The Bay Of Pigs
...of
mismanagement, overconfidence, and lack of security. The blame for the
failure of the operation falls directly in the lap of the Central
Intelligence Agency and a young president and his advisors. The fall out
from the invasion caused a rise in tension between the two great
superpowers and ironically 34 years after the event, the person that the
invasion meant to topple, Fidel Castro, is still in power. To understand
the origins of the invasion and its ramifications for the future it is
first necessary to look at the invasion and its origins.
Part I: The Invasion and its Origins.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, started a few days before on
April 15th with the bombing of Cuba by what appeared to be defecting Cuban
air force pilots. At 6 a.m. in the morning of that Saturday, three Cuban
military bases were bombed by B-26 bombers. The airfields at Camp Libertad,
San Antonio de los Baos and Antonio Maceo airport at Santiago de Cuba were
fired upon. Seven people were killed at Libertad and forty-seven people
were killed at other sites on the island.
Two of the B-26s left Cuba and flew to Miami, apparently to defect to
the United States. The Cuban Revolutionary Council, the government in exile,
in New York City released a statement saying that the bombings in Cuba were
". . . carried out by 'Cubans inside Cuba' who were 'in contact with' the
top command of the Revolutionary Council . . . ." The New York Times
reporter covering the story alluded to something being wrong with the whole
situation when he wondered how the council knew the pilots were coming if
the pilots had only decided to leave Cuba on Thursday after " . . . a
suspected betrayal by a fellow pilot had precipitated a plot to strike . . .
." Whatever the case, the planes came down in Miami later that morning, one
landed at Key West Naval Air Station at 7:00...
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