Billionaire Buddies Build Border States Bar Chain

Lifting Our Glasses Against Evil Forces
At Billy Budd's Simon Bolivar Don't Tread On Me Revolutionary Bar & Grill

By Winsip Custer  CPW News Services

     When Orlando Claveria Castro and Thomas Washington Budd were young and living in South Florida they pooled their baseball cards, tiger eye marbles, tin soldiers and colorful Pez dispensers and opened a neighborhood secondhand shop across the street from their elementary school.  

     “Well it wasn’t exactly a shop. It was a card table on our lawn,” said Budd.  Orlando was quite a businessman and he led me to believe that my stuff which was about 80% of the total was only about 40% and he made off like a bandit,” said Budd.

     “What did you expect,” said Orlando whose middle name was used in the Spanish Philippines to define the imposed laws that made all native Philippinos choose a Spanish surname.  “That was during the age of the Spanish Conquistadors.  We Spaniards grew out of that imperialistic mind set…..probably starting with the return of Cabeza de Baca to Spain after he had survived the Florida Everglades and Seminoles and the Gulf Coast and Northern Mexican Indian tribes without his Toledo sword and armor.”

     Thirty five years later and the two men are enjoying and joining their mutual success as an electronics designer and importer-exporter.  They own their own businesses, but they still work together from time to time.  “Now we’ve decided to open a chain of bars across the Southern U.S. called Billy Budd’s Simon Bolivar Bar,” said Castro.

     “My favorite novel is Melville’s Billy Budd about a young sailor who is on a ship with a tyrannical officer.  They get into a fight and young Budd kills the brute in self-defense.  The ranking officers initially agree that it was self-defense, but then realize that if they let Budd off the hook there could be a mutiny.  So they hang him for murder,” said Castro.  "It was a case of to hell with the individual ….we’ve gotta save the ship and our positions on it.  Of course, we don’t live on a ship and the regimented life of soldiers and sailors is not our idea of freedom,” said Castro, no relation to Fidel.

     “My favorite Latin-America leader is Simon Bolivar,” said Budd who sees Simon Bolivar as a type of George Washington throwing off the tyranny of the Spanish in Latin America, just as Washington who had challenged the British. 

     "Was Washington throwing off Britain's taxation or was he throwing off the anti-slavery sentiments of Britain's Wilberforce?" asked Castro.

     "See, this is what makes our bar such a great place to mix and mingle!" said Budd.

     "Seriously," said Castro, "was Bolivar's hatred of slavery sincere?"  I believe it was.

     "Okay," said Budd.  "So anyway, qhy not a pub that combines these two great stories and provide a place where we can move forward together?” asked Budd turning to Castro. 

      "The only problem is that Simon Bolivar was a Mason inducted into the Scottish Rite Lodge in Paris in 1804.  That means that he was part of the Prussian Royal Family's wing of Masonry founded after 1776 and which in the U.S. was advanced through Albert Pike  who would eclipse the tradition of Washington and Franklin's Masonry and aligning it with a growing Fascist sentiment in the U.S..  Albert Pike was the KKK's chief legal advisor and Scottish Rite Masonry's patron saint in the United States.   He was hardly a saint and would have made the whole of the Caribbean a Golden Circle of slave labor.  He was an avid slaver which Fascists always are....as much so as Stalin or the Communist Chinese dictators.  Simon Bolivar claims to have hated slavery.  Did he?" asked Budd.

     "The history of  Latin America does not appear to have made it so," said Claveria, "what with human trafficking and all, but all of us have to do our own historical analysis and digestion of fact and myth to arrive at our own conclusions and to chart a different course when we see that the myth does not fit the reality," he concluded. "So we drink and share ideas, share ideas and drink.  This is a great idea....our new venture."

     "Why not just Budd and Castro's Bar," I asked.  "Does that name say as much as Billy Budd's Simon Bolivar Don't Tread on Me Revolutionary Bar and Grill?" asked Castro.  "I don't think so."

     With their first two pubs opening in Orlando and South Beach in Miami, the old friends have high hopes for building a bar-chain that will celebrate the similarities of their North and South American traditions that will eclipse the constricting and over-amplified subplot of the North American Yankee-Confederate history.  Billy Budd and Simon Bolivar would have made horrible slaves,” said Budd.

     "I'll drink to that," said Castro.  "We think that our new pub chain has a chance of becoming like the early American pubs that were so important to the American Revolution and the spirit of 1776 in opposing tyranny.   Today, that includes the drug cartels and even more brutal American Military Industrial Complex that has been eating away like a cancer on the wonderful American Republic that replaced the repressive British tyrrany with its own.  If there's human trafficking and a resurgence of slavery you'll see glasses raised against it here," said Budd.
     "Viva la Billy Budd and Simon Bolivar Don't Treat on Me Revolutionary Bar and Grill!" shouted Castro as he held up a Budd and Bolivar Beer made in their own micro-brewery.

     As proof of their sentiments to discontinue the tyrannical patterns of Albert Pike's Masonry or Washington's and Bolivar's limitations, if they weren't really sincere in their plans to free slaves, plans are in the works for the extension of the Billy Budd’s Simon Bolivar Pubs from Key West to San Diego, California. 
     "Mr. Presdent,  tear down that wall," shouted Budd referring to the U.S. Mexican border.
    The two businessmen have, however, raised another wall.  They refuse to sell Budweiser beer in any of their pubs because of the Prussian/German connection to Pike and Bolivar's Prussian/German Scottish Rite movement.  "The 'King of Beers'" said Budd.  "Can you imagine any respectable pub in Revolutionary America selling the King of anything?  Hell no!" he yelled.  "Simon Bolivar would also have been against drinking 'The King of Spain's Lager', too," said Castro.  "We drink to the permanent death of feudalism  and all tyranny on planet earth!  Viva la liberation!"

     "I'll drink to that," said Budd.