Located on the southern coast of Cuba, the Bay of Pigs marks the site of a failed invasion of Cuban exile forces trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in April 1961. The operation was designed to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro, considered a dangerous communist by the American government.
By the late 1950s, North Americans owned most of the mines, cattle ranches, and sugar plantations in Cuba and the U. S. government propped up the corrupt and dictatorial regime of General Fulgencio Batista. After a three-year campaign, a group of revolutionaries and peasants led by Fidel Castro marched into Havana and overthrew the Batista government on New Year’s Day, 1959. Castro had received little help from the Cuban Communist Party during his struggle, although he soon took control of it. He launched his own brand of reform program that involved massive land redistribution, seizure of U. S.-owned oil companies, and confiscation of other privately owned firms. In response, President Dwight D. Eisenhower halted American imports of Cuban sugar and cut off all trade to Cuba except for medicine and some food staples. Castro turned to Premier Nikita Khrushchev for economic assistance, and the Soviets bought increasing amounts of Cuban sugar. Convinced that Castro was a puppet of the Soviets and that this invasion was the first step toward communist control of the Caribbean, the Eisenhower administration prepared plans to overthrow the new Cuban leader.
CIA chief Allen Dulles dispatched agents to Guatemala to train a group of Cuban exiles to invade their homeland. The CIA believed that a small invasion force would trigger a large internal uprising, but it underestimated the depth of the Cuban public’s support for Castro.
When John F. Kennedy became president and learned of the operation, he agreed to support it. He had made Cuba a major issue in the 1960 campaign by criticizing the Eisenhower administration for “losing” a country in America’s backyard to the communists. Kennedy had promised to take action against Castro and believed that his political credibility was at stake. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy also subscribed to the domino theory and argued that if Castro was not defeated, he would launch a series of leftist revolutions culminating in the communization of Latin America. He overestimated the degree of Cuban interference in the internal affairs of its neighbors, at least at that time. Because he viewed COMMUNISM as a monolithic movement, Kennedy thought of Cuba as a Soviet satellite, a picture that was not entirely accurate. Castro approved all Soviet decisions about economic or military aid to Cuba. Kennedy’s view of Castro contributed to his decision to approve the invasion, named Operation Zapata.
Concerned about American prestige, Kennedy wanted to hide U. S. involvement as much as possible. Less than a month before the invasion, he revised the plan so that the landing site was more isolated and the landing would occur at night. He also inserted a stipulation that there would be no direct U. S. military participation, including air cover. These changes proved to be disastrous.
The invasion began on April 17, 1961, and in less than two days it was over. Of the more than 1,450 men, 114 died and the rest were captured and imprisoned. Because the Bay of Pigs is a swampy area, easily cut off from the rest of the island, Castro’s army quickly surrounded the invasion force and sank the ship transporting the reserve ammunition. Even if the commandos had somehow managed to evade Castro’s forces, they would have had to cross the wetlands to reach the Escambray Mountains where they were supposed to meet up with internal anti-Castro allies, recoup their losses, and launch guerrilla operations from the mountainsides. More critical, the expedition failed to trigger an internal uprising. The exile army’s fate was sealed when Kennedy canceled a planned second strike by American planes. Eventually, Kennedy authorized a payment of $53 million in pharmaceuticals and food to the Cuban government in exchange for the release of the surviving prisoners.
The CIA’s role in the operation soon became public knowledge and the United States suffered international condemnation. Although Kennedy publicly accepted sole responsibility for the invasion, he privately believed that his advisers had failed him and that the CIA and the military had misled him. He shook up the CIA, replacing Dulles with John McCone, and rearranged the national security bureaucracy to have more authority in the White House. The Kennedy administration also intensified its campaign against the Cuban government by tightening the economic blockade and instituting OPERATION MONGOOSE, an interagency task force designed to overthrow the Castro regime by fomenting discord, sabotaging economic targets in Cuba, and, if necessary, assassinating Castro himself. These covert operations led Castro to seek military assistance from the Soviet Union, precipitating the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Further reading: Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).
—Jennifer Walton
World History
