What Can a Person Learn From the Bay of Pigs Incident?

fifty Years Afterward: Learning From The Bay Of Pigs 00:00

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Members of Fidel Castro's militia gather in Republic of cuba's Escambry Mountains during the ill-fated 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. (Iii Lions/Getty Images)

Jim Rasenberger has written for The New York Times, Vanity Fair and The Wilson Quarterly. He lives in New York with his wife and sons. (Ellen Silverman)

Fifty years agone Sun, a brigade of around ane,500 CIA-trained soldiers stormed the beach in Cuba's Bay of Pigs. It was the opening phase of a undercover mission to overthrow Fidel Castro and, President John F. Kennedy hoped, halt the spread of communism throughout the world.

Things did not go equally planned.

"I recall the thing that you accept to keep in mind when you ask yourself, 'How did this ever happen?' is the extraordinary fright of communism in the late 50s and early 60s," author Jim Rasenberger tells NPR's Noah Adams.

In his new book, The Brilliant Disaster, Rasenberger suggests the debacle marked the start of the Vietnam era — before which, "information technology would have been a fairly skeptical or cynical American who doubted he lived in a country run by competent men, engaged in worthwhile enterprises."

The Bay of Pigs changed that.

"Non merely did it appear immoral to many people," Rasenberger says, "but it was also incompetent."

For Kennedy, A Stone And A Difficult Place

The plan for a covert, CIA-led overthrow of Fidel Castro was hatched under President Eisenhower, who increasingly saw Castro every bit aligned with communists in the Soviet Matrimony.

Eisenhower insisted it must remain secret. When John F. Kennedy was elected president and presented with the mission — then still existence planned — he agreed.

"He knew that if the American paw showed in this, [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev would then exist forced to retaliate," Rasenberger says, leading to all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Kennedy, who had run against Richard Nixon past "beating the Eisenhower administration over the caput with Castro," Rasenberger says, could see no way not to press on with the mission.

"He had a lot of doubts about it, a lot of concerns about information technology, but he never could figure out a mode not to do it."

A Plan Amiss, And A Tipping Betoken

The mission, set into move on Apr xv, 1961, called for a series of air strikes to take out Castro's defenses first. Then, a brigade of ane,500 Cuban expats would land in Cuba'southward Bay of Pigs, storm the beach, and spark an overthrow of the Castro regime.

Merely from the beginning, things did not get well.

The ships that carried the brigade got hung up on coral in the Bay'south shallow waters. A series of bombings on Castro'due south air defenses by Cuban exile B-26s — crucial if the brigade troops on the ground were to invade successfully — missed several of Castro'southward planes.

Only the tipping indicate, Rasenberger says, may have come up on April 16, when John F. Kennedy canceled a second series of air strikes, leaving Castro with air defenses intact and more fourth dimension to prepare for the troops, which hit the beach on April 17.

"One time those second air strikes were canceled, the game was basically over," Rasenberger says. "The brigade was doomed at that bespeak."

Eduardo Barea, a 25-year-old Cuban exile at the time, would have piloted his B-26 bomber in those air strikes. When the order came through to stop the bomb, "every airplane pilot was surprised," Barea tells NPR. They'd been expecting to assistance their comrades on the ground launch a successful invasion.

"It was very hard for me to understand," Barea says. "We never expected that something like that was going to happen."

Lessons Learned

Without air support, most of the invaders were taken prisoner and held for over a year until the Kennedy assistants negotiated their release.

Despite its legacy as one of the biggest American foreign policy disasters in history, Rasenberger says it may take been the best Kennedy could have hoped for. A victory, later all, would accept led to a U.S. occupation of Cuba.

"Some people say he got the best-case scenario. He went forwards with it, and then he looked similar he was potent on communism, and yet information technology failed, so he didn't accept to deal with some terrible consequences if information technology had succeeded."

Those consequences might have looked something like modernistic-day Iraq, Rasenberger says, or even Great socialist people's libyan arab jamahiriya.

One lesson from the Bay of Pigs, he says: "Don't assume, when we go into another state, that immediately the locals volition all come and gather behind our cause."

Some other lesson — though Rasenberger says it'south too early on to accurately apply to Great socialist people's libyan arab jamahiriya — "the cure may exist worse than the disease.

"And indeed information technology was," he says, later the Bay of Pigs. "Castro became far more powerful later on the invasion. He became more closely tied to the Soviet Matrimony."

Merely the most of import legacy of the Bay of Pigs may be the simplest, Rasenberger says: Murphy'south Law.

"Things are going to get incorrect," he says.

For an assistants composed of the best and the brightest, as Kennedy'southward was, "it would exist wise for presidents to have few people in their administration more acquainted with things not going well."

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Source: https://www.wbur.org/npr/135444482/50-years-later-learning-from-the-bay-of-pigs