Santiago Rivas - Playa Girón: The Cuban Exiles Invasion at the Bay of Pigs 1961

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO REVOLUTION

C uba, being one of the first islands discovered by Christopher Columbus, was a very important place for the Spanish colonies in Latin America, with La Habana harbour a bastion of royalist forces during the independence wars.

Independence movements began late on the island, backed by the US, especially, the southern states, who wanted to annex Cuba as a slave state, because the black people there outnumbered the white. Three revolts occurred in 1848, 1850 and 1851, headed by former Spanish Army General Narciso Lpez, all backed by the US, but after the Confederate States lost the American Civil War and slavery was abolished, such schemes were abandoned.

However, the revolts and what had happened elsewhere in the Americas led to growing independence sentiments among the Cuban people, and the Liberals rose up against Spanish rule in 1968, headed by Carlos Manuel de Cspedes, leading to a 10-year-long civil war which ended in the defeat of the rebels. But the Spanish government agreed to sign the Pact of Zanjn, whereby it compromised to make some reforms to give more freedom to the islanders. Slavery was finally abolished in 1886, but as the planned reforms were not made, in 1879 Jos Martand Toms Estrada Palma had begun a new revolt, which ended a year later with their defeat. Yet the independence flame was afire, and in 1895 the final independence war began, headed by Antonio Maceo and Mximo Gmez as the military heads, with Jos Mart as the ideologue. The latter was killed at the Battle of Dos Ros on 19 May 1895, and Maceo died at Punta Brava on 7 December 1896. The Spanish sent a major reinforcement to the island, changing the tide of the war against the Cubans, but the US government became interested in forcing the Spanish from the island and used the pretext of the destruction of the USS Maine battleship in La Habana harbour on 15 February 1898 to declare war on Spain.