What happened at the Bay of Pigs? An American led attempt to overthrow the communist government of Cuba failed.
The Bay of Pigs is on the southern coast of Cuba. It is 150 km away from the capital city of Havana. There are a lot of wild pigs in the area, which could be why it has the name, but a more likely argument is that it is a mistranslation. There are a lot of triggerfish in the bay and in Cuban Spanish, triggerfish and pig are both “cochino”. The bay is called Bahla de Cochinos in Cuban Spanish.
The Bay of Pigs incident happened on April 17th, 1961. The American government wanted to remove Fidel Castro who was leading a communist government. Castro overthrew the Cuban government in 1959 and made himself president. He aligned his new communist country with the USSR and settled in. He might have been left to get on with things if he hadn’t started nationalizing companies, many of which were American. The USA imposed sanctions on Cuba and Castro replied by nationalizing American companies. American companies were responsible for 80% of Cuba’s trade and they ran a lot of the country’s infrastructure. There was a lot of poverty and inequality, so nationalizing these companies might have been the right move for Cuba, but the owners of those companies had plenty of sway in American politics. The USA wasn’t very happy having an ally of the USSR right on their doorstep. There was a lot of civil unrest in the USA in the late 1950s and they were possibly worried that Castro would try to incite revolution on US soil. They started to think how to remove Castro.
The idea that ended up becoming the Bay of Pigs fiasco was put to President Eisenhower and he approved it in March 1960. The plan was to train anti-Castro exiles in the United States. They would be trained, armed, and then shipped back to Cuba to lead a revolution and overthrow Castro. The new president would be more friendly to US interests and the role of the US and the CIA would be kept completely hidden. This is obviously not what happened.
In 1960, Eisenhower finished his two terms and JFK beat Nixon in the election. After he had been sworn in he was briefed on the plan to overthrow Castro. He may have had reservations but he put his support behind it. During the election Kennedy had styled himself as strong on communism and Cuba. Now he was president, he had no choice but to do something. The CIA started to recruit Cubans living in Miami and set up a training camp in Florida. They were led by Jose Miro Cardona, who was expected to become the president of Cuba after Castro was overthrown.
The first problem with the secret plan was that it was not very secret. The whole invasion and any American involvement in were supposed to be top secret. However, it turned out that Castro heard about the plans through his links with the Cubans living in America. He knew roughly what was being planned, where the attack would be carried out, and generally when. The KGB also knew many of the details of the plan through leaks from the CIA and other sources. They filled Castro in on anything he didn’t already know. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the New York Times wrote an article on April 7th, ten days before the invasion, explaining about the training and the plans. The article ends by saying an invasion is very near. JFK was furious when he read the article, but probably more with the CIA than with the New York Times.
The US shipped all of the trained Cubans to Nicaragua to wait for the invasion. The needed to start with an air attack to knock out Castro’s air defenses. They couldn’t use US planes, so they found 8 Second World War B-26 bombers and painted them to look like Cuban aircraft. The idea was for the world to think this was basically a civil war. The air attack began on April 15th and the bombers targeted Cuban air bases. They ended up missing most of their targets and leaving the Cuban airforce mostly unscathed. A second attack was planned, but in the meantime the world’s press worked out that the bombers were actually repainted US planes and the second attack had to be called off. The fact that America was behind the attack was now blatantly obvious and to attack with US planes risked a war with Russia.
Seeing as Castro knew pretty much when and where the attack would take place and the world press knew that America was behind it, the better decision might have been to call it off. The invasion went ahead and 1,200 anti-Castro Cubans sailed for the bay on boats. The managed to land and they fought on the beach for three days before they had to surrender. The undamaged Cuban Airforce bombed the area and Castro sent in 20,000 troops. It was inevitable that they would have to surrender. The CIA had hoped that the landing troops would be able to use the dislike for Castro in Cuba and raise other forces, but they had underestimated how much the Cuban people liked Castro.
The survivors were arrested and sent to prison. The US had to negotiate their release and ended up having to pay $53 million in medicine and food for the prisoners. The money was nothing compared to the global humiliation the US and the CIA faced. And this is what I learned today.
Image By Rumlin, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49446605
Sources
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56808455
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/the-bay-of-pigs
https://www.history.com/news/bay-of-pigs-mistakes-cuba-jfk-castro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mir%C3%B3_Cardona
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/040761cuba-invasion.html