Origin of The Pugilist: Why I Was Born For This Moment
Both my parents are products of horrific covert United States intelligence and military operations that intentionally harmed children and collided in New Mexico.
If anyone was born to cover the Epstein Class at this moment in American history, via the secrecy around Zorro Ranch, Epstein’s ranch that has never been properly searched, it’s me. Both my parents are products of covert United States government operations — one in the US and one in Cuba — that collided in New Mexico from 1944 to 1961, and because of what was done to them, I have no illusions about what the CIA and United States military intelligence are capable of doing to innocent children in the name of US military dominance.
Every Wednesday in the early 1950s, nurses came down the aisles at Central Grade School in Belen, New Mexico. They carried metal pails. They ladled government orange juice into little white paper cups and handed them to the children. Then they took measurements. My mother, Mary Maxine Conant, was in tge second grade. Then third. Then fourth. She drank the orange juice because that is what children do when adults in authority hand them something and expect them to drink it. Her parents had signed the consent forms, because they were told it was their patriotic duty to allow their children to be used for “nutritional” research. None of them were told what was hidden in that juice. It was radiation.
But that wasn’t the first time the United States government had radiated my mother, and many other rural New Mexicans. The first time, she was eighteen months old.
To understand what was done to my mother, you need to understand what the United States government did to New Mexico in the summer of 1945.
The Manhattan Project was the American military’s secret program to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could. Launched in 1942 and funded with two billion dollars — roughly thirty billion in today’s money — it employed over 130,000 people across dozens of sites, most of them unaware of the program’s full scope. The scientists and engineers at its center were among the most brilliant minds in the world. They were also, many of them, fleeing fascism in Europe. The bomb they built was intended to end the war. It did. It also inaugurated a new era of human history in which governments possessed the power to destroy cities in an instant, and private defense contractors began to quietly control those governments in the United States. In New Mexico, the nuclear industrial complex ushered in an era still alive and well today, in which the creation, design, building and testing of weapons of mass destruction became the backbone of the state’s entire economy, and the families living near those bomb laboratories, families like ours, would pay a price they were never told about and never consented to, for generations.
The Army chose the Jornada del Muerto desert in southern New Mexico for the first test of the first atomic bomb. They’d toyed with testing the bomb on a foreign country, but worried it might create international issues. They chose rural New Mexico, noting in their files that “it’s nothing but cows and Mexicans out there.” The land was remote, federally controlled, and surrounded by communities that had been there for centuries — Hispanic farming villages, Indigenous pueblos, ranching families whose roots in that land predated the United States itself. The Army did not consult them. The Army did not warn them. The Army chose their land because it was convenient, and because the people living barely registered as human to them.
On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 in the morning, the device code-named Trinity detonated, above ground, at White Sands, New Mexico. The explosion released energy equivalent to twenty-one kilotons of TNT. The flash was visible for two hundred miles in every direction. The shock wave shattered windows across the valley. A mushroom cloud rose forty thousand feet into the sky, during monsoon season, and mixed into the clouds on its way up. The heat at the hypocenter was four times the temperature of the sun’s surface. The sand beneath the tower fused into a glassy radioactive mineral that scientists later named trinitite.
The fallout drifted with the building thunderstorms. Invisible, silent, carried northeast on the wind, and paused over my mother’s family’s farm in the tiny hamlet of Bosque, along the Rio Grande River. It rained. Heavily. The radiation rode the raindrops down and settled into the soil, the water table, the grass the cattle ate, the milk the cattle produced, the gardens the families tended, the dust the children breathed. The Army monitored it. The Army knew. The Army said nothing. And my mother played in that dirt, drank that well water, that milk, at those vegetables.
My great-grandfather was working the family ranch near Mountainair, roughly seventeen miles from the blast site, when the sky cracked open before dawn that day. He called my grandpa to say he thought the sun had risen twice that day.
In the years that followed Trinity, the Atomic Energy Commission — the civilian agency created in 1946 to manage America’s nuclear program — conducted studies on the health effects of fallout on downwind populations. Downwinders is the term that came to describe them: the people who lived in the path of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests, most of them in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, most of them rural, most of them poor, most of them Hispanic, Indigenous, or Mormon farming communities with little political power. The AEC knew what the fallout was doing to their bodies. The AEC classified the data.
The program that brought government nurses to Central Elementary School in Belen every Wednesday with metal pails of orange juice was part of that research apparatus — the government tracking the biological consequences of what it had already done, in secret, without consent, on American children.
The Albuquerque Journal eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the program. By then the damage had been done for decades.
My mother’s body answered the question the government had been asking.
Most of the girls in her high school graduating class in Belen developed leukemia. Leukemia — cancer of the blood and bone marrow — is one of the signature radiation injuries, among the first malignancies to appear in exposed populations. My mother developed thyroid cancer. The thyroid gland is particularly vulnerable to radioactive iodine, which is released in large quantities by nuclear detonations and concentrates in the thyroid tissue of people who ingest or inhale it. Thyroid cancer in downwinder populations is so common and so well-documented that it is one of the compensable conditions under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, the federal law passed in 1990 — forty-five years after Trinity — that finally acknowledged what had been done to these communities. My mother survived her thyroid cancer by having the gland and tumor removed in her 40s.
What none of us knew — what she didn’t know, what I didn’t know growing up — was that she was also carrying a meningioma in her left frontal lobe. A meningioma is a tumor that grows in the meninges, the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Radiation exposure is among the most well-established causes. This one was slow-growing, sitting in the part of the brain that governs personality, judgment, social behavior, and inhibition, and it had been there for decades. Quietly. Doing its work.
When I was around ten years old, my mother began to change. Drastically. The Sunday school teacher who hand-sewed by dance recital costumes suddenly became someone I didn’t recognize. Unfiltered. Cruel. Erratic. The woman who had shaped her life around poetry and family made appalling choices that shattered both. That shattered me. I grew up trying to understand what had happened to her, blaming her, blaming myself, carrying the wreckage of a childhood defined by her transformation. I had no name for it, until I was in my 40s myself.
We found the tumor when my mom was 73 years old. She’d been incubating it since she was a toddler. By then it was the size of an orange. They removed it.
The first thing she did in recovery was search the room for me. “There’s my beautiful daughter,” she said. It was the first kind thing she had said to me since the 1980s. I had my mother back, the one from my early childhood.
When the neurosurgeon explained what a left frontal lobe injury does to a person — the disinhibition, the personality inversion, the erasure of the self that had existed before, the lack of filter, the cruelty — I finally had a name for my childhood. Our own government had put a lesion in my mother’s brain before she was out of diapers. I grew up inside the consequences without ever knowing the cause. That is a particular kind of theft. It doesn’t have a line on any compensation form. There is no word for this level of betrayal and gaslighting, other than grief.
My father’s story begins in Santa Clara, Cuba.
To understand what was done to my father, you need to understand what the United States government did to Cuba in the years before and after Fidel Castro’s revolution.
Castro came to power on January 1, 1959, after a years-long guerrilla campaign toppled the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. The Eisenhower administration, alarmed by a socialist government ninety miles from Florida, immediately began planning to remove Castro. The CIA was the instrument of that planned removal. Its methods included a planned “grassroots” military invasion — the Bay of Pigs — as well as a sophisticated psychological warfare campaign designed to destabilize Cuban society from within, to sow terror among the civilian population, and to prevent Cubans from accepting or accommodating the new government. One of those psychological warfare operations was called Operation Pedro Pan.
The CIA, working through the false front of the Catholic Church and specifically through Father Bryan Walsh of Catholic Charities in Miami, circulated a story through Cuba: the revolutionary government was coming for the children. Parents would have their legal rights stripped. Children would be sent to Soviet re-education camps. The only way to save them was to send them to America, where the Catholic Church would care for them until their parents could follow.
It was a lie, and the CIA knew it.
The actual objective was to keep Cuban parents — particularly the educated, professional, ruling class families whose cooperation or departure would most destabilize the new government — in Cuba. By sending their children ahead, parents would feel compelled to stay and fight, or at minimum would not flee en masse to Miami, which would have meant the United States would have to admit to invading Cuba themselves and risk retaliation by the Soviet Union. They preferred to have the wealthy in Cuba stay to fight Castro themselves. Which they would not do if they felt their kids’ lives were in danger. So, the lie. “We’ll take care of your kids until Castro is gone. They’ll be with loving Catholic foster families until it’s safe to come home again.”
The Cuban children were not being rescued. They were being used as geopolitical instruments. The CIA expect about 600 Cuban kids to take the United States up on the offer to pay for their kids to leave. They were stunned with more than 14,000 kids signed up between 1960 and 1962, including my dad. They were put on planes to Miami without their parents, some as young as infants. Many would not see their families again for years. Some never saw them again at all.
The CIA leafleted the private preparatory schools of Havana with this propaganda. The targets were the children of the wealthy. One of those schools was Instituto Edison in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, one of the most prestigious prep schools in Cuba.
My father, Nelson, attended that school, though in truth he probably had no business being there.
His mother, Eugenia Leyva, had been a teenager from a large peasant family from Santa Clara when she went to work as a maid for a wealthy family. Two young adult sons in the household made a bet about her. A man named Ricardo Hernandez won. My father was the result. The family fired Eugenia, who was likely coerced and raped, for being “easy.” The shame, as was customary, was entirely hers
.
She fled to Havana to find work, with my infant father. She found a one-room tenement in Luyanó, one of the roughest barrios in the city, and three jobs, and left my father alone from the time he was two years old because there was no other way to keep him alive. When he was seven she married Elpidio Valdes — a loan shark, brutal and well-connected, the kind of man who collected debts in cash in paper bags and had doctors who owed him favors. Elpidio beat Eugenia. He beat my father. My father, at nine years old, tried to stop him. Elpidio took my dad to work with him and forced him to watch as he beat gay men to death for fun.
When my father was nine, Eugenia died. Elpidio said it was leukemia. The death certificate said leukemia. It was written by a doctor who owed Elpidio money. That doctor took my father aside and told him something he has carried his entire life: remember that leukemia causes bruises that look exactly like being beaten to death. My dad did not know his mom was dead until he was at the graveside with Elpidio and no one else as she was interred. “That’s your mom,” said Elpidio. “Remember, men don’t cry.” My dad stopped talking for one full year.
My father’s name — Valdes — belongs to the man who killed his mother.
Elpidio, whatever his sins, believed in education. He enrolled my father at Instituto Edison, across the city from Luyanó. Every day my father took the bus from the rough barrio to the gleaming prep school in Miramar, where he sat in class with the sons of lawyers and industrialists and government ministers. Elpidio, who could not read beyond sums owed, paid the tuition in cash, in paper bags, while the other fathers wrote checks. My father was the only boy at Instituto Edison who came from Luyanó. He was also, it would turn out, one of the very few Pedro Pan kids who was not from a wealthy family.
When the CIA leaflets circulated through the school, my father’s friends, all around 15 by then, were electric with excitement. They believed the promise: America, adventure, American girls, brick houses with swimming pools. They thought they’d be gone a month or two, maybe three, and then come home. They didn’t understand what was happening to their country or to them.
Elpidio saw an opportunity to be rid of some other man’s kid. In December 1960 he put my father on a plane to Miami. My father traveled with several boys from Instituto Edison, among them his close friends Manolo and Faustino.
In Miami, the children were processed by Catholic Charities under Father Bryan Walsh — a priest my father remembers with undisguised contempt — and transported to Camp Matecumbe, a facility in what is now the Kendall area, roughly twenty miles southwest of downtown Miami, in the flat sawgrass country at the edge of the Everglades. It was presented as a transit camp. It was, in practice, a juvenile detention facility. My father and the Cuban boys from the prep schools of Havana found themselves housed alongside American boys who had been placed there by the courts for criminal offenses. The Cubans and the Americans played baseball together. My father says the Cubans were far better players. They always let the Americans win. The Americans, he explains, were murderers, and the Cuban boys were “spoiled rotten.”
My father was at Camp Matecumbe from December 1960 through April 1961. On April 17, 1961, a CIA-trained force of roughly 1,400 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast. The invasion was a catastrophe. Within three days it had collapsed. Castro’s forces killed or captured nearly the entire brigade. Kennedy, who had inherited the operation from Eisenhower and authorized it with profound ambivalence, refused to provide American air cover. The invasion failed completely.
My father and the other boys listened to it on the radio.
When the news came through that Castro had won, something broke in the camp. The Cuban counselors who had been caring for the boys understood what it meant: they were not going home. Cuba was not going to be liberated in a month or two. The revolution had survived. The door had closed. The counselors walked out. The boys rioted. They dragged their mattresses into the center of the yard and set them on fire.
In the chaos, my father walked out of Camp Matecumbe. He walked into the Everglades edge and kept going, twenty miles northeast toward Miami, alone, in the April heat, a fifteen-year-old boy with nowhere to go and one lead: before he left Cuba, Elpidio had told him that if he ever found himself in a bind in Miami, he should go collect what El Chino owed him. There was a Chinese-Cuban man, a restaurant owner in Miami, who had left Cuba owing a debt with Elpidio. My father found the restaurant. But he was a gentle, mournful boy who did not have it in him to “collect.” El Chino fed him and let him sleep in the back room.
Then the man called the police.
My father was returned to Catholic Charities. Father Walsh’s office arranged transport. My father and a group of other boys were sent to New Mexico — the same state where, fifteen years earlier, a flash of light before dawn had made an old rancher think the sun had risen twice.
My father and his friend Faustino were placed together in a foster home in Albuquerque. It was tolerable, as these things went. Their friend Manolo was sent to a rural New Mexico family — racist, brutal. Manolo hanged himself in their barn.
My father eventually enrolled at the University of New Mexico, renting an apartment near campus with his Cuban buddies. That’s where he met my mother — literally, then, the girl next door, living with her friend. Dad became a professor. Mom finished college and went to work as a secretary. Things were normal, for a time.
In his thirties, my dad returned to Cuba and found his extended family in Santa Clara, the city his mother had left in shame decades before. They told him what Eugenia had never been able to: that Elpidio Valdes was not his father. That his biological father was Ricardo Hernandez — the man who had won the bet. Ricardo Hernandez had also left Cuba after the revolution. He had settled in Miami, where he ran a chain of laundromats with his daughter — his legitimate daughter, the one who got the name. When my father found him, Ricardo Hernandez wanted nothing to do with him. Or me.
I have spent my life trying to figure out where someone like me fits in.
In New Mexico, my Cuban dad has rendered me not quite local enough for a lot of people here.
Among Cuban Americans — who are few and far between in New Mexico — having a radical leftist father who was not rich at the time of the revolution, and being from New Mexico, meant we were exiles among the exiles of Miami and New Jersey.
As a perpetual outsider, I gravitated towards writing and, eventually, journalism. I’d always been on the outside looking in anyway. It was a way to be in any room without belonging there, and still be useful.
It was not until now — until The Epstein Class, Zorro Ranch, the untold story that connects US military intelligence and the Cold War and espionage and New Mexico and South Florida and the Caribbean that I am uniquely primed to tell — that I realized my inability to fit in has given me a superpower perspective that is needed right here, right now. I know firsthand what this system is capable of, because it abused both of my parents mightily. I exist only because of this abuse, in fact.
And I know this land like no other.
So. That’s where THE PUGILIST comes from. That’s why I won’t stop until this whole thing is exposed.
I am in awe of your story, your resilience and your resolve…and obviously your courage and skills. You have my abiding respect and support. Stay strong, resolved…and safe. Please.
Your unique pedigree and shared experience gave you the insight to fully expose the various aspects of the scandals that plague your ancestral grounds given the toll it imposed upon your parents. Keep up the great work 🥊