Bay of Pigs

14 Pages 3500 Words

Bay of Pigs: The Failed Invasion The story of the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs is one of mismanagement, overconfidence, and lack of security. The blame for the failure of the operation falls directly in the lap of the Central Intelligence Agency and a young president along with his advisors. The fall out from the invasion caused a rise in tension between the two great superpowers and ironically, thirty-eight years after the event, the person whom the invasion was meant to topple, Fidel Castro is still in power. To understand the origins of the invasion and its ramifications for the future, it is first necessary to look at the invasion and its origins.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 started a few days before the bombing of Cuba on April fifteenth by what appeared to be defecting Cuban air force pilots. At 6 a.m. on that Saturday, B-26 bombers bombed three Cuban military bases. The airfields at Camp Libertad, San Antonio de Los Banos and Antonio Maceo airport at Santiago de Cuba were fired upon. Seven people were killed at Libertad and forty-seven people were killed at other sites on the island. Two of the B-26s left Cuba and flew to Miami, apparently to defect to the United States.
The Cuban Revolutionary Council, the government in exile, in New York City released a statement saying, “The bombings in Cuba were carried out by ‘Cubans inside Cuba’ who were ‘in contact with’ the top command of the Revolutionary Council.” The New York Times reporter covering the story alluded to something being wrong with the whole situation. He wondered how the council knew the pilots were coming if the pilots had only decided to leave Cuba on Thursday after a suspected betrayal by a fellow pilot had precipitated a plot to strike. Whatever the case, the planes came down in Miami later that morning. One landed at Key West Naval Air Station at 7:00 a.m. and the other at Miami International Airport ...