 At the time, during the height of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, communism was regarded in the U.S. as the nation's number one threat, and Castro, who set up a communist government in Cuba in the late 1950s, was among the country's chief enemies.The narrator escapes, Rita gets a job at a motel, and the farmer lies in wait for the narrator in hopes of turning him in to the FBI.At the song's conclusion, the narrator considers that "without freedom of speech, I might be in the swamp."