The Bay Of Pigs Invasion Of Cuba

The planning for the Bay of Pigs began under President Eisenhower’s administration. President Eisenhower approved the CIA’s Bay of Pigs plan to oust Fidel Castro and overthrow Cuba’s communist government on March 17, 1960. The planning and preparation continued throughout the rest of the year. On January 20, 1961, John F Kennedy became the President of the United States. He had learned of the Bay of Pigs plan months earlier, and now as President, after consulting with his advisors, also approved the CIA planned Bay of Pigs

BAY OF PIGS It seems that the United States has been one of the most dominant, if not the most dominant, countries in the world, since the Declaration of Independence. Yet, on Monday, April 17, 1961, our government experienced incredible criticism and extreme embarrassment when Fidel Castro, dictator of Cuba, instantly stopped an invasion on the Cuban beach known as the Bay of Pigs. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his advisors, and many Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials, made the largest error of their political careers. Once the decision was made to invade Cuba, to end Castro and his Communist government, Kennedy and his administration were never looked at in the same light nor trusted again. Russian leader Nikita

The CIA initiated the training process by setting up training camps in Guatemala and trained "counter-revolutionary Cubans serving as the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, known as Brigade 2506" (The Bay of Pigs Invasion and its Aftermath). Soon, by November the United States had prepared a small army to perform assault landing and guerilla warfare. If the invasion turned out to be a success a former member of Castro's government, José Miró Cardona, was going to take the presidential position of Cuba. However, the plan was already in trouble by October of 1960 when Castro found out about the guerilla training camps that were based in Guatemala. Once John F. Kennedy became president, one of his first decisions in office was authorizing the plan in February of 1961. Although Castro was aware of the United States' intentions, President Kennedy still put in effort to keep the U.S. support disguised. One of the ways he attempted to do this was by assigning The Bay of Pigs as the landing point. "The site was a remote swampy area on the southern coast of Cuba, where a night landing might bring a force ashore against little resistance and help to hide any United States involvement" (The Bay of Pigs). The down side to this was that the Bay of Pigs was 80 miles from refuge in Cuba's Escambray Mountains, giving us an excessive distance which would be a problem if we were faced with an

Before John F. Kennedy moved into the White House, President Eisenhower approved the CIA’s plan to overthrow Castro. John F. Kennedy was informed on the plan during his campaign, but recently after he was briefed on the new information, the CIA abandoned the plan. Even though Eisenhower approved of the

The primary initiative involved a 1961 CIA backed attempted large scale operation titled the Bay of Pigs invasion, that involved an the landing of 1,400 Cuban Guerilla exiles which subsequently failed. The CIA then oped for a more covert, assassination route and contacted their sources within the Mafia. The plan was to have Fidel Castro ingest a poison capsule through the help of old Mafia contacts in Cuba who opposed Fidel. Their man for the job was the prominent Chicago and Vegas Mob Boss Handsome Johnny Roselli; however, after failed attempts in both late 1961 and 1962 the program was shut down and the Mafia assets were put on notice. (Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba, and the Mafia: 1933 to 1966, Chapter 2, Location 4871). The reasoning behind this is because the CIA began to fear that Roselli and other associates were gathering information to expose the American Government for working with criminals, using that as future information blackmail.

“One of our greatest assets is that all men aspire to be equal and free. This fact haunts the rulers of the Kremlin today for they cannot change the law of nature and they know it.” stated Allen Dulles, the fifth director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an encounter that occurred on April 17, 1961, between Cuban exiles, armed and trained by the American Central Intelligence Agency and the military forces of Fidel Castro. With the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion the United States found itself more involved in the Cold War and experienced a new era in the military, political, and intelligence fields as well as the exchange and exploration of communist ideology.

The Bay of Pigs invasion into Cuba can be seen as one of the most important political decisions in the history of the United States. Four months after John F. Kennedy took office as the thirty fifth President of the United States, he was blamed for the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs. The failure was due to the lack of bad advice he received and then used to put into making his decision to invade. The decisions he made showed that the United States President and his Joint Chiefs were far from perfect. Bay of Pigs was a secretly organized coup in Cuba that resulted in many consequences that Kennedy would be forced to face. Politically, Kennedy decided to pursue the foreign policy decision to invade in order to stop the spread of

It all began On April 17, 1961, about 1400 Cubans were launched at what became to be known as the invasion of Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. It lasted two days from April 17, 1961, to April 19, 1961. It became one of United States biggest screw-ups and failed operations. Causing the death of 114 Americans and over 1,100 were taken prisoner each was sentenced to 30 years in prison (“History.com”). After twenty months of negotiation, most of the prisoners were released in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine (. This event gave Fidel Castro a means to claim there was a threat from the USA while in reality the US barely supported the invasion.

After Fidel Castro overthrew Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista, expropriated American economic assets and developed links with the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower authorized the CIA in March 1960 to develop a plan to overthrow Castro. The agency trained and armed Cuban exiles to carry out the attack. Shortly after his inauguration, John F. Kennedy learned of the invasion plan, concluded that Fidel Castro was a Soviet client posing a threat to all of Latin America and, after consultations with his advisers, gave his consent in February 1961 for the CIA-planned amphibious assault.

The invasion was launched only 77 days after President John F. Kennedy took office, so obviously he was not the one who originated the ideas of this invasion. An invasion on Cuba had been in discussion and debated since the beginning of 1960.

“Victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan,” remarked John F. Kennedy. The Bay of Pigs invasion code named operation Zapata began in March of 1960 one month and a year before the famed invasion took place. United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to begin a covert operation to bring down the pro-communist Cuban government. Nonetheless Fidel Castro’s potential pro-communist beliefs, the seizure of American owned companies and land lead to extreme concern from United States policy makers and officials. The mission, however would become possibly one of the greatest intelligence failures in the history of the United States. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion lead to a new era in the military and intelligence fields that continues to affect foreign policy

Chapter 1 - The Bay of Pigs Invasion - 1961 Figure 1The above image is a primary source image of Fidel Castro (right) an infamous Cuban dictator, and Che Guevara who played a number of key roles within the Cuban government. This photo was taken in 1961, during which the Bay of Pigs Invasion took place. The photo was taken by Alberto Korda, a Cuban photographer. This photo allows us to peer into the past and see Castro presumably leading Cuban troops. There is a large possibility of bias when considering that the photographer that took this image, Alberto Korda, was not only Cuban but also a personal photographer and close friend of Castro.

Castro knew well in advance that an American attack was fast approaching Cuba. The front cover of The New York Times ruined the element of surprise when they published information regarding the Cuban exiles stationed in Guatemala and Florida ready to fight Castro’s forces at a moment’s notice. The report was written ten days before the invasion. However, Fidel Castro knew well before that the CIA wanted to overthrow him from power due to the openness of refugees and revolutionaries in Miami. Months before, in November 1960 The Nation described the training operations of the Cuban exiles in Guatemala with a report from the Los Angeles Times that followed shortly after. The media factor was huge in President Kennedy’s calculation of maintaining plausible deniability and ensured premature failure of the covert objectives in Cuba. When eight B-26 bombers carried out there bombing campaign against the Cuban Air Force a day before the invasion, the media ripped through the highly doubtful cover story that this was the feat of a rogue Cuban defector. As a result, President Kennedy ordered the strikes that were planned for the next day to be postponed until after airstrip of the Bay of Pigs was secured. This would prove to be a devastating mistake for the operation. American news stations had exposed the CIA in every phase of covert planning and action right up to the Invasion.

Bay of Pigs operation Among the multiple steps taken by the CIA to remove Castro, a squad of approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles were hired to create a large-scale invasion on the island, with the help of its own air force. The assumed result of such actions would trigger mass rising to

It can be said that the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 challenged world peace. When the United States discovered that the Soviet Union was shipping nuclear missiles over to Cuba to get a better shot at taking down the United States, the United States and