Bay Pigs Quotes
The Bay of Pigs
Raul had missed the first day of fighting during the American backed invasion of the Cuban Bay of Pigs. Castro who was personally in charge of the defense, did not seem very worried. Two days later his troops had killed or captured most of the invaders.
In April of 1962, President Kennedy convened a meeting of top advisors at the State Department to discuss the proposed CIA plan for the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The senator was the lone dissenter from the plan:
The President had been dealing with a series of crises—The Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the beginning of Vietnam.
Kennedy was a relatively new president and the Bay of Pigs Operation was prepared and planned by the CIA under the Eisenhower Administration. The president assumed that the intelligence was correct and there would be an uprising of the Cuban people when as soon as the landing took place. That was all wrong and the Cubans actually supported Castro and the operation was a disaster. Kennedy never trusted the CIA after that.
See {637464} for the trigger for the FBI to write this report. It was the report that verified that the CIA had hired the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro which President Johnson had heard but the CIA never revealed it to Johnson or the Warren Commission investigations JFK’s assassination. The full document was kept secret and was not yet declassified in 2014 when this quotation was entered in the collection.
When the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion attempt of Cuba failed, over 15,000 Cubans recruited for the operation were in the United States:. Almost all eventually settled in the U. S.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, the President was surprised to discover that his May 1961 approval rating in the polls was 82%, higher than ever:
During the Bay of Pigs crisis the President was consulting congressional leaders including Senator Barry Goldwater, who had ambitions for the Presidency:
The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was the lone voice who warned the President of the CIA Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. After its failure:
The Cuban dissidents and the CIA had assured President Kennedy and the Joint Chief’s of Staff that as soon as the CIA organized troops landed there would be uprisings throughout Cuba and the invaders would be supported by the Cuban people, happy to overthrow Castro. After the landing, there was not a single uprising nor was there any assistance provided to the invaders who were easily captured by Castro’s men. Castro was very popular. The CIA and Cuban dissidents were guilty of wishful thinking.
Johnson tasked Clark with finding out what the FBI knew of this story. The story was true. Worse, the CIA had hired members of the Mafia to do the assassination. (The Mafia resented Castro as he ended the Gambling Mecca that Cuba had been when his revolution succeeded. Before the Castro revolution, he Mafia got a “piece” of the profits from each Cuban casino for “protection.”) It might have been that the Kennedy Assassination was retaliation by Castro. However, the CIA withheld this from the Warren Commission and Robert Kennedy never revealed it even though he was a member of the Commission and the Commission had security clearance. See {637465}.
The Undersecretary had misgivings just before the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, and urged a cancellation:
talks toward normalizing relations with Cuba One of the many alternative theories about the assassination of President Kennedy, was that it was done by fanatic Cubans who resented Kennedy for not sending more military assets to support the Bay of Pigs operation, for not supporting the Cuban militants to make another invasion attempt. If they had found out that Kennedy was secretly negotiating with Castro, they would have seen this as a betrayal. Attwood had secretly met with the Cuban Government Representatives and was to have briefed President Kennedy, but the president was assassinated first. His death ended the mission to normalize Cuban relations, so if that was the motivation for an assassination, the Cuban exiles might have been successful in derailing relations with Cuba. However, there has been no direct evidence found for this speculative theory.
