Bay of Pigs Fails: Castro's Regime Solidified

Fourteen hundred Cuban exiles stormed ashore at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, expecting American air support that never fully arrived and a popular uprising that never materialized. Brigade 2506, trained and armed by the CIA at camps in Guatemala, hit the beaches at Playa Giron and Playa Larga on Cuba's southern coast in a predawn amphibious assault. Within 72 hours, Castro's military had killed 114 invaders, captured 1,189, and humiliated the most powerful nation on earth. The operation had been conceived under Eisenhower and inherited by Kennedy, who approved it with fatal modifications. Kennedy, worried about the appearance of direct American involvement, canceled a second round of air strikes meant to destroy Castro's remaining air force on the morning of the invasion. Castro's pilots, flying T-33 jets and Sea Fury fighters, sank two of the brigade's supply ships, destroying most of their ammunition and communications equipment. Without air cover or resupply, the invasion force was trapped on a swampy beachhead with the sea at their backs. Kennedy's advisers had assured him that even if the landing failed, the brigade could melt into the Escambray Mountains and wage guerrilla warfare. They neglected to mention that the Escambray range was eighty miles from the Bay of Pigs across impassable swampland. The CIA had also wildly overestimated internal opposition to Castro, whose 1959 revolution was barely two years old and still popular among the Cuban majority. Anti-Castro guerrillas in the mountains had already been largely suppressed. The disaster had consequences far beyond the Caribbean. Kennedy, embarrassed, became more cautious about overt intervention and more aggressive about covert operations. The CIA launched Operation Mongoose, a sabotage campaign against Cuba that included assassination attempts on Castro. Castro, convinced another invasion was coming, deepened his alliance with the Soviet Union. Eighteen months later, that alliance produced the Cuban Missile Crisis, bringing the world closer to nuclear war than at any point before or since. The Bay of Pigs cost 1,300 casualties; its aftershocks nearly cost everything.