Florentino Aspillaga was a high-ranking officer in Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence during the Cold War. He ran a consulting trading company called Cuba Tecnica out of Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, that functioned as a front for Cuban spy activity. Aspillaga grew disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s Communist cause and defected to the U.S. in 1987. After debriefing at a U.S. Army base in Frankfurt, West Germany, Aspillaga met with a former Havana station chief named El Alpinista who now worked for the CIA and dropped the bombshell that many of the CIA agents stationed in Cuba were working as double agents for Cuban intelligence. The news shocked the CIA, who couldn’t comprehend how the Cuban government had managed to trick them in such a major way. Gladwell presents Aspillaga’s story in Chapter One to introduce the idea that people are bad at telling when a stranger is lying to them.
Florentino Aspillaga Quotes in Talking to Strangers
The Talking to Strangers quotes below are all either spoken by Florentino Aspillaga or refer to Florentino Aspillaga. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
This is what makes no sense about Florentino Aspillaga’s story. It would be one thing if Cuba had deceived a group of elderly shut-ins, the way scam artists do. But the Cubans fooled the CIA, an organization that takes the problem of understanding strangers very seriously.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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Florentino Aspillaga Quotes in Talking to Strangers
The Talking to Strangers quotes below are all either spoken by Florentino Aspillaga or refer to Florentino Aspillaga. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
This is what makes no sense about Florentino Aspillaga’s story. It would be one thing if Cuba had deceived a group of elderly shut-ins, the way scam artists do. But the Cubans fooled the CIA, an organization that takes the problem of understanding strangers very seriously.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
