Someone kidnapped our government, and we are hostages.

It. Must. End.

because it pretty much says it all in one short post.

"specials" to the base back then when I ran airfreight out of Madison. Those specials were pick-up @ ORD and deliver to Ft McCoy... shipments of tear gas. I couldn't phone my dispatcher from the property because nobody was supposed to know they were there and security for civilians was pretty tight.

We had to build up everything from scratch very quickly to get ready to process the Cubans. We lived in the old style open bay wooden barracks.

I still remember, the first 3 or 4 days I hardly got any sleep at all. I was a supply man, I drove and drove and drove, getting, picking up things the company needed.

Fort mcCoy has a long history,I believe we held German POWS at Fort McCoy during WWII.

Funny side note: Some of the items I picked up was a refrigerator and some lumber. We built a bar in the lounge. We were restricted to base the entire time we were there. We worked 7 days a week, 24 hrs a day. Three 8hr shifts. We took up a collection and went out and bought cases of beer and soda.

After the bar was built we charged 40 cents for a can of beer and 35 cents for a can of soda. Wow I still remember that. Whenever some one got done with their shift they had a place to get a beer.

All the profit went towards a party we had once we got done with the mission. It was an awesome party.

a story from the inside.

I lived in Madison at the time. When they started releasing those guys it was a nightmare for the night life in both Madison and Milwaukee. Knife fights in the nightclubs, shootings on the streets... the crime rate shot up exponentially. Madison, in particular, was a highly progressive community in many ways and it had a thriving night scene because of the lack of violence in general. When the Cubans showed up, i only took a year to shut that all down between the street violence and the massive influx of cocaine, which many of the Cubans applied to their eyes for prolonged high. Apparently it's due to the smaller veins in the eye. Ugh!

My partner at the time was a social worker who dealt with them, trying to find them jobs and keep them out of jail. Every evening I would get a running tally of how many weapons and drugs were seized while at the office. It wasn't pretty, lots of fun stuff stopped because of the dangers in the streets all of a sudden. I heard it was worse, from news reporting, in Milwaukee.

I don't doubt what you posted, but I believe many, most of those Cubans became very good citizens of America.

but remember, Castro let a lot people from the prisons out and off the island, many of those landed in Ft McCoy. They were eventually released at a trickle and they quickly ended up in the larger cities and the problems began to mount. It changed the whole dynamic of Madison for some time.

I moved away in 1985 and only went back to visit a few times. It's been decades since I've been there but Madison was a really cool place for most of the time I was around there.