Castro jumps out of a tank in April 1961 upon arrival in Girón, Cuba, near the Bay of Pigs.
That month a group of 1,300 Cuban exiles, armed with US weapons, tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Castro.
Editor's Note:
Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor.
His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America.
Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International.
The opinions expressed here are solely his.
(CNN Spanish) -
60 years have passed since the Bay of Pigs expedition.
Why did it fail?
For many years, like so many Cubans, I mistakenly repeated like a parrot that the only fault for this failure was the Democratic President John F. Kennedy for three reasons:
First, because the landing site changed to silence the media scandal that would undoubtedly take place. The Bay of Pigs was a remote and isolated place in Cuba. Originally, it was planned that the landing would be at Casilda, the port near Trinidad, on the slopes of the Escambray mountains, where there were some fierce peasants facing the regime and where the expedition members could withdraw in case things went wrong.
Second, because it prevented the invaders from having a clear command of the skies by reducing the bombardment of enemy aircraft. As Santiago Morales, a member of Brigade 2506 who infiltrated Cuba and spent 18 years in jail, explained to me: “It was enough for a handful of British Seafury and a pair of US T-33s capable of flight, which emerged unscathed from the attack by the April 15, to destroy the supply transport boats of the invading troops. We were not annihilated. We just run out of bullets. While our old and slow B-26s had to fly for several hours to be 10 minutes over the theater of operations, they were 15 minutes from their bases ”.
Third, because he did not want to order an invasion by US troops or, at least, send a squad of military jets to regain lost airspace.
According to this hypothesis, the command of the air would have been enough for the expedition members to have triumphed.
Only that the president of the United States, publicly, a few days before the invasion, had promised that, in no case, the United States Armed Forces would intervene in Cuban conflicts.
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Today it is known that the reasons are different and that they come from the government of Dwight Eisenhower, immediately prior to that of John F. Kennedy:
First, General Eisenhower, who ran his first presidential campaign opposing the Korean War, did not want to go down in history by unleashing a very unpopular war in the Caribbean. At that time, the "bearded men of Sierra Maestra" were universally respected and, in many circles, even loved.
Second, for those purposes he had the CIA.
It had been very useful to the Eisenhower administration in Iran, when a military coup deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, and in Guatemala to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. The "experts" in Guatemala were appointed to liquidate Fidel Castro. , without noticing the great differences between Árbenz and the "maximum leader of the Cuban Revolution", as well as between Guatemala and Cuba, and they did not even take into account the fact that the USSR was not going to abandon its brand new Caribbean satellite.
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Third, in mid-March 1960, US President Ike Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow Fidel Castro, but to leave no trace of his actions. A week earlier, the USSR had clandestinely sent General Francisco Ciutat, alias "Angelito", to Cuba to organize the military defense of the regime. He did it, very successfully, in the Escambray and in the Bay of Pigs.
Eisenhower and Kennedy's primary mistake was trying to hide the American footprint. The Cuban opposition did not understand anything. If the quintessential ally of the Cuban Democrats, who a few years before had gone to fight in Korea - thousands of miles away, protected by the "domino theory" that says that if a country adopts a political system the nations in their area would also adapt the same ideology - why was Washington not using the same reasoning in Cuba? Wouldn't it have been better to invoke the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) and inform the USSR that they did not accept the Soviet presence in the American neighborhood?
Naturally, that would have meant that the US would have assumed its role as a staunch defender of democracy, something that the country was willing to do in Korea, but not 90 miles from its shores, despite the price being very high in Latin America.
(A price that Venezuelans continue to pay, 62 years after the establishment in Cuba of the communist dictatorship established by the Castros).
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In any case, if Kennedy had ordered a flotilla of planes to hand over the airspace to the invaders, it would not have been of much use.
Fewer than 1,500 brave expeditionaries would not have been able to face the waves that the regime threw at them of combatants willing to fight and kill.
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson faced a more or less similar situation in the Dominican Republic and, after invoking the TIAR, ordered the United States Armed Forces to liquidate the pro-Castro insurgency, which they did effectively.
But it was they who disembarked.
That could have been carried out in Cuba, knowing that many people would die.
Fidel would not have given up.
It was the operatic ending I expected.
Eighteen months after the Bay of Pigs incident, when he foolishly asked Nikita Khrushchev to preemptively attack the United States, he assumed that the Cuban people would disappear as a result of the reprisals.
I remember that, in Panama, I asked Henry Kissinger why they calculated that winning in Cuba would have taken them a month.
"That is the calculation of the military," he told me.
"What if the Cubans resist?"
"Then it's a matter of a week," he told me.
In any case, whether it was a month or a week, it would have been a hideous carnage.
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