LEST WE FORGET THE BAY OF PIGS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403660001-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: April 19, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403660001-5
AR I MOLL NA I 1 UN
ON PAGE 5 3 2- 19 April 1986
THE UNLEARNED LESSONS
LEST WE
FORGET THE
BAY OF PIGS
On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the Bay of Pigs invasion we asked an
unreconstructed supporter of the operation,
Harold Feeney, a retired U. S. Navy commander
who worked with the veterans while serving in
the Cuba Branch of the Defense Intelligence
Agency in 1962, to find out what his former
associates think about it today. For the historical
lessons of the invasion, we turned to Walter
LaFeber, a Nation contributor and a longtime
student of U. S. intervention in Central America.
- The Editors
WALTER LAFEBER
President Kennedy's attempt to destroy Fidel
Castro's regime at the Bay of Pigs has rightly
been called the perfect failure. But the debacle of
April 17, 1961, went far beyond Cuba. It helped
lure the United States down a violent dead-end
street in pursuit of revolutionaries throughout
Latin America. It resulted in the first Soviet
presence in the hemisphere. It rapidly ac-
celerated Washington's disastrous policies in
Vietnam. It caused nations throughout the world
to question U.S. judgment and dependability.
Twenty-five years later Washington officials still
do not understand the reasons for this failure
and seem bent on repeating it.
Certainly no place appeared more vulnerable
to U.S. power than Cuba. The United States had
controlled the island since 1898. Its ambassador
was Cuba's second-most-powerful official, after
the president, and at times the most powerful.
Fidel Castro changed all that with his victory
over dictator Fulgencio Batista on New Year's
Day, 1959. During the rest of that year, his
determination to transform Cuba led to radical land
reforms and other economic changes that brought him
closer to the Cuban Communist Party-which, as late as
1958, had refused to work with him-and put him on a col-
lision course with the Eisenhower Administration. As
historian Richard Welch has put it, North Americans
discovered, to their amazement, "that the Cuban Revolu-
tion was un-American."
When in early 1960 the United States tried to strangle Castro
with tough economic sanctions, he turned to the Soviet bloc for
help. Eisenhower tightened the choke hold and, in March of
that year, secretly ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to
plan an invasion of Cuba. U.S. appeals for help in isolating
Cuba drew little response from Latin American countries,
who feared the Cubans less than Washington's century-old
policy of intervention in their affairs. But two dependable
friends did volunteer: Guatemalan dictator Gen. Miguel
Ydigoras, one in a succession of military leaders who ruled
that country after the C.I.A. overthrew the elected re-
formist government in 1954, and Anastasio Somoza in
Nicaragua. Those two men provided training bases in their
countries for the Cuban exiles involved in the Bay of Pigs
operation. This collaboration is indelibly etched in Central
American and Cuban memories.
Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, Kennedy blamed
Eisenhower for losing Cuba to the Communists. The ac-
cusation trapped the new President. He discovered that the
former general, an old hand at plotting covert counter-
revolutions, had invasion plans well under way. Kennedy's
State Department, however, warned that such an incursion
would set back U.S. relations with Latin America and,
moreover, probably fail. It quickly became obvious that the
C.I.A.'s plans were lacking in intelligence, in both senses of
the word. The agency and the Administration said openly
that Cuban exiles were going to restore freedom to their
homeland, but clearly the C.I.A. was recruiting, training
and controlling them. Mutual trust was conspicuously ab-
sent. One agent admitted that he refused to tell the exiles
when they were to invade because "I don't trust any god-
damn Cubans." Propaganda about the exiles made U.S. of-
ficials believe that the invasion, carried out by an in-
dependently formed anti-Castro force, would cost this
country almost nothing. The ultimate responsibility lay with
the C.I.A. and Kennedy. Both desperately tried to ignore
the operation's central problem-North Americans telling
the Cubans how to run their country-by assuming that
once the exile force landed, the Cuban people would spon-
taneously assist in overthrowing Castro.
Harboring serious reservations about the operation, Ken-
nedy decided to cut direct U.S. military support to an ab-
Walter LaFeber teaches history at Cornell University. His
most recent book is Inevitable Revolutions: The United
States and Central America (W. W. Norton).
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403660001-5
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403660001-5
solute mlhimum. Nevertheless, he despised Castro and saw
himself going head-to-head with Nikita Khrushchev over
which superpower would. control the Third World. He was
also passionately committed to a romantic view of counter-
revolutionary operations and feared being labeled as less of
an anti-Communist than Eisenhower, whose policies he had
blasted only months earlier. So the attack went ahead on the
night of April 17.
It was doomed from the start. In the first place, the
C.I.A. mistook the coral reefs in the Bay of Pigs for
seaweed. The exile crafts ran aground and were easy targets
for Castro's small but effective air force. When U.S. naval
officers on an aircraft carrier just offshore urgently re-
quested permission to launch their'planes to support the ex-
iles, the White House rejected the request. Robert Kennedy
recalled: "We kept asking when the uprisings were going to
take place. Dick Bissell [the C.I.A. official in charge of the
operation] said it was going to take place during the night.
Of course no uprising did take place." Castro killed or cap-
tured nearly all the invaders. At a televised press conference
Kennedy took full responsibility for the disaster.
Kennedyites have since gone to great lengths to blame the
fiasco on the C.I.A. But deeper causes than agency bungling
were involved. In the aftermath, U.S. officials tried to fool
the public into believing that the exile force was acting on its
own and that it was so strongly identified with the cause of
freedom that the Cuban people would rally to its banner.
Those officials were, and remain, vastly ignorant of both
the damage North American control has inflicted on Carib-
bean and Central American societies and the promise of
escape from that past that revolutionaries like Castro seemed
to offer.
Moreover, the exiles could never have conquered Castro's
army without massive U.S. involvement. That realization
led Senator J. William Fulbright, in a last-ditch attempt to
stop the invasion, to pose the classic question: What if we
win? "Winning" would have meant a U.S. occupation of
Cuba and, no doubt, a bloody guerrilla war. U.S. troops in
Cuba would have been as unpopular as the Russians are in
Afghanistan. In addition, most Americans took seriously
the U.S. commitment to the Organization of American
States Charter of 1948 not to use force to overthrow Latin
American governments. As it was, the invasion violated that
pledge. The respect for the rule of law that supposedly
distinguishes U.S. foreign policy from that of the Soviet
Union was cast aside.
Kennedy's successors have continued to regard the Bay of
Pigs tragedy as a failure by the "experts" to run a military
operation properly, instead of what it was: a - failure to
understand the political and economic causes of revolution.
By relying on the C.I.A. and the exiles, U.S. officials un-
wittingly tried to revive the imperialist past. Over the next
several years Kennedy's Administration authorized sabo-
tage, dirty tricks and even assassination attempts to
eliminate Castro. Those attacks only made the Cuban leader
more popular at home and drove him closer to the Russians.
Finally, in the aftermath of the debacle, Kennedy resolved
to redeem himself by sending more troops to Vietnam. The
significant escalation of involvement in Southeast Asia by
the end of 1961 was a direct result of Kennedy's misreading
of the lessons to be drawn from the Cuban revolution. With
the Bay of Pigs invasion Kennedy dealt militarily with the
effects, not the causes, of revolution.
Although sympathetic to the Cuban exiles' cause, Harold
Feeney demonstrates in the following article that the United
States is better at enlisting and exploiting exile forces than in
protecting them or dealing with the long-term social and
political consequences of their actions. There are troubling
parallels between the C.I.A.-created Brigade 2506 in 1961
and the C.I.A.-created contras in 1986. As did Kennedy
with the Cuban invasion force, Reagan pretends that his
Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" are an independent band of
dedicated patriots who will stem the tide of communism in
the hemisphere at little cost in U.S. lives and treasure. Just
as Kennedy raised the specter of "losing" Cuba to Com-
munism, so Reagan depicts the Nicaraguan revolution in
stark cold war terms and threatens that legislators who op-
pose his aid program for the contras will be blamed for los-
ing Central America to Moscow. Washington's ignorance of
the causes of the "perfect failure" twenty-five years ago,
which led to disaster in Vietnam, is now drawing this coun-
try into another calamity in Central America. ^
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403660001-5