Coke reportedly uses worldwide, mafia-type strong-arms to assure distribution and wreck competitors. Such as making soda pop competitors' refrigerator units in stores to over-night, disappear. In some places it is the traditional Sicilian and Italian mafia. In other places, former Soviet Secret Police agents the KGB, like in the U.S. and current Russia, called the mafia. Elsewhere used reportedly are the numerous Japanese underworld, the Yakuza.
Feeding on lush revenue of Coke ads, the press whores are not about to run news items or documentaries pointing out the reportedly close link between The Coca-Cola Company, covert operations of the American CIA, and the criminal cartel.
A key player, reportedly combining covert operations and the soda pop, was Roberto Goizueta. A Cuban, he started with the firm at their Havana offices in 1954. From 1980 to about the time of his death in 1997, Goizueta was at the helm of the spy-pop witches brew, operating in most every place on the globe. Through stock options he became a billionaire.
Goizueta's father was a Cuban sugar plantation dictator. Cuba was the major source of cane sugar used in the cola drink. Because of the ferment for change, needed was a new front man in Cuba. Batista, and the mafia, and the wealthy criminal families sucking the sugar blood out of Cuba, had overplayed their hand.
So the American CIA, with the help of their reputed Atlanta-based adjunct, The Coca-Cola Company, installed their darling, Fidel Castro, a popular hero. When, like Frankenstein's monster, he turned against his creators, they plotted to overthrow Castro and assassinate him. It was 1961 and it was called the Bay of Pigs operation.
The Coca-Cola Company and other old-time imperial firms having an entrenched interest to have Cuba as a puppet colony, participated with CIA. Aiding them was Claire Boothe Luce, wife of the boss of the Time-Life Magazine empire.
With the American CIA actually since 1959, through his espionage front, Zapata Petroleum, was George Herbert Walker Bush.
He aided as well the aborted mission. One of the attempted invasion vessels was named after Bush's operations. Out of official government office was Richard Milhous Nixon. In 1961, he was the overlord for the planned invasion. Blamed for the aborted invasion planned actually by President Eisenhower, President John F. Kennedy said as a punishment, he would scatter the CIA to the wind.
CIA boss Allen Dulles, sacked by JFK, called him a "traitor". Some say the JFK threats against CIA led to the plot to assassinate him.
Some would simplify this story by pointing to Coke trying to change over greatly to a diet cola, as a way of breaking loose of filling the void once supplied by Cuban cane sugar, against which there was a U.S. embargo.
By the end of the 20th Century, the major player in supplying the chemical sweeteners for non-Diet Coke, was Archer-Daniels-Midland. At the time of Watergate, the head of ADM was to have been prosecuted for secret participation in Nixon's covert operations slush fund. Dwayne Andreas was too useful to the American CIA for them to allow him to be jailed. Like The Coca-Cola Company in the past, by 1999, ADM had an interest in putting their claws on Cuba.
pt 2