few miles from Liberty Point, the city in the jungle built by the American capitalist Pierce Polk. It wasn’t even Polk’s American mercenaries who’d captured him. That was the humiliating part. He’d been captured by Guyanese militiamen while surveying repairs to the runway. It was no particular salvation to his ego that Earl Roberts, the head of that militia, had later been elected president of Guyana. Cabrillo’s capture had set his life off in a direction he hadn’t planned but wasn’t surprised by. He’d amassed a small fortune while in the employ of the Madeira regime, including a little freight company which did a brisk business moving cocaine from Colombia through the port of Maracaibo to Merida, Mexico on its way to the United States. It was a perquisite of his position in the Venezuelan army that his shipments were not to be checked at the border. When the Madeira regime fell, and especially when his wife left him and cleared out the bank accounts on her way to… somewhere, Cabrillo lost everything. But not everything. He still had contacts from the freight company. And the Colombians and Mexicans both recognized that Manuel Lopez Alejandro Cabrillo was a man of talent and drive, a man who merely needed opportunities and resources and he could achieve substantial things. So he hired on as a security consultant for a consortium of cartels. And that soon led to a role in something like governmental relations. With certain governments. One of which was Manolo Candela’s government, which still regarded Manuel Cabrillo as a hero. Over the past three years Cabrillo had connected the cartels with Candela’s regime as never before. It wouldn’t be out of place to say that Cuba had become something of a narco-state, though what was being negotiated was a grand escalation of that status. Cuba was perfect for the cartels. Far better as a jumping-off point for shipments into the United States than Mexico, as it turned out; the reinstalled Trumbull administration had all but shut down the southern border and made drug shipments considerably harder and less profitable. But Cuba was just 90 miles away from the southern tip of Florida. And Florida had miles and miles of coastline, much of it swampland and other uninhabited areas. And the cartels had become very, very sophisticated in the waterborne transportation of product to the American market. In particular was the invention of the coffins. 0:00 /0:10 1× **A coffin arrives in Florida to deliver its load.* They were submersible boats, crewed by three or four men, into which as much as ten tons of cocaine could be packed. The cartels built them in jungle shipyards throughout the Caribbean, at a price of between two and four million dollars. Often the coffins would make one, maybe two, runs and be scuttled; to the naked eye this would seem to be an exorbitant expense. Until you calculated that ten tons of cocaine translated into as much as a hundred million dollars in revenue, and at that sum the cost of the coffins began to seem quite low. What Cabrillo’s bosses wanted him to procure from Candela was the old Soviet submarine supply and repair facility at Cienfuegos, not far from Cabrillo’s family’s beachfront property there, so that the cartels could consolidate their boat production in a hardened facility and create an assembly line for the coffins. They would overwhelm Trumbull’s Department of Homeland Security with vessels and fill the streets of the United States with white powder, serving two purposes – fattening the wallets of Cabrillo’s employers, and weakening the monster to the north before it could deliver the long-anticipated blows both to Cuba and the cartels everyone knew would come. Trumbull had been back in office for almost a year and a half and Cuba still stood against him. It was a surprise, but one that Cabrillo’s employers knew was also an opportunity with a short window. Candela knew that, too. Which is why he was demanding not a straight fee to the government in exchange for a lease of the Cienfuegos facility but a cut of the revenue from each load delivered to Florida from Cuba, and a larger cut from the deliveries made from the coffins. 0:00 /1:26 1× **“I cannot convince my employers to make you their partner, jefe.”* “I cannot convince my employers to make you their partner, *jefe*,” Cabrillo told Candela after the president had finished his fit of performative indignation. “That was not my charge. I was told to negotiate a number, a rate of regularly-scheduled payments or a one-time fee, and to secure the use of the facility. I have listened to your list of requests and have not said no. Now is the time, *jefe*, for you to not say no.” “Yes, but you do not understand,” said Candela. “Cienfuegos is not for sale.” Cabrillo merely looked at the president. “It is not for sale, Manuel,” Candela said again. Cabrillo sighed once more. “*Jefe*,” he said, “we are not buying Cienfuegos and you are not selling it. You are renting out a hole the Russians dug forty years ago to hide things from the Americans. It is a hole full of cobwebs now. Useless. No submarine has entered that facility since you and I were little boys. If not this arrangement, what use will you make of it?” “The Chinese will…” “*Jefe!*” Cabrillo cut in, a derisive rebuke. “If the Chinese wanted Cienfuegos they would have bought it from you already. They do not. We do. Now, what I have put in front of you is a far more advantageous arrangement than you will get anywhere else. You can sell the rest of Cuba to the Chinese… if you haven’t already. But this, you will say yes to. And on the terms you have been presented. I have come bearing more than enough gifts for both the revolution… and the revolutionaries. After all, as the saying goes, *La codicia rompe el saco*.” “You deride the revolution,” said Candela, in a tone Cabrillo read as defeat. “And you call yourself a communist.” “I'm a committed communist, *jefe*,” Cabrillo retorted, “but even I know communism doesn't work. So do your Chinese friends.” Candela snorted, but Cabrillo could see that he had won. “You need something new,” he said. “My employers are that something. And because they want this to work, I have brought you one last thing.” “Yes?” Candela asked. “What would that be?” Cabrillo rose from his chair and knocked on the door of the study. The large black man standing outside opened the door, nodded at Cabrillo and motioned to another man down the hall. And a few moments later came the girl. Cabrillo guessed she was 17\. He hoped she was 17, at least. He didn’t know where she was from. Southern Europe, perhaps, or maybe the Caucasus. He could see in her pale, Slavic – maybe it was Slavic - face the desperation, or maybe it was resignation, of someone who could see, even at a tender age, that her life was not her own and would never be again. She wouldn’t look at him as she walked past him into the room, her dress so tight it revealed everything, unsteady in the spike heels either from the sedatives she’d been given or the fear – Candela had a reputation, after all. Cabrillo judged that was for the best. He didn’t want her eyes to meet his. He did plan on sleeping that night, after all. 0:00 /0:15 1× **The inducement and the close.* “Does it meet with your approval?” he asked Candela. “*Que chica!*” said the president. “You may have your Russian hole, Cabrillo. Send your men with papers. And leave us!” Cabrillo did, exiting the villa from a side door and making for the car taking him to the hotel. It was dusk, and he could see the meager lights flickering on in the capital city across the bay.