Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Before jumping into the details of the Bay of Pigs invasion I want to make sure we understand the environment in Cuba and the United States leading up to the invasion.
So, going into the late 1950s Cuba was controlled by this guy right over here: Batista
and he was a dictator that was supported by the United States.
Just to give a sense of what he was like. Here's a quote from John F Kennedy in 1963.
So this is after his already had oil the Bay of Pigs has happened, the Cuban Missle Crisis has happened.
He was not a big fan of Fidel Castro. But with that said in hindsight, JFK did say this,
this is pretty objective assessment of what Batista was like as the dictator of Cuba.
This is John F Kennedy saying this:
I believe there is no country in the world
including any and all countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation
were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime.
To some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the US.
Now we shall have to pay for those sins. So even JFK in hindsight is saying that Batista
was really not the best person and it really was not a good idea for the US to support such a
corrupt dictator for so long in Cuba. This is Batista
right over here, riding with some US generals in a parade when he was visiting DC. So you can imagine
he was not a popular person in control in Cuba and in 1959 you have a successful revolution against him.
In 1959 there is a revolution and the revolution is led by this character, Fidel Castro, and
his kind of two right hand men are Raoul Castro and Che Gueverra right over here
and they take control of Cuba. They're part of this nationalistic, revolutionary movement. Now the one thing
they do do, and they are left-leaning from the beginning, people assume that they're maybe communist or
quasi communist. But even from the get go as soon as they take power, they start taking over lands that were owned by,
well, one that was private cuban property, some of it that was United states property. Their arguement would
probably have been that this was wealth, private property that was ill gotten, that was gotten in the time of Batista,
but they did on a broad sweep , so they took over a lot of private land, a lot of private property, which also lead people think
hey, this is not just a nationalist revolution but also a communist revolution but you could also imagine
that once they take over there this huge migration of Cubans to the United States and there, it's
primarily middle class, upper middle class, educated Cubans who were really afraid of what Fidel Castro
was doing in terms of taking over of private land, taking people's properties. so you start having this
cuban exile community really focused around Florida and mainly Miami and they're still there.
And they're very unhappy with this fidel castro character right over here. So when we fast forward to 1961 JFK beocmes president,
He got selected in early 1961. We're now fast forwarding to April 1961 so JFK has only been president for a few months. But you can
imagine a lot of levels you have all of these cuban exiles, upper middled class, educated, middle
class, cuban exiles who hate fidel castro. He's taking over their lands he's turning it into what looks like a left
estate. This is all happening within the context of the cold war, the US is afraid of
countries falling to communism. It looks like fidel castro is a communist, so the US decides the fact
that you have all of the exisles who wanna oust him to the US porbably wants to oust him just because
he's a communist and they're afraid that he's going to align himself with the soviet union. So in conjunction
with the cuban exiles and the cia, and this right here is the director of the central intelligence
during the Kennedy administration or at least the beginning part of the Kennedy administration, this is Allan
Dulles, his brother is John Foster Dulles, where Dulles airport is named after and he was a US secretary of state.
They decide to they want to oust Fidel Castro but they want to do it in a way that the US does
not look like the one doing the invasion, so what they do is they plan an invasion where they
take cuban exiles and they get 1400 men to sign up to be kind of part of the CIA backed , US backed force
to invade cuba and overthrow fidel castro and a lot of this was based on the premise and you can imagine
this evenhappened in the iraq war, where the CIA, the American president. They kind of surround themselves with people who tell
them, who want give them a very optimistic, hopeful scenario telling them , look we represent what the rest
of the cuban people want, they'll say look if we just start a revolution, fidel castro will be over thrown
the reality that came out, at least at that point in time, in early 1960s fiedel castro was actually
pretty popular with the cuban people and you can imagine he was at that time popular with the poor
people who did not have land and now all of the sudden you have this leader for the people, I don't know
about his popularity now but at that point he was propbably much more popular than the exiles and the
cia would have had kennedy believed. so they plan this attack
Kennedy says oh, if we can get rid of Fidel Castro then that derisks the possibility of having this
communist nation right off of the florda coast. so they plan this invasion and you know it's shady to
begin with because they didn't want to make it look like an official american invasion they wanted to
make it look like a pure cuban counter-revolution to some degree that really mixed up every thing and
made it look and it really was suspect bcause they really were doing something that was not what it really
was. But the invasion the way it all worked out was that by April 15th and this is just going into the
details of the day
So they had the fourteen hundred exiles
They had some ships, some planes they marked them
They either removed the markings so that it didn't look like they were American
ships or planes
Or they put false markings of the Cuban military
So that it would cause some confusion or whatever
So on April 15 1961
Remember this is only a few months into Kennedy's administration
They start air attacks
Which launch from Nicaragua and they go to Cuba
And the whole point of these air attacks was to kind of soften the Cuban airforce
for an eventual invasion by the 1400 exiles
and so they have eight aircraft, eight bombers
Leaving Nicaragua they bomb Cuba at a base outside of Havana
and a base near or not too far from the current Guantanamo Bay
and the point or goal is to destroy the Cuban ariforce
It turns out that they didn't do it
They did it to cause confusion, due to the Cuban airforce markings on the planes
You had eight planes going and doing the bombing
One of them gets shot down
and a ninth plane actually leaves from Nicaragua and they falsely put bullet holes
in it to make it look like it was hit with anti aircraft guns
and had it defect to Florida
So I guess the idea behind this was to make it look like there was a Cuban
pilot who takes off from Cuba or somehow gets out of Cuba
With a Cuban plane and then tries to destroy a bunch of Cuban aircraft
and then defects to the United states
That's the impression that they wanted to create
It's not so clear if the Cuban's actually fell for it
When that happened in 1961 almost everyone saw it as an American attack
Then you fast forward to the night of April 16th
and this whole time everyone was expecting a US attack
This all leads to the fact that this was not a well orchastrated series of events
It's pretty well established that some of these exiles were just not as tightlipped as they should have
been about the invasion. It got out to Soviet intelligence so the Cubans knew that an invasion was immenent
So on April 16th you have a false or decoy attack
right over here, decoy boats with loud speakers on them
that made them sound like they were firing to cause confusion
and it did temporarily cause Castro to look in that direction
because they were on hair trigger notice expecting an immenent invasion
that was not the real one. This was on the evening of April 16th
When you go to the early morning of April 17th you have the real invasion
You have the 1400 Cuban exiles with CIA and US military support (but all of that was hidden )
To actually invade at the Bay of Pigs
and to make a long story short it was kind of a invasion that did not go well
It has been blamed on bad planning, on incompetance at some parts of the invasion
If the invasion lasted from April 17th which was the first day of the invasion
By April 19th the invading force or counter revolutionary force made up of the 1400 cuban exiles
had been pushed back to the beaches
and for the most part a little over 100 of them were killed
and over 1000 of them were captured and later executed
and then later on in the year Fidel Castro makes a deal with the United States
Where he hands over the captured exiles to the United States in exchange for 58
million dollars in aid and supplies and the rest
so this at least from a military point of view was a complete debaucle from the United States point of
view and when you imagine after this happened people in the United States started
pointing fingers
You have the CIA and the exiles blaming the Kennedy administration
saying that look he was not willing to do what it takes to actually do a proper invasion
He was not willing to supply the proper air support once the invasion started happening
He was not willing to commit more US troops once the invasion started looking like it was not going in
the direction of the exiles
Kennedy on the other hand blames the CIA
He says look this was just done and planned incompetently
He also says that "You gave me all sorts of misinformation, you told me that once the invasion
started there was all sorts of resentment against Fidel Castro that would cause this broader
uprising, which never ever happened."
This is actually a quote from John F Kennedy that he said after the Bay of Pigs invasion
"The first advice that I am going to give to my successor is to watch
the generals and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military manners
were worth a damn" JFK
This is JFK after the Bay of Pigs invasion
You can dig deeper and figure out who probably was in the right here
But the bottom line here is that this lead to all round negative consequences for the US
After this kind of strength in Fidel Castro's hold on Cuba
He was like hey that was the US's best shot
Huge embarrassment for them it allowed his to concentrate his control
It also caused him to now become very openly communist
Before the Bay of pigs invasion he was kind of trying to get the US to somewhat like him
Although they would not like him because he was taking over private property and he was clearly left
leaning
But after the Bay of Pigs invasion he definetly aligned himself closely with the soviet union
So he became much more open about being a Marxist, Lenninist, communist state
and because he as afraid of the future US invasions he was open to what eventually leads
to the Cuban Missile Crisis which is the Soviet Union actually placing balistic missiles with nuclear
war heads in Cuba within short reach of the United states. It set up this whole
series of events that did not really end up working in favour of the United States