What was the Bay of Pigs invasion?

A plan Kennedy inherited

Fidel Castro took power in January 1959, and within two years Cuba and the United States had broken with each other. Castro seized American refineries, sugar mills and banks; Washington stopped buying Cuban sugar, then cut off trade; Moscow stepped in as buyer and arms supplier. In March 1960 President Eisenhower approved a secret CIA program to remove Castro. Its centerpiece became a force of Cuban exiles trained in Guatemala, Brigade 2506, named for the serial number of a recruit killed in training. John F. Kennedy, inaugurated in January 1961, let the plan go ahead with one limit: no American troops would land.

Three days at Playa Girón

On April 15, exile pilots flying B-26 bombers painted to look like Cuban planes struck Castro’s airfields, but missed much of his small air force. The next day, at a funeral for those killed in the raids, Castro declared for the first time that his revolution was socialist. Before dawn on April 17, the brigade came ashore at Playa Girón and Playa Larga, on the Bay of Pigs, on Cuba’s southern coast.

It went wrong fast. Castro’s remaining planes sank supply ships, his army and militia closed in, and Kennedy refused to send American air support into the fight. By April 19 it was over. More than a hundred invaders were killed, Cuba had its own dead, and nearly the whole surviving brigade was taken prisoner. In Cuba the battle is remembered as Girón and celebrated as a victory over the United States.

“Defeat is an orphan”

Four days after the landing, at his news conference of April 21, a reporter pressed Kennedy for the facts. He would not go into detail, but he offered a line that outlived the battle:

There’s an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.

The saying is usually traced to the wartime diary of Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s foreign minister. Kennedy added that his refusal to say more was “not to conceal responsibility because I’m the responsible officer of the Government.” In private he fumed at the CIA and the generals who had backed the plan, and before the year was out the agency’s director, Allen Dulles, had been replaced.

Ransom, Mongoose and a lesson for Moscow

The captured exiles were put on trial in Havana. In December 1962, two months after the missile crisis, the New York lawyer James Donovan negotiated their release for about $53 million in food and medicine, and more than a thousand came home by Christmas. On December 29, at the Orange Bowl stadium in Miami, the brigade handed Kennedy its flag, and he made a promise:

I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.

The secret war had not stopped after the defeat. In November 1961 Kennedy had approved Operation Mongoose, a program of sabotage and subversion driven by his brother Robert. In 1975 a Senate committee chaired by Frank Church reported “concrete evidence of at least eight plots involving the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro from 1960 to 1965,” some involving underworld figures and poison pills.

Havana and Moscow read all this as a warning: the Americans had failed once with exiles, and the next attempt would use their own forces. That fear is half of the answer to why the Soviet Union put missiles in Cuba.