Fletcher FD-25

Transcription

Before jumping into the details of the Bay of Pigs invasion I want to make sure we understand the environment in Cuba and the United States leading up to the invasion. So, going into the late 1950s Cuba was controlled by this guy right over here: Batista and he was a dictator that was supported by the United States. Just to give a sense of what he was like. Here's a quote from John F Kennedy in 1963. So this is after his already had oil the Bay of Pigs has happened, the Cuban Missle Crisis has happened. He was not a big fan of Fidel Castro. But with that said in hindsight, JFK did say this, this is pretty objective assessment of what Batista was like as the dictator of Cuba. This is John F Kennedy saying this: I believe there is no country in the world including any and all countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime. To some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the US. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. So even JFK in hindsight is saying that Batista was really not the best person and it really was not a good idea for the US to support such a corrupt dictator for so long in Cuba. This is Batista right over here, riding with some US generals in a parade when he was visiting DC. So you can imagine he was not a popular person in control in Cuba and in 1959 you have a successful revolution against him. In 1959 there is a revolution and the revolution is led by this character, Fidel Castro, and his kind of two right hand men are Raoul Castro and Che Gueverra right over here and they take control of Cuba. They're part of this nationalistic, revolutionary movement. Now the one thing they do do, and they are left-leaning from the beginning, people assume that they're maybe communist or quasi communist. But even from the get go as soon as they take power, they start taking over lands that were owned by, well, one that was private cuban property, some of it that was United states property. Their arguement would probably have been that this was wealth, private property that was ill gotten, that was gotten in the time of Batista, but they did on a broad sweep , so they took over a lot of private land, a lot of private property, which also lead people think hey, this is not just a nationalist revolution but also a communist revolution but you could also imagine that once they take over there this huge migration of Cubans to the United States and there, it's primarily middle class, upper middle class, educated Cubans who were really afraid of what Fidel Castro was doing in terms of taking over of private land, taking people's properties. so you start having this cuban exile community really focused around Florida and mainly Miami and they're still there. And they're very unhappy with this fidel castro character right over here. So when we fast forward to 1961 JFK beocmes president, He got selected in early 1961. We're now fast forwarding to April 1961 so JFK has only been president for a few months. But you can imagine a lot of levels you have all of these cuban exiles, upper middled class, educated, middle class, cuban exiles who hate fidel castro. He's taking over their lands he's turning it into what looks like a left estate. This is all happening within the context of the cold war, the US is afraid of countries falling to communism. It looks like fidel castro is a communist, so the US decides the fact that you have all of the exisles who wanna oust him to the US porbably wants to oust him just because he's a communist and they're afraid that he's going to align himself with the soviet union. So in conjunction with the cuban exiles and the cia, and this right here is the director of the central intelligence during the Kennedy administration or at least the beginning part of the Kennedy administration, this is Allan Dulles, his brother is John Foster Dulles, where Dulles airport is named after and he was a US secretary of state. They decide to they want to oust Fidel Castro but they want to do it in a way that the US does not look like the one doing the invasion, so what they do is they plan an invasion where they take cuban exiles and they get 1400 men to sign up to be kind of part of the CIA backed , US backed force to invade cuba and overthrow fidel castro and a lot of this was based on the premise and you can imagine this evenhappened in the iraq war, where the CIA, the American president. They kind of surround themselves with people who tell them, who want give them a very optimistic, hopeful scenario telling them , look we represent what the rest of the cuban people want, they'll say look if we just start a revolution, fidel castro will be over thrown the reality that came out, at least at that point in time, in early 1960s fiedel castro was actually pretty popular with the cuban people and you can imagine he was at that time popular with the poor people who did not have land and now all of the sudden you have this leader for the people, I don't know about his popularity now but at that point he was propbably much more popular than the exiles and the cia would have had kennedy believed. so they plan this attack Kennedy says oh, if we can get rid of Fidel Castro then that derisks the possibility of having this communist nation right off of the florda coast. so they plan this invasion and you know it's shady to begin with because they didn't want to make it look like an official american invasion they wanted to make it look like a pure cuban counter-revolution to some degree that really mixed up every thing and made it look and it really was suspect bcause they really were doing something that was not what it really was. But the invasion the way it all worked out was that by April 15th and this is just going into the details of the day So they had the fourteen hundred exiles They had some ships, some planes they marked them They either removed the markings so that it didn't look like they were American ships or planes Or they put false markings of the Cuban military So that it would cause some confusion or whatever So on April 15 1961 Remember this is only a few months into Kennedy's administration They start air attacks Which launch from Nicaragua and they go to Cuba And the whole point of these air attacks was to kind of soften the Cuban airforce for an eventual invasion by the 1400 exiles and so they have eight aircraft, eight bombers Leaving Nicaragua they bomb Cuba at a base outside of Havana and a base near or not too far from the current Guantanamo Bay and the point or goal is to destroy the Cuban ariforce It turns out that they didn't do it They did it to cause confusion, due to the Cuban airforce markings on the planes You had eight planes going and doing the bombing One of them gets shot down and a ninth plane actually leaves from Nicaragua and they falsely put bullet holes in it to make it look like it was hit with anti aircraft guns and had it defect to Florida So I guess the idea behind this was to make it look like there was a Cuban pilot who takes off from Cuba or somehow gets out of Cuba With a Cuban plane and then tries to destroy a bunch of Cuban aircraft and then defects to the United states That's the impression that they wanted to create It's not so clear if the Cuban's actually fell for it When that happened in 1961 almost everyone saw it as an American attack Then you fast forward to the night of April 16th and this whole time everyone was expecting a US attack This all leads to the fact that this was not a well orchastrated series of events It's pretty well established that some of these exiles were just not as tightlipped as they should have been about the invasion. It got out to Soviet intelligence so the Cubans knew that an invasion was immenent So on April 16th you have a false or decoy attack right over here, decoy boats with loud speakers on them that made them sound like they were firing to cause confusion and it did temporarily cause Castro to look in that direction because they were on hair trigger notice expecting an immenent invasion that was not the real one. This was on the evening of April 16th When you go to the early morning of April 17th you have the real invasion You have the 1400 Cuban exiles with CIA and US military support (but all of that was hidden ) To actually invade at the Bay of Pigs and to make a long story short it was kind of a invasion that did not go well It has been blamed on bad planning, on incompetance at some parts of the invasion If the invasion lasted from April 17th which was the first day of the invasion By April 19th the invading force or counter revolutionary force made up of the 1400 cuban exiles had been pushed back to the beaches and for the most part a little over 100 of them were killed and over 1000 of them were captured and later executed and then later on in the year Fidel Castro makes a deal with the United States Where he hands over the captured exiles to the United States in exchange for 58 million dollars in aid and supplies and the rest so this at least from a military point of view was a complete debaucle from the United States point of view and when you imagine after this happened people in the United States started pointing fingers You have the CIA and the exiles blaming the Kennedy administration saying that look he was not willing to do what it takes to actually do a proper invasion He was not willing to supply the proper air support once the invasion started happening He was not willing to commit more US troops once the invasion started looking like it was not going in the direction of the exiles Kennedy on the other hand blames the CIA He says look this was just done and planned incompetently He also says that "You gave me all sorts of misinformation, you told me that once the invasion started there was all sorts of resentment against Fidel Castro that would cause this broader uprising, which never ever happened." This is actually a quote from John F Kennedy that he said after the Bay of Pigs invasion "The first advice that I am going to give to my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military manners were worth a damn" JFK This is JFK after the Bay of Pigs invasion You can dig deeper and figure out who probably was in the right here But the bottom line here is that this lead to all round negative consequences for the US After this kind of strength in Fidel Castro's hold on Cuba He was like hey that was the US's best shot Huge embarrassment for them it allowed his to concentrate his control It also caused him to now become very openly communist Before the Bay of pigs invasion he was kind of trying to get the US to somewhat like him Although they would not like him because he was taking over private property and he was clearly left leaning But after the Bay of Pigs invasion he definetly aligned himself closely with the soviet union So he became much more open about being a Marxist, Lenninist, communist state and because he as afraid of the future US invasions he was open to what eventually leads to the Cuban Missile Crisis which is the Soviet Union actually placing balistic missiles with nuclear war heads in Cuba within short reach of the United states. It set up this whole series of events that did not really end up working in favour of the United States