Creating Mr Men and the Austrian wine scandal

29:40After a few days in the camp, the Ojitos were finally taken to meet Uncle Osvaldo. It was just an incredibly happy occasion. He was very tanned. He had a white T-shirt that was very dirty. And we were just so anxious to hug him. It was very, very emotional. But when we arrived at the boat, very quickly after us, Lots more people, dozens. In the end, about 230 of us crowded in the Valley Chief, people we didn't know, people who to us looked a little strange. Some didn't have any shoes on. Some clearly were wearing clothes that had been folded for too long, as if they had been in an institution, perhaps an insane asylum, perhaps a prison.

30:28And one asked my father for a nail clipper. and my father said, what do you want that for? And he said, to cut my veins. So there were some clearly disturbed people in that boat and when we were finally told we could leave, the boat weighted down by the weight of so many people would not move. In desperation, Myrta's uncle tried to find another boat to tow them to the United States. He found a Vietnam War veteran called Mike Howell who'd gone to Marielle to try to help out. He was young and strong. I remember that he had a very interesting profile. And there was something strange about his left arm.

31:12It was a fake arm. And we realised that because he got tangled up with some ropes that he was throwing overboard to tie the two boats together, and the arm went in the water. And it was quite a moment. My mother fainted. Mike Howell's boat took the Ojitos to Key West. I ended up coming to the U.S. in a much nicer boat called Mañana. It was a very long journey. It took us 16 hours because we were towing the valley chief until we got to international waters. And I got seasick. I don't even know how I got out of that boat. But the moment I did and I stepped on firm ground, I came back. I was myself again.

31:57And then I thought, oh, my God, where are we? Chickens ran around, dogs, lots of people, small, dilapidated houses. I thought that we were in an island somewhere, not in the United States. But the reception was so warm and people so welcoming. It was just incredibly emotional. As it became obvious that there were thousands of criminals among the Cubans reaching Florida, public opinion changed. The United States tightened its policy and the numbers leaving the island tailed off. Mirta Ojito became a successful journalist and wrote a book about the boat lift called Finding Manana. Its emotional heart is a reunion with the captain of the boat which brought her to America.

32:47He made it his mission to help other people. He felt he was already living on borrowed time. And sadly, he passed away. Simon Watts in 2011. We're staying in Cuba for our next first-hand insight from the past. In May 2002, the former US President Jimmy Carter paid a hugely controversial visit to the country, which by then had been on the receiving end of a US trade embargo for more than 40 years. Jennifer McCoy accompanied Carter on the trip, and she's been speaking to Ben Henderson.

33:25First, he was extremely driven, really, to accomplish his goals, some of the things that he didn't finish during his presidency, driven by his very strong faith. Jimmy Carter was US president from 1977 to 1981. After his presidency, he set up the Carter Center to promote human rights and alleviate suffering around the world. Jennifer McCoy was director of the Carter Center's Americas Programme in 2002. She'd accompany him on trips across the region. Whenever we would travel, President and Mrs. Carter would get up early in the morning with their Secret Service, go on bike rides or on runs in whatever place we were, and the Secret Service would have to keep up with them.

34:13The US had seen Cuba as an enemy since 1959, when Fidel Castro came to power following the Cuban Revolution and established a communist regime allied to the Soviet Union. No sitting or former US president had visited since. Carter tried and failed to improve relations with Cuba during his presidency. But in 2000, he and Castro hit it off when they both served as pallbearers at the funeral of Canada's former Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau. Castro suggested a visit. Improved relations with the US might lead to welcome sanctions relief. Carter shared the desire to ease sanctions, while he also hoped to encourage Castro to embrace democracy and uphold Cuban civil liberties.

34:54But it wouldn't be straightforward. Many Cuban-Americans had fled Castro's one-party state, in which dissent wasn't tolerated. They'd be furious if Carter cosied up to him. Jennifer was tasked with navigating this diplomatic tightrope. One of President Carter's main goals was to be able to talk directly to the Cuban people. And so we requested a live broadcast of a speech that he wanted to give. He also decided to do it in Spanish so that there wouldn't be any possibility of changing through the interpretation of the speech. I brought in a professor from Georgia State University to work with him on his Spanish because I was a little bit worried about his southern accent.

35:38if that would be intelligible. Jennifer planned for the speech to be the highlight of a six-day visit. Carter would address the Castro government's shortcomings live on TV and radio, something not seen in Cuba for many years. In return, he'd call on the US to lift economic sanctions. But they had to keep the contents of the speech secret for now. Jennifer convinced the Cubans to agree to broadcast the speech without approving it beforehand, a remarkable feat in a country without press freedom. The arrival date was set for the 12th of May, 2002.

36:14On arrival in Havana, the US national anthem is played. Castro turns to Carter and whispers, haven't heard that around here in a long time. At least, that's how it's reported by CNN. The first item on the agenda, food. We had a lovely dinner and then retired to a meeting room with President Carter and President Castro sitting across each other. They're very different personalities, and President Carter is very direct. And so in a conversation, he wants to get through his agenda. But President Castro took off talking about the history of the relationship. At least an hour, he went on like that.

36:53And he would go round and round. And we thought, oh, he is losing it. You know, he's elderly. He is not remembering what he has said already or what we're trying to talk about. But then he would come back to the main point at the end. So we realized, no, he's completely with it. So as the hour was growing late on that night, President Carter just put up his hand and Castro got the message. He said, oh, yes, you know, I don't want to keep you up too late. We'll wrap this up and we'll continue you the next day. With a good night's sleep behind him, Carter embarked on a busy schedule. As he travelled, crowds gathered.

37:33Jennifer says they were always friendly, and Castro appeared to be holding to his pre-trip promises. Carter's visit was widely covered by the Cuban media, and the Americans were given the freedom of the island, even visiting dissidents who'd organised a petition called the Varela Project, which called for democratic elections, individual freedoms, and amnesty for political prisoners. But the acid test would be the speech, in which Carter planned to speak directly to the Cuban people, would Castro really tolerate public criticism?

38:05We arrived at the University of Havana, where the speech was going to be given. We were met by the president of the university. And he mentioned that following President Carter's speech, there would be a Q &A. And, you know, I said, well, oh, that's a surprise. We weren't expecting a Q &A, but there was really nothing we could do. So we walked in and then walks in President Castro and his full cabinet and sat in the front row. And we thought, oh, my goodness, how is he going to react? One, we knew what was in the speech. Castro did not. And two, oh, the Q &A is really meant for President Castro to get up and give a rebuttal.

38:52In the speech, President Carter had two main points, that the relationship between these two countries, you know, had been unequal. The U.S. needed to lift the embargo on Cuba, and Cuba needed to respect its own constitution, which gives the right of people to free speech, free assembly, and for democracy. and the right to petition their government for changes in the laws. And so he mentioned the Varela Project, and then he asked Castro to respect those rights, but that the US should move first as the larger and more powerful country. It was the first time in 43 years that Cubans had heard public criticism of their government.

39:38So I was watching his face and thinking, oh gosh, when he hears this part, you know. But he sat passively, he did not scowl. and after the speech was over and the Q &A and Castro did not get up to give his rebuttal, instead he just came up, shook President Carter's hand, congratulated him on a speech and said, so we go watch a ball game. It was a remarkable moment. Castro, for so long America's nemesis, was willing to tolerate public criticism on his own soil from a former US president. Perhaps the Cuban government really was willing to open up. Castro invited Carter to a Cuban all-star baseball game, and that wasn't all.

40:17I think you're going to be the pitcher, and our foreign minister will be the batter. Castro had asked President Carter to throw out the first ball. He had asked him ahead of time, and President Carter actually practiced with Secret Service, I think on the rooftop of our hotel, making sure it was going to go over the plate. Now, there's a huge stadium, and usually there's Secret Service all around him. But he walked out alone and threw the ball, did a good job. And afterward, Castro thanked him for having the trust in the Cuban people to walk out there alone like that without security. After six days in Cuba, Carter and his team returned home.

41:04The speech made waves across the region, but Carter wasn't able to convince Castro to take concrete steps towards democracy and protecting human rights. We were happy with the trip, a little bit disappointed. There wasn't a breakthrough on things like political prisoners, but happy with the trip. And we briefed President George W. Bush. He did not indicate that he was going to be opening. In fact, he had just made further restrictions on American travel to Cuba. So it really wasn't till later that the fruits of the trip could be born. Former US President Barack Obama took steps to improve relations with Cuba, but the Trump administration reversed that policy.

41:46Jennifer McCoy worked for the Carter Foundation until 2015. She's now Regent Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. Ben Henderson was speaking to Jennifer McCoy. Next, we've got this week's sporting witness. and with the Winter Olympics underway in Italy, we're going back just over 20 years, to the achievements of a pair of skiing siblings. Croatians Janica and Ivica Kostelic made history by becoming the first sister-brother duo to win Alpine Ski World Cup races on the same day. They told Marta Medveseck about their extraordinary journey from a country where they had limited ski training facilities to the very pinnacle of the alpine sport.

42:30It's the 25th of February 2002 and alpine skier Janica Kostelic has just returned home to Croatia from the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Hello everyone. Thank you all for coming in such great numbers. She has just won four Olympic medals, three of them gold, and is now the most successful female Olympic skier of all time. But as she addresses the press, her first words are about her older brother and fellow skier Ivica. The welcome was phenomenal for everyone, and especially for Ivica, who didn't manage to win a medal, but I believe he definitely will at the next Olympics. Aged just two years apart, Ivica explains how he and Janica have shared a close bond since childhood.

43:12We were always together, in training and outside of the training. Growing up in the 1990s, their parents taught them how to ski on a low local mountain in the Croatian capital Zagreb. We would always find a patch of snow, the dirty snow with a lot of mud in it. But we would come very early when the snow was still hard, and that was good for us. With only a handful of modest hills and less than 20 kilometers of snow slopes in the entire country, Croatia is hardly a place made for skiing. To try to make a ski champion with no snow and no money is almost impossible. But not for their coach, their father Ante.

43:46A former handball player and coach, Ante sought to overcome Croatia's limited skiing facilities by taking his children abroad to train for weeks at a time. On these trips, the family were often unable to afford any proper accommodation. We would build shelters from wood, normally far away from people. If we couldn't, we would just sleep in the forest or sleep in the car. While their rivals focused on high-intensity training and time trials, their father employed different methods. He said skiing is a skill. To master a skill, the most important thing is repetition. So when competition did 10 repetitions, we did 30.

44:23We would always be first on the lift and we would be the last ones going out. Even after a whole day of skiing, the siblings would stay outside playing. It was like that world belonged to us. There was great silence on the mountain. And we had time to spend a few hours just playing around these rocks, building shelters. Since we spent so much time with our dad, it was also nice to spend some time without him and just be children. And the only person I could be a kid with was my sister. Janica, the younger sibling, started training a few years after Ivica. At first, reluctantly. Because she was always falling.

45:05What was funny is that that same year when she started skiing seriously, she already started winning. She was such a great talent. Over the years, the two kept supporting and challenging each other in training. I'm a girl, so he didn't like when I came closer to him. And for me, it was fun because I wanted to be faster. I wanted to be closer to the guys. There's a term in the athletics. He was my bunny running in front, and I'm trying to catch him to make a better result. So we helped each other without really realizing how much it means to us. It was natural. But it wasn't just training with her older brother that set Janice up for success.

45:41For Janice, it was always just a game. She's a natural-born champion. Just the way she's thinking is special. It's different. She doesn't worry. By 2003, 20-year-old Janica was sweeping all before her and had already won four Olympic medals. Ivica had endured a frustrating time with injuries, but he too was starting to fulfill his potential by winning a number of World Cup races. Janica's results were proving that what we did was working. And it was a great encouragement for me because we did it together. On the 5th of January 2003, both siblings were in peak form. She was in Bormio and I was in Krańska Gora.

46:19and the whole day is in this diary. See, I write Sunday, 5th of January, a great date. In Borneo, Italy, Janica led the field after the first of her two runs in the slalom. Just an hour later at Krajnska Gora in Slovenia, Ivica was also fastest in his first slalom run. Each skier completes two runs and the one with the fastest combined time wins. A double victory was smiling on us. As he waited in the participant's tent ahead of his second and final run, Ivica attempted to conserve his energy, but he still had half an eye on his sister's second run 150 miles away. Our PR guy was giving us results from Bormio over the radio because he was the only one watching the TV because we had to rest.

47:03Janica easily came home in first place. Janica completely destroyed them. She won with two seconds advantage. Amazing. Ivica knew that if he could close out victory on the bumpy Slovenian slope, he would once again write the Kostelic name into alpine skiing history. I went down very furiously. I was very furious. First part, I skied full gas because the slope was in good condition. And then it was important to go through the ruts in the correct timing. Ivica crossed the finish line and looked up at the clock. He had won by 27 hundredths of a second. In doing so, he and Janica became the first siblings to win World Cup alpine races on the same day.

47:43I did a few push-ups with my skis still on my feet. And all of the crowds went crazy because there were a lot of people from Croatia watching the race on site. The historic day was also Janice's birthday. It was a great, great present from him. I was in the press conference and, you know, we were very emotional. At a press conference, she called me on the phone and all of the people from the media sang happy birthday to you over the phone. Many situations you cannot really describe with words. So it's one of those moments that you just feel and think about it inside. But yeah, it was an amazing day.

48:19Just a month later, the siblings struck again, this time a day apart, both claiming gold at the World Championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland. However, despite all his success, for Iwica there was still one unfulfilled dream, winning an Olympic medal. And then, at Torino 2006, it finally happened. Ivica secured silver in the combined event, and Janica, who picked up two more Olympic medals of her own, was there to celebrate with him as he crossed the line. She was sick at that time. I was really, really sick. Despite the doctors suggesting that she should not go anywhere. I couldn't stand, basically.

48:58She came to the finish. I went to the finish line and... She knew how much this medal meant for me. I know how much he wanted it. Because she was my best friend. Everybody that has a brother or a sister knows what kind of bond you have. Nobody knows me better than my sister. Just overwhelmed with joy. We both cried at that point. And I just remember saying into the camera, this is my sister. Why did you say that? Because I was proud. But you just won a medal. Yeah, but you know, it's also her medal. It was for me the most emotional moment of my entire career. She knew what this meant for me. It was as if she has wished for this medal more than for her own medals.

49:43For me, it's a much bigger achievement than what I did, even though he has silver and I do have gold. But as I know what he put into it, what he went through, it's much bigger than a silver medal. Janica and Ivica trained together for 16 years. By the time they retired from professional skiing, they had won a combined 10 Olympic medals, eight world championship medals, four overall World Cup titles and over 50 World Cup races, cementing their place as the most successful sibling duo in alpine skiing history. While they no longer ski professionally, Ivica and Janica remain very close. Today, each of us has their own family, small kids, different programs, but we are still very well connected.

50:27Looking back, what stands out most is not just their victories, but how they did it all together, through all the ups and downs. From today's perspective, it seems very impossible to me. Maybe it was the product of that time, our bond. Probably today we would be watching our phones. We would never get connected like that. But back then, we were together all the time. So I'm really happy that I lived a childhood like that. Although, you know, it was difficult. I wasn't keen on sleeping outside in the cold. But now when I look back, I think this made us a lot stronger than anything. The fabulous Kostelich siblings Ibiza and Janica were speaking to Marta Medveshek.

51:08And you can keep across all the action from this year's Winter Olympics by following events on the website bbc.com forward slash sport. Finally this week, the Austrian wine scandal. The country prides itself on its winemaking industry, which has deep roots in its history. But in 1985, government scientists discovered that large quantities of fine bottled wine had been contaminated with antifreeze. Nobody died, but the incident proved extremely damaging to the industry's reputation and operations. In 2015, Susan Hume spoke to Heidi Schruck, a young Austrian winemaker at the time of the scandal.

51:47We were sitting in the evening to watch the news and there was this bottle of wine on the TV screen coming closer and closer and the speaker said, we warn you from buying and consuming this wine. First thing was, I thought, was kind of a joke and did not take it serious. But this was no joke. For the Austrian wine industry, a catastrophe. A few months before, an anonymous letter had arrived at the Ministry of Agriculture, alleging that some winemakers had been using more than just grapes to make their wines taste sweeter and more luscious. Government chemists began testing bottles of apparently high-quality wines and discovered diethylene glycol, an industrial chemical used in antifreeze, at high levels of up to 5 grams per litre in some bottles.

52:41It's a very great amount if you think that it is fixed that 0.03 gram per liter are danger for health. 20-year-old Heidi Schreck was working in the wine trade already, helping to promote Austrian wines across the world. I was elected wine queen, which is a kind of representative job for a young woman and she represents the wines of her country. I opened wine festivals, I went to wine fairs. Do you dress up for it? Of course, of course, the traditional Austrian dirndl and I had a little golden crown on my head. While she was promoting Austrian wines, the wine queen had sometimes been surprised at the sweetness and softness of wines available at low prices.

53:35She'd been brought up on the family vineyard in the small village of Rust in Austria's Burgenland. And she knew that fine, sweet, auslays of wines made from the ripest, sweetest grapes could only usually be produced in small quantities. It never was quantity. It always was quality was the highest peak you could get during a vintage. Yeah, and of course those bottles had their price. And when I came to this wine fairs, I saw bottles of Ausleys. I had to pour them and I saw the price and thought, wow, they were rather cheap. And so this was what I was really wondering about. Heidi Schreck was especially surprised because she knew recent harvests had not been good for sweet wines.

54:22It was in 1982, which was very rainy vintage. I remember we started on October 20th. I will always remember because it was very late. And the grapes at that time were kind of ripe, but not really. So everybody was speaking of not a very good harvest. So it was a surprise to find quantities of good tasting wine. Later, yes, it was. She believes some winemakers had agreed in advance to provide large quantities of sweet Austrian wine to Germany and beyond, something no wise winemaker would do. They had their contracts about special qualities each year, and this is with a nature product like wine.

55:06It is impossible to make long-term contracts of a certain quality. You can't do that. I sometimes have from my 10 hectares 10 barrels of Ausbruch and sometimes I have only one barrel. So I never could promise somebody I have certain quantity of that wine every year. By the summer of 1985, the hunt for the culprits was afoot and the political future of the agriculture minister, Gunther Haydn, was on the line.

55:38Our reputation is ruined the world over because criminals have adulterated huge quantities of wine with a substance that's damaging to health. We must complete the investigation and quickly bring the accused to justice. Although no one had died or seems to have become ill from drinking the poisoned wine, Austria's reputation as a wine-producing nation was ruined. But not everyone took the crimes entirely seriously.

56:07It spawned a comic song, Zum Wohl Gleichol, or Cheers Gleichol.

56:16Newspaper columnist Hans Rauscher reckoned in some areas, everyone knew the wine was being doctored. They laughed and they told jokes about their neighbours, but they didn't go to the authorities. Everybody knew, and that's the Austrian attitude. They looked away. No one was laughing about the revelations in the quaint little town of Roost on the banks of the Neu-Ziedlersee lake, where Heidi Schreck's family had their vineyard.

56:46Roost is famous for its stalks nesting on the chimneys and for its fine wines. She says no winemaker there had been involved in doctoring wines with glycol. The first thing was a kind of a shock and people thought, wow, what is happening? The people of Rust felt really upset. It must have seemed very unfair to the people in Rust who weren't involved. Absolutely, it was unfair because it was the name of our town, the name of our region, which was used. Rust had around 480 hectares of vineyards, but a far larger area had been trading on its famous label. Vineyards to the east, where vines had not existed a few years before, had been cashing in with lower quality grapes enhanced with glycol.

57:35Genuine rust wine growers like the mayor at the time, Heribert Altinger, showed reporters the bottles bearing the fake labels from rust.

57:48Yes, this bottle here contains genuine rust wine as we grow it here. But this here is a devilish drink, adulterated wine enhanced with glycol, bottled in Germany. The tragedy is it bears our name. For Heidi, her family and her neighbours, it was a hard summer. It was just that the summer season started and people who know Rust, it is a very touristic place and lots of the bottles of wine are sold during these summer months when the tourists come and visit Rust and swim in the lake and later take some bottles home. And during these next two months we could not sell one bottle. In the Parliament in Vienna, tough new laws were rushed through to bolster the industry's reputation.

58:36The law must demonstrate to the whole wide world our determination to root out this unparalleled scandal. There were stricter rules on production. Labels, bottling and corks had to have an official seal. Several winemakers were convicted and jailed for adding the antifreeze to wine. But the Austrians are practical people. Instead of discarding all that adulterated wine, one enterprising business came up with a way of putting it to good use. With obvious logic, an Austrian company has suggested that since the wine contains antifreeze, why not use it as antifreeze? This week, they put the idea to the test on an ice-bound airport.

59:17Thousands of gallons of the contaminated wine, mixed with salts to make it even more effective, were sprayed onto the runway. Ten minutes later, the three centimetre layer of solid ice had completely melted. But Heidi Schreck, who now runs the family winery in Rust, reckons the wine scandal was remarkably a good thing for her industry in the end. New thinking, new methods were introduced. And some might say there's no such thing as bad publicity. OK, the world knows that Austria is a wine producing country. During all these bad things, this was a very good thing. but now we have to show them what potential in this wine country is and what beautiful soils we have, what wonderful climate we have and then it started to be a real revolution.

1:00:06Yeah, it's like Phoenix. Rise like a Phoenix. The Austrian winemaker Heidi Schruck was speaking to Susan Hume in 2015 and with that we've come to the end of this edition of the History Hour. We'll have more for you next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

1:00:50I did cry most of the half. Oh man, I'm failing. I'm failing this sport and I love. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there. It's not just about the sport. It's about all the other things that people with disabilities learn from each other. For nine minutes, you become a fan in the stands as we take you back in time to examine memorable moments from all over the world. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.