Castro Fidel - The brilliant disaster : JFK, Castro, and Americas doomed invasion of Cubas Bay of Pigs

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ALSO BY JIM RASENBERGER

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Copyright 2011 by Jim Rasenberger

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011004178

ISBN 978-1-4165-9650-9
ISBN 978-1-4165-9653-0 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4391-0047-9 (ebook)

Insert photograph credits: 1, 2, 8, 15, 24, Associated Press; 3, Getty Images ( New York Daily News Archive); 4, Museo del Che Guevara; 5, by Alberto Korda; 6, 7, 25, CIA; 9, National Park Service; 10, 18, public domain; 11, Getty Images (Alfred Eisenstaedt); 12, Getty Images (Joseph Scherschel); 13, 26, John F. Kennedy Library; 14, Getty Images (Gilberto Ante); 16, 19, 20, 22, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, FL; 17, Getty Images (Edward A. Hausner); 21, Navsource.org; 23, Getty Images (Miguel Vinas); 27, author.

For my parents

PART I HONEYMOON
APRIL 15OCTOBER 26, 1959

PART II A PROGRAM OF COVERT ACTION
NOVEMBER 3, 1959JANUARY 19, 1961

PART III GOLDEN INTERLUDE
JANUARY 20APRIL 14, 1961

PART IV D-DAY
APRIL 15APRIL 19, 1961

PART V AFTERMATH
APRIL 20DECEMBER 31, 1962

B ACK IN THE first half of the twentieth century, America was a good and determined nation led by competent men and defended by an indomitable militarythat, anyway, was a plausible view for Americans to hold fifty years ago. The First World War, then the Second World War, asserted and confirmed Americas place of might and right in the world. Even in the decade after the Second World War, as a new conflict in Korea suggested there were limits to what the United States might accomplish abroad, it would have been a cynical American who doubted he or she lived in a powerful nation engaged in worthy exploits.

And then came the Bay of Pigs.

In the early hours of April 17, 1961, some fourteen hundred men, most of them Cuban exiles, attempted to invade their homeland and overthrow Fidel Castro. The invasion at the Baha de Cochinosthe Bay of Pigsquickly unraveled. Three days after landing, the exile force was routed and sent fleeing to the sea or the swamps, where the survivors were soon captured by Castros army. Despite the Kennedy administrations initial insistence that the United States had nothing to do with the invasion, the world immediately understood that the entire operation had been organized and funded by the U.S. government. The invaders had been trained by CIA officers and supplied with American equipment, and the plan had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president of the United States. In short, the Bay of Pigs had been a U.S. operation, and its failurea perfect failure, historian Theodore Draper called itwas a distinctly American embarrassment. Bad enough the government had been caught bullying and prevaricating; much worse, the United States had allowed itself to be humiliated by a nation of 7 million inhabitants (compared to the United States 180 million) and smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. The greatest American defeat since the War of 1812, one American general called it. Others were less generous. Everyone agreed on this: it was a mistake Americans would never repeat and a lesson they would never forget.

They were wrong on both counts.

Mention the Bay of Pigs to a college-educated adult American under the age of, say, fifty and you are likely to be met by tentative nods of recognition. The incident still rings discordant bells somewhere in the back of our national memorysomething to do with Cuba, with Kennedy, with disaster. That phantasmagorical phrase aloneBay of Pigsis hard to forget, evoking images of bobbing swine in a bloodred sea (or at least it did in my mind when I first heard it). But what exactly happened at the Bay of Pigs? Many of us are no longer certain, including some of us who probably ought to be. At about the time I began thinking about this book, Dana Perino, the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, good-naturedly confessed on a radio program that she confused the Bay of Pigs thing (April 1961) with the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962). Given that Ms. Perino was born a decade after these events, her uncertainty was understandable. But coming from the woman representing the president who launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003an exercise that repeated some of the very same mistakes made in Cuba in 1961it also was unsettling. Presumably, somebody in the Bush White House considered the history of the Bay of Pigs before sending Colin Powell to the Security Council of the United Nations (an episode, as we shall see, bearing striking similarities to Adlai Stevensons appearance before that same body in April 1961) or ordering a minimal force to conquer a supposedly welcoming foreign land.

Then again, if history teaches us any lesson, it is that we do not learn the lessons of history very well. Almost as soon as the mistakes of the Bay of Pigs were cataloged and analyzed by various investigative bodies, America began committing them again, not only in Cuba, but elsewhere in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa. Afghanistan. Some of these have arguably produced long-term benefits for the United States. Most clearly have not.