I had intended to post this on the anniversary of the attack….but life got in the way as it has often done and it got pushed back and almost forgotten.

As this month comes to a close I would like to reach back in history and write about the US led invasion of Cuba in April of 1961….the invasion force was rather small in the beginning because the US had ruled out using US  troops….A full-scale invasion would have incurred huge US casualties: 40-50,000 according to Department of Defense estimates. There was also public opinion to be considered. Since the introduction of the ‘good neighbor’ policy, US armed intervention was of potential political harm and had been formally ruled out under such commitments as the Charter of the Organization of American States. The US had made political capital during 1956 out of Soviet armed intervention in Hungary and the British-French-Israeli action in Suez. Any involvement in Cuba must be subject to ‘plausible deniability’, with the White House especially untainted by any knowledge or involvement.

Instead the powers decided to use a small force of 1400 men….

The first part of the plan was to destroy Castro’s tiny air force, making it impossible for his military to resist the invaders. On April 15, 1961, a group of Cuban exiles took off from Nicaragua in a squadron of American B-26 bombers, painted to look like stolen Cuban planes, and conducted a strike against Cuban airfields.

However, it turned out that Castro and his advisers knew about the raid and had moved his planes out of harm’s way. Frustrated, Kennedy began to suspect that the plan the CIA had promised would be “both clandestine and successful” might in fact be “too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful.”

Such requirements left Pluto in operational limbo. In the first place, air cover was deemed essential for the invading force to secure the beach-heads; yet control of the skies could not be achieved by the rebels alone. To solve this problem the original landing-site was changed from a point close to the Escambray mountains (good guerrilla territory) to the Bay of Pigs, more difficult terrain for an amphibious operation. Three main groups of rebels existed: insurgents in Cuba killing and sabotaging, but ignored by the CIA; the invasion forces being trained by the CIA mainly in Guatemala, but also within the United States; and the anti-Castro leadership, which divided into two antagonistic groups: the original Batistianos and those who began as Fidelistas, but lost faith in the revolution. The most influential of this disparate trio was the divided leadership, but precisely because of these divisions, their susceptibility to leaks and the unsavory backgrounds of many, such men were cut out of CIA decision-making.

read on….

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/bay-pigs-invasion

This would be invasion lasted about 24 hours before it broke down and was Kennedy’s first international failure.

For more reading this is an excellent account….

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56808455

And the US has been interfering in international situations ever since.

You would think we could learn from that mistake….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”