eric streb's List: bay of pigs

• The Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 was a United States-sponsored mission intended to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba.
• Castro had led a successful revolution in January 1959, overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista and installing his new coalition government in Havana
• As Castro solidified his power, the new Cuba grew distant from the United States and began to develop close relations with the Soviet Union.
• The Bay of Pigs Invasion was conceived in January 1960 and approved by President Dwight Eisenhower on March 17, 1960.
• The scheme entailed training Cuban exiles for a mission that would land them at the Bay of Pigs southwest of Havana.
• As late as December 1960, Eisenhower endorsed the plan for an amphibious landing of these CIA-trained paramilitary fighters. John F. Kennedy had already been elected president, but knew nothing of the mission until two days before his inauguration.
• Kennedy had little choice but to agree to the plan.
• The Joint Chiefs of Staff supported the invasion, and presidential advisor John Foster Dulles and his brother CIA director Allen Dulles saw this as a quick way to rid America of the threat posed by Castro and weaken Soviet-Cuba connections. Kennedy agreed, but wanted the mission conducted so the United States could deny involvement.
• In April, three days before the scheduled invasion, the president announced that the United States would not lead any military invasion into Cuba
• The mission was botched from the beginning. Both CIA planners and the Cuban exiles predicted the invasion would spark a popular anti-Castro uprising and that the United States would send military support once they achieved the beachhead at the bay. Neither of these things happened. The domestic uprising that was thought to coincide with the invasion never took place. And the United States-sponsored guerillas never received any U.S. military support because Kennedy maintained his public position that he would not intervene militarily. Castro sent his Soviet-made tanks directly at the invaders, who never made it very far inland from the beach. After a three-day standoff, about one hundred of the invading fighters were killed, fourteen were rescued by the U.S. Navy, and 1,189 were taken prisoner.
• The incident also damaged America's standing with Latin American countries, which began to worry that their large, powerful neighbor had aggressive imperialist intentions.
• Further, the failed plot led Khrushchev to view Kennedy as weak and ineffective. When Kennedy and Khrushchev met at a summit in Vienna, Austria, in June, the president told his Soviet counterpart that the Bay of Pigs was a mistake. Khrushchev responded by telling Kennedy that wars of national liberation would now be won by Communists and that the United States was on the wrong side of history. The emboldened Khrushchev soon brazenly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, aiming them at the United States.

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• BAY OF PIGS INVASION (17 April 1961), the abortive attempt by Cuban exiles—organized, financed, and led by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—to overthrow the revolutionary regime of Premier Fidel Castro in Havana. The landing by the 1,453 men of Brigade 2506 on the swampy southwestern coast of Cuba turned within seventy-two hours into a complete disaster as the Castro forces captured 1,179 of the invaders and killed the remaining 274.
• For the United States and for President John F. Kennedy, who had authorized the operation in his third month in the White House, the Bay of Pigs became a bitter political defeat as well as a monumental failure in a large-scale intelligence enterprise.
• The invasion led to an increase in Soviet aid to Cuba that climaxed with the installation of nuclear warheads in Cuba in 1962
• The Cuban missile crisis that followed was one of the most dangerous moments in post–World War II relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
• The plans for the Bay of Pigs were conceived by the CIA during 1960, toward the end of the Eisenhower administration
• To prepare for the invasion, the CIA trained the force in secret camps in Guatemala for nearly six months
• But long before the landing, it was widely known in the Cuban community in Florida (and, presumably, the information was also available to Castro agents) that such a landing was in the offing
• Finally, the invasion failed because Kennedy refused to provide U.S. air support for the brigade.
• Castro's aircraft easily disposed of the exiles' tiny air force and proceeded to sink the invasion ships and cut down the men holding the Bay of Pigs beachhead
• Twenty months later, in December 1962, Castro released the 1,179 Bay of Pigs prisoners in exchange for $53 million worth of medical supplies and other goods raised by private individuals and groups in the United States.
• The invasion forced the resignation of the CIA director, Allen Dulles, embarrassed the Kennedy administration, and contributed to decades of tension between the United States and Cuba.

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• One historian described the U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 as a "perfect failure." Some 1,500 Cuban-exile commandos, trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), left a staging area in Nicaragua for Cochinos Bay (the Bay of Pigs), where they landed on coral reefs and attempted to wade ashore through a swamp. The force proved pathetically ineffective against the militia of Cuban leader Fidel Castro (b. 1926). No sympathetic insurrection occurred, as had been predicted, and Castro's forces put down the revolt in two days. In all, 114 commandos died and more than 1,100, including the men shown here, were captured. Some 150 Cuban defenders and four American pilots were also killed in the ill-fated CIA operation. Rather than eliminating Castro, the Bay of Pigs incident solidified his authority and created an aura around the Cuban leader for standing up successfully against the United States. In the attached audio, Carlos Lechuga, Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, reveals the involvement of the United States in the invasion of the Bay of Pigs.

• The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, planned under Eisenhower but approved and carried out under Kennedy, had just ended in a debacle: Some 1,500 Cuban exiles, trained in Miami, Florida, by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had been easily subdued by the forces of Cuban leader Fidel Castro (b. 1926)
• he operation, poorly conceived and badly executed, was the CIA's most egregious blunder
• Kennedy soon accepted the resignation of CIA director Allen Dulles (1893-1969), who bore primary responsibility for the failed Cuban operation. At the same time, however, assassination plots against Castro, some employing U.S. mobsters, remained on the CIA agenda.

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• Fearing that Cuba would become communist, and that a communist country just 50 miles from the coast of Florida  would be a threat to the United States, President John F. Kennedy  (1917–63; served 1961–63) chose to support the anti-Castro Cubans living in Florida. With funding from the Central Intelligence Agency  (CIA), in 1961 Kennedy sent an armed group of Cuban exiles to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to overthrow Castro
• The invasion was a series of one error after another, however. Jeeps were brought in without fuel, maps of the area were not distributed, and exiles began shooting at fellow exiles. It was a major embarrassment in U.S. history, but Kennedy never apologized for the fiasco.

• Bay of Pigs invasion April 20, 1961