Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Lessons of the Bay of Pigs

The infamous paramilitary assault remains a cautionary Cold War history.

Sixty-five long years after the Kennedy White House launched a CIA-led paramilitary invasion at the Bahia de Cochinos, the specter of that failed attack haunts the current crisis in US-Cuba relations. Almost daily the Trump administration has escalated its threats to once again use military force in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government; the White House has now issued a directive to the Pentagon to be ready. “Military planning for a possible Pentagon-led operation in Cuba is quietly ramping up, in case President Donald Trump gives an order to intervene,” USA Today reported just this week.

Trump has given every indication that he intends to assert US dominion over Cuba—a country that has stood as a symbol of Latin American independence since the 1959 revolution. The quagmire of war with Iran appears to have given the imperial president no pause. “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with [Iran],” Trump cavalierly stated on April 13. “Cuba is going to be next,” Trump declared just two weeks ago about his regime change intentions.

In the context of the present Cuba crisis, the 65th anniversary of the infamous Bay of Pigs debacle takes on renewed and immediate significance. The CIA-organized paramilitary effort to roll back the Castro revolution remains a cautionary history of the high costs of US intervention in Cuba—and elsewhere.

“The Perfect Failure”

The covert regime-change effort against Cuba began just 15 months after the 1959 revolution, with a March 17, 1960, authorization of President Dwight Eisenhower. The original “Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime” focused on creating CIA-backed teams of exile guerrillas who would be infiltrated into the mountains of Cuba to organize a counterrevolution. That effort failed miserably, as Castro’s forces quickly intercepted the infiltrators and CIA airdrops of weapons to them landed in the hands of the Cuban military, rather than the counterrevolutionaries.

At the first meeting of the CIA’s “Branch 4 Task Force,” the CIA’s director of Western Hemisphere operations predicted that the effort would fail “unless Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara could be eliminated in one package.” The regime, he argued, would only “be overthrown by the use of force.” Within months, the covert plan was reconfigured to become a paramilitary assault by a brigade of CIA trained exiles.

And the CIA did try to decapitate the Cuban leadership by enlisting the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro, diverting $200,000 of the invasion budget to pay for those operations. The CIA officer in charge of managing the paramilitary effort, Jacob Esterline, forcefully opposed the........

© The Nation