The Bay of Pigs Thing
“It’s not you… it’s us.”
Cuba’s foreign policy has played a much larger role on the world stage than warranted by the nation’s size and degree of economic development. Since 1959, it has challenged the imperial power of the United States in the latter’s own backyard and confronted an American-sponsored invasion, in April 1961, and hundreds of other violent attacks, including numerous acts of terror and attempted assassinations against the island’s leadership, particularly Fidel Castro. — Samuel Farber, “Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment” (2011)
Grab your map, pile the kids in the car, and get ready to see the world’s biggest ball of string! We’re going on a roadtrip, American style. Vast, open spaces, a station wagon full of whining children, microwaved burritos at truck stops, and refined unleaded gasoline fumes. Doesn’t sound enticing, eh? Okay, how about this: gather the kids by the side of the road, get your stack of currency ready, fan it out, wander out into traffic on the highway, waving your handful of cash, and attempt to flag down a driver! Jungle landscapes, guava juice, and the smell of a country with no emissions regulations! We’re going on a roadtrip, Cuba style! Except, we actually went in a tour bus. But even if we had hitchhiked, we might have ended up in a tour bus anyway: Cuban law, dictates when and if (government-owned) tour buses may pick up hitchhikers. While a tour bus that contains customers (read: foreigners) cannot pick up any hitchhikers (read: ordinary Cubans), if a tour bus is empty, or has only hitchhikers, it is obligated by law to pick up hitchhikers.
The road from Havana to the Bay of Pigs, a.k.a. Bahía de Cochinos, a.k.a. Playa Girón, was treacherous. The road had huge potholes in precarious places, in curves, in the middle of the road, blocking one lane. Sometimes roads would suddenly become gravel, and very slippery for a tour bus. The narrowness of the roads varied along the journey as well (the less road there is, the less road you have to maintain), leading to some breathtakingly complex four-body problems involving horses, tractors, potholes, herds of goats. When we passed other tour buses, the side view mirrors of the passing buses looked to be inches apart.
But our masterful steersman, with nerves of steel, who would put Steve McQueen to shame if he ever took to the streets of San Francisco, was Daniél:
This wild man knew every limit of his bus to two significant figures. He proceeded calmly in the face of certain danger. Although, come to think of it, we couldn’t see his face from the back of the bus, so he may well have looked as terrified as we did!
We drifted through back roads of rural Cuba, toward Bahía de Cochinos, traversing a winding highway that was entering swampland. We suddenly came upon a cluster of billboards that proclaimed the northernmost point that “the mercenaries” had reached — the “mercenaries” being the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion force of April 1961, consisting of an army of Miami-based Cuban exiles hired by CIA and driven by their passion for overthrowing Castro and the Revolution (hence their other label, “counter-revolutionaries”). As we drove further along the highway, the bay came into partial relief — a sparkling sapphire color peeking between thick overgrowth.
I felt a growing gap between the beauty and vibrant colors of the surroundings, and the grainy, black-and-white images that depicted the history of what had happened here.
The bus stopped at a wide spot in the road.
We clambered off the bus like aliens from a wrecked spaceship, and gazed through an opening in the foliage. We were standing at the water. Far, far away from its hazy black and white history, and yet so close, the bay itself was spectacular: the electric blue waters of the Carribean, slowed down and spread out by the bay, warmed up by the sun. The colors stimulated my eyes the way sizzling bacon must stimulate a dog’s nose. I began to take in my surroundings.
Quiet and solitary, the waters of the bay were still. Not a single sail dotted the horizon; not a single boat, ship, or craft in sight. (Cubans are not allowed on boats; Consider the Cuban Lobster, if you have not already, to find out more). The surface of the sea was a perfectly flat line, interrupted only by the coast running north to south. The water was teeming with fish, and a lone scuba diver was helping keep the sleepy roadside scuba shack afloat.
Aside from a few other gawking tourists and the thatched-hut scuba shack, the only other person was a man holding a giant snake. For 1 CUC, he would let you photograph the snake. In fact, he would even let you handle the snake. And by let you handle the snake, I actually mean he would drape the snake around your shoulders while you are busy changing the settings on your camera so that you don’t notice until it is too late to tell him that you are too terrified to drape a snake around your shoulders.
I managed to stomach Nature’s equivalent of a hunk of muscle the length of my entire body wrapped in a piece of Saran wrap slithering around my neck — and survive, with naught between me and it’s killer aggressor instincts (not to mention a mouth that could fit my forearm) but a flimsy knot in a piece of red dental floss and a long, long way to the nearest hospital.
As the reptile de-perched from my shoulder, attempting to wind its tail into my camera neckstrap as it was being pulled away like a panicked lover grasping for one last caress, our tour guide walked around attempting to herd a few stragglers from the group back onto the bus. Time to go! This trip is not about reptilian fun and games, it’s not a beach vacation! It is a people-to-people exchange that is all about cultural education, and maybe just a little bit of government-sponsored indoctrination, so now it’s off to the Cuban Government’s Bahía de Cochinos Museum.
The museum was small, with two connected rooms, which might have had a posted maximum of 65 people had there been a fire marshal, or anyone else who cared enough, all in an unattractive, whitewashed, low-ceilinged building whose front lawn featured Soviet tanks and mortar equipment captured from the “mercenaries” — the CIA-trained-and-funded Cuban exiles who had invaded at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.
Cuban history is a bit of a shaggy dog story. Except down underneath the shaggy, densely-packed timeline of events in and between the two countries over the past 60 years lie tangled geopolitical roots.
“Did you know,” Arianna asked slyly, just a few minutes into our taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, my first afternoon in Havana, “that we share a President?”
No. No, I did not.
(I’ll give you a hint: he’s the tubbiest U.S. and Cuban President.)
U.S.-Cuba relations didn’t rise into the consciousness of the U.S. government with World War 2, as the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam or the U.S. and the Koreas did. Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders helped fight for Cuban independence from Spain in the “Spanish American” War, as it is called in the U.S. — or the Cuban-Spanish-American War, as it is called in Cuba — the fact that the war was for Cuban independence didn’t (and still doesn’t) occur to U.S. historians.
John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State in 1823 and soon to be president, had this to say about Cuba:
There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, can not choose but to fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature can not cast her off from its bosom.
- John Quincy Adams
Far from being a mere foreign policy pain in the ass (and an enduring symbol of international humiliation of the U.S.) for the last 60 years, Cuba has a history with the United States. This has everything to do with geography: it is the largest island in the Caribbean, is 90 miles from Florida, and has desirable natural resources and agricultural products like tobacco, sugar, and coffee.
Oh, yes, and oil too.
The Revolution came to power during Eisenhower’s presidency, on January 1, 1959. And to understand Eisenhower’s Latin American policy, you have to look at Guatemala. Jacobo Arbenz had been elected President of Guatemala in 1951 by almost 75%, on a platform of land reform. In 1952 Arbenz began a series of land reforms in which land on large estates was expropriated and the owners were then re-compensated for the value of the land as claimed in the previous year’s taxes.
This was a big problem for the United Fruit Company, which was the largest landowner in Guatemala and a financial entity with greater financial wealth than the government of Guatemala. The United Fruit Company had let huge swaths of land sit idle, undeveloped, for the purpose of preventing a glut in banana exports. This took place at the expense of the people of Guatemala, who experienced food shortages, which would have been resolved if the land were in the hands of farmers and not companies.
Thus, the land reform and the popularly-elected Joseph Arbenz.
This creeping fear of Communism, McCarthyism mixed with foreign policy, led to the domino theory, and the increasing assertion of the Monroe Doctrine and the right to assert a strong arm abroad under the banner of the Cold War.
Enter the Dulles Brothers.
These two brothers exercised enormous power in a democratic republic: they dictated the covert and overt operations of U.S. foreign policy: John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), Secretary of State under Eisenhower (1953-1959), for whom Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. is named; and Allen Dulles, his younger brother (1893-1969), Director of CIA (1953-1961) under Eisenhower and Kennedy (and during the “Bay of Pigs thing”).
Foster and Allen never imagined that their intervention in foreign countries would have such devastating long-term effects—that Vietnam would be plunged into a war costing more than one million lives, for example, or that Iran would fall to violently anti-American zealots, or that the Congo would descend into decades of horrific conflict. They had no notion of “blowback.” Their lack of foresight led them to pursue reckless adventures that, over the course of decades, palpably weakened American security. — The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (Stephen Kinzer)
The goal was to overthrow Arbenz in a military coup and install a U.S.-backed dictator-general running a puppet government under the thumb of the U.S. and open for business with U.S. companies (like Boston-based United Fruit Company). The plan involved an invasion of the capital with a small army that pretended to be a large army, and to have so thoroughly soften the populus to support the coup and the overthrow of Arbenz prior to the fake invasion, that the fake invasion would ignite an uprising that would foment a revolution that would topple the government and force Arbenz out of the country so the military could take over.
Amazingly, it went pretty much according to plan. (Mainly because they got the Catholic Church involved, and not on the government’s side, to get the population to oppose Arbenz on grounds of religious edict).
This triggered the attempt to apply the same model to Cuba (not to mention many other governments in Latin America), overthrowing Fidel’s government and replacing it with a government composed of Cubans in exile in Miami. Except, things didn’t go as planned in Cuba.
There were three reasons, our tour guide Arianna told us, for the failure of the U.S. at the Bay of Pigs, and in their attempt to apply the Guatemalan model in Cuba:
- Overestimation of Kennedy’s support
- Underestimation of Castro’s abilities and Cuban military strength
- Underestimation of Cuban commitment
But upon reading up on the political situation in the United States in the late 50s and early 60s, one quickly finds that that first point actually unpacks extremely complicated political dynamics involving lots of individual actors.
Vice President Richard Nixon, for example, took an interest in Cuba as a foreign policy issue that could potentially give him an October surprise in the 1960 elections. Nixon was emphasizing his foreign policy experience, particularly in foreign policy (he had traveled extensively as Vice President). If Castro were to be assassinated or overthrown, Nixon argued, the country couldn’t afford a novice like Kennedy in the White House. After CIA success in Guatemala, and thanks in no small part to his advisors, Eisenhower began to see CIA’s “Guatemalan Model,” covert action taken by CIA or with CIA support to remove foreign governments through assassination of foreign political leaders or through military coups, and replace them with U.S.-friendly governments, as a perfect solution to the problem of post-WW2 Communism: the U.S. government could pursue its interests abroad, but because it was perpetrated by CIA, the U.S. government maintained plausible deniability. With leaders like Dick Helms, who had no scruples about hiding or destroying documents, lying to Congress, or falsifying documents (even internal documents) about CIA’s connections with organized crimes and plots against Fidel Castro, this plausible deniability could be made a reality through destruction of evidence.
These organized crime connections to CIA and to Cuba were critical. For obvious reasons (its close proximity to Florida, its being a tourist destination, its location on routes for drug trafficking through Latin America, South America, the Straits of Florida, and the Caribbean), the mafia had a very deep hold in Havana casinos and across the island. They had very strong interests in keeping the Cuban government’s hands off of all that wealth, interests which were threatened by the impending nationalization that would come with a Socialist revolution, and they were willing to go to extreme lengths to protect all of that.
And Dulles and Helms, in turn, were willing to go to extreme lengths to protect their connections with the Mafia from the prying eyes of a new President and Attorney General: Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Organized Crime’s Enemy Number One and Enemy Number Two. Their war on the mob had brought them fame, but also the ire of the mob.
After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy, who had been largely kept in the dark about the details of the operation, realized that CIA had been lying through their teeth about conditions on the ground in Cuba and about the chances of success. He said he wanted to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter them into the wind.” Had Kennedy discovered CIA connections to organized crime, or that CIA continued covert operations in Cuba without his approval, the CIA would have become a brief experiment in the annals of the Republic.
Instead, Dulles was fired from his post as head of CIA, and CIA did an extensive “house cleaning,” which involved sweeping a lot of dust under a lot of rugs. CIA continued its covert plots in Cuba and against Castro under Robert Kennedy under Project Mongoose, which had 33 different operations (as many as there are species of mongooses).
When Cuban intelligence discovered Project Mongoose and informed Fidel Castro of the plots, Castro, who had up until that point been resistant to Khruschev’s suggestion that he install missiles in Cuba, began accepting shipments of Soviet missiles onto the island.
And thus began the thirteen-day standoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as it is called in the U.S. — or the October Missile Crisis, as it is called Cuba.
But all of that is just dipping a toe into the enormous sea of context of what happened at the Bay of Pigs.
Curiously, I couldn’t remember ever reading a detailed account of the invasion itself. I’ve many times read about it with no description of the invasion itself other than calling it “the Bay of Pigs failure,” “the Bay of Pigs fiasco,” or (Nixon’s favorite) “the Bay of Pigs thing.” But I couldn’t remember any descriptions that went into more detail than giving the number of the invading force that were killed or captured, describing Kennedy’s decision not to provide a second round of air strikes, and attribution of blame that took place in the aftermath and continues to play out in the pages of history books. A somewhat curt dismissal of the affair as a foreign intelligence failure by the CIA.
The museum, however, spared no detail. Large, colored maps that brought to mind a high school teacher with a penchant for lecturing on and (quizzing on) Civil War battles, the strategies of each side, how the lines evolved, the complex task of bringing order to the absolute chaos of war, and attempting to present a complex evolution of time, space, people, and materials with fat, pointy, red and blue arrows angrily poking each other across the map.
The museum was, as alluded to earlier, filled with propaganda. Some of it — everything in English, essentially — was completely ludicrous. But it wasn’t the message alone; it was the conveyance of the message, with strange word choices, grammatical errors, and awkward sentence structure. Arianna told me that they last updated the English placards in the 1990s.
The artful mercenary bombing of April 15th caused the popular repulse; it narrowed the revolutionary cohesion and affirmed the unyielding decision of defending the homeland to the price that it was necessary.
The militiamen seized their weapons; many of them that still weren’t, requested to enter in the Revolutionary National Militias, before the imminence of an invasion. The town organized in the Revolutionary Defence Committee (CDR) impeded activities of the internal counterrevolution directed by the (C.A.I.) The burial of the victims of the attack it was a multitudinous sample of militant ability around the national sovereignty and our revolutionary process.
(English translation on placard)
El artero bomardeo mercenario del 15 de abril provocó la repulsa popular, estrechó la cohesión revolucionaria y afirmó la inquebrantable decisión de defender la patria al precio que fuera necesario.
Los milicianos empuñaron sus armas; muchos que aún no lo eran, solicitaron ingresar en las MNR, ante la inminencia de una invasión. El pueblo organizado en los CDR impidió actividades de la contrarevolución interna dirigida por la CIA. El sepelio de las victimas del ataque fue una multitudinaria muestra de firmeza militante en torno a la soberanía nacional y nuestro proceso revolucionario.
(Spanish words)
And yet, slanted as they were, the words and images from the museum would raise lots of questions about a history I knew little about, and one where powerful actors in the U.S. had incentive to sweep things under the rug.
After the bombings of the international airports, Fidel informed the People: “This is an imperialist aggression which violates the Rules of International Law.”
(English caption on placard)
“…es una agresión imperialista que viola todas las normas del Derecho Internacional — comunicó Fidel al pueblo, después del bombardeo a los aeropuertos.”
(Spanish caption)
What, exactly, the CIA was doing in Cuba is something that, thanks to Richard Helms’ penchant for secrecy and document destruction, we’ll probably never learn from CIA and U.S. government files. The skewed, strange, mechanical English descriptions inflated with hyperbole that filled the museum were, in some way, primary sources, tainted with the heavy odor of conspiracy, but with a faint whiff of truth.
That is what they cannot forgive us: That we are there in their noses and that we have made a socialist revolution in the own noses of the United States.
And that that socialist revolution we will defend it with those rifles!: and that that socialist revolution we will defend it with the same value which our antiaircraft gunners yesterday riddled to shots the aggressors airplanes !
Workers and farmers, men and humble women of the homeland, you swear to defend until the last drop of blood this Revolution of the humble ones, by the humble ones and for the humble ones.”
FIDEL
(English translation on placard)
It was difficult to separate the straight-shooting from the smoke-blowing — especially with all those cigars.
Back on the bus, we shook off the cobwebs of a deceptively easy worldview that was over-simplistic for the sake of convenience, and whose rhetoric had lost much of its potency since it had last been updated (surely not in the last quarter century). But the seeds of doubt that the museum had sown were still there, like grass seeds in a crack on the sidewalk, soon to sprout, erode the concrete, and take over.
The Bay of Pigs invasion lasted for three days; the museum had a detailed map for each day of the battle. Having driven along the entire length of the invasion battlefield, having experienced the feeling of vastness that the Bay gives, having my senses immersed in the colors and heat and light and everything else, the connection I felt to the history of what happened became much more visceral.
Having experienced a morning’s drive from Havana to the Bay of Pigs, bisecting Cuba at its narrow waist, gave me a sense of the simultaneous proximity to and remoteness from Havana (although it was a lot more remote at the time of the invasion, and for most of the Revolution).
As the bus idled in the parking lot, our Habanero tour guide differed in opinion with the perspective of the Bay of Pigs Museum, not in her characteristic martini-dry saying-something-so-deadpan-you-could-never-prove-anything manner, but in a more candid way. She wanted us to know, the government’s view was only the view of the government — not of ordinary people in Cuba. The perspective of the museum is not the perspective of ordinary Cubans.
We do not see it as the United States versus Cuba, she said. We see it as Cubans versus Cubans.
A continuing part of the contentious struggle over Cuba’s identity.
Great, I thought. She’s apologizing for her government’s misrepresenting her views. Now I’ve got to apologize for all the belligerent views my government has that don’t represent me. While in Cuba, I was being reminded, daily, hourly, of the things my country was doing to Cuba that were outrageous, and was being taught the depths of outrageousness that my country had plumbed over the course of sixty years of contentious relations, most of which I didn’t know about.
Like that 33 species of mongooses thing.
I began to think about other Latin American countries. South American countries. The dictators we’ve supported. The militaries we’ve armed. All the drugs, the money, the weapons.
I broke into a sweat.
But the bus had rumbled to life, and Arianna was setting down the microphone, and giving us a few hours’ reprieve from the informational deluge, the better to keep our brains fresh to absorb more information once once the gates had been re-opened and the information began flowing again.
The bus pulled onto the highway and left for Cienfuegos — “A Thousand Fires.” Another Rock Star in Cuba’s history. I counted my answers, and I counted my questions, and I found I had far more questions than answers. I was confused by contradictory information. Four sleepless nights had taken their toll.
I took a nap.
