OK. Dumb history question:
What was the deal with the “invasion” at the Bay of Pigs?
Were the 1300 or so expatriates really expected to take over Cuba from Castro’s troops? Doesn’t sound like much of an invasion.
Or were they just supposed to slip into Cuban society and harass him thru acts of guerilla warfare?
I know they didnt get promised air support from the US, but thats all I know.
This is a potential can of worms but here it goes.
The invasion at bay of pigs WAS intented to overthrow castro, not right away, but as the start of an insurgency campaing that would eventually topple the regime. Remember, castro came to power after launching his own invasion with a mere 80 men. A few things went wrong, for one as mentioned before, the US government reneged on its promised air support.
But more importantly, castro got wind of the coming invasion and in the weeks before the invasion rounded up several tens of thousands in Cuba who might have joined the invaders and/or provided support.
This was important because while castro is generally portrayed as the leader of the Cuban revolution the truth is far, far more complicated. castro’s forces NEVER strayed beyond the Sierra Maestra mountains the extreme eastern end of the island, some 1100km from the capital. Attacks on batista’s government, and the most effective part of the revolution, were carried out by an alphabet soup of organizations, which organized general strikes, bombing campaigns, sabotage, and demonstrations.
Once batista was forced from power by the daily attacks, and the withdrawal of foreign support, castro shrewdly marched across the island and assumed the role of conquering general, mostly by force of personality, and by virtue of the arms his couple of hundred men had. By the time he arrived at havana, most of the Cuban military had been disarmed, imprisoned, or had otherwise fled.
In a few short weeks in 1959 castro managed to accuse the leaders of the many resistance groups of all sorts of crimes and imprisoned or executed most of them. As they said in france, “the revolution devours its children”. In the end he was left as 1. the only recognizable face of the revolution, who 2. controlled all the arms.
Consequently, when castro got wind of the bay of pigs invasion, his first order of business was to preemptively destroy any potential insurgency groups. This lead to the imprisonment of priests, leaders of student groups, intellectuals, and so on.
So now you have the scenario, a known attack, at a known location, met by a waiting force, and with no internal support. The result, in a 72 hour battle the invading force was defeated.
You might ask, how did castro know? either Cuban or russian spies in the US government is the most likely answer. As an illustrative example I give you Ana Montes, the US government’s foremost Cuban expert and the author of a number of Cuba policy recommendations. She was arrested shortly after September 11th, she had been spying for Cuba for a number of years (she was of puerto rican descent). Sentenced recently to a whole bunch of years in prison. Not that she had anything to do with this subject, just an example of how high a spy can get.
Actually, the fact that the US was training Cuban guerillas in Guatemala was well known (a US reporter was asked about it my a cabbie in Mexico City, the story goes. The editor (UPI/AP, don’t remember) killed the story) in central America.
Guessing the purpose was not really tough.
The problem was one of “disposal” - the Cubans had been recruited, armed and trained under the Eisenhower admin. JFK didn’t want to pursue the invasion plans, but, since the Cubans knew the plan, how was JFK to deal with the situation? Tell them all to go home? Massive loss of credibility when the US was already not popular in Latin Am. Some think the invasion was deliberately set up to fail - the withdrawal of air support is a big tip-off.
FWIW the CIA post-mortem believed Moscow found out the date. They told the Cubans. The CIA knew that before the invasion. They went ahead anyway.
Why? As bayonet has neatly laid out, the plan was much more to provoke a counter revolution than it was that a suprise force of +1000 guys were going to take Havana - so surprise was important, but the critical factor in the plan was going to be the people rising up.
The only other thing I would add to the excellent stuff already posted is about the timing. The Warsaw Pact was going to start shipping miltary equiptment in late’61-'62. So, Spring of '61 was seen as now-or-never time unless the U.S. was prepared to use troops (it was not).
The problem was that the entire thing was one giant pooch screw from beginning to end.
For one thing, the CIA operatives kept telling the President that morale was really high among the ex-pat Cubans. However, the morale was only high because the CIA had been telling them all about the air support, naval support, etc. that the Cubans would be getting from the US. This lie by the CIA was one of the reasons JFK decided to go ahead with it.
The US was supposed to destroy the Cuban Air Force prior to the invasion. But they didn’t. Carnage ensued when the US commander for the invasion misunderstood the warning - he thought they meant only a few planes were still operative, when the US meant that only a few planes were destroyed.
The noted lack of air support.
They chose a terrible landing site, so many of the landing craft were not able to make it to shore properly and the ex-pats were cut to ribbons.
In addition, the idea was that if the invasion failed the ex-pats would just join up with the other rebels in the mountains. Except the landing site was a swamp really really really far away from the mountains.
The US believed that the Cubans hated Castro and would join in a rebellion against him if only someone would prompt them. So the idea was that the invasion would start the ball rolling and the Cuban people would join with them as they marched on Havana and on to victory. Needless to say, after Castro annihilated the domestic resistance, this didn’t work out too well. In addition, the US had the Cubans land at an area that was more or less supportive of Castro.
There were gaps in training. Some of the ex-pats made it to shore and were able to capture a tank. This would have been an extremely important weapon for the invaders…but they were never trained in tank operations. So they had to destroy it.
There were all sorts of other things that went wrong as well. Basically, the whole thing was a giant catastrophe from beginning to end.