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It's April the 17th, 1961, just after midnight. A small rubber raft glides through the open waters of the Caribbean Sea. On board are six men. Their painted faces shine in the silvery moonlight. Stealthy, shadowy, dressed head to toe in dark colors. They have the appearance of burglars. Some would say that's exactly what they are. Thieves intent on taking what isn't theirs. The men themselves are adamant that they aren't stealing anything.
Quite the opposite. They are returning something precious to its rightful owners. The raft sails onwards. Its crew looks stern, focused, alert. Ahead of them is the dim outline of landfall. It's the Bay of Pigs, a remote swampy area on the south coast of Cuba. Five of these men are Cuban exiles. Having fled the rule of Fidel Castro, they're about to make a spectacular return. The sixth man in the party is an American.
from the Central Intelligence Agency. For the past several months, the CIA has been attempting to turn a brigade of anti-Castro Cubans into a fighting force capable of invading the island, reversing the revolution, and consigning Fidel to the pages of history. One of those Cubans is Eduardo Saez-Bassan. Tonight he's in the raft, inching towards home, brimming with confidence. After all,
He's got the unwavering support of the great American superpower. Eduardo breathes deeply and swallows hard. There's just minutes until they reach their destination. Minutes until they make war on their own homeland. Out of nowhere, the raft judders and sways. There's something underneath, attacking them. Ironically, Cuba's natural beauty is to blame. A giant fragment of coral reef. Their mission at risk of instant failure, they all bail out.
Sloshing about in the sea, Eduardo tries to keep his firearms out of the water, and his mind on the task in hand. This wasn't meant to happen. The CIA had assured them that the beach was free of hazards. And then, in the distance, Eduardo spots something. A glimmer on the beach. Headlights of a vehicle. It's a jeep, and it's on the move.
The water was up to our waist. And that's when suddenly this jeep comes, turns towards us. And that's when our American instructor said the first word at the Bay of Pigs invasion. Fire. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is part five of the Fidel Castro story. And this is Real Dictators. So how did we get here?
How did Cuba find itself under attack from America, and from many of its own people? Let's go back to the autumn of 1960. The Cuban Revolution is nearing its second anniversary. In that time, life on the island has been transformed. Fidel Castro's government has seized and redistributed land. Swathes of the economy are now nationalized. Elections, constitutional rule, civil rights, all those things Fidel had promised to restore, they're a distant memory.
His message of justice for the poor and freedom from American interference remains popular. Many Cubans still believe in the revolutionary path, but many others don't. Resistance comes in various forms. In the cities, dissidents engage in political action, civil disobedience, even terrorism. Up in the Escambray Mountains, the best part of 200 miles southeast of Havana, an anti-Castro guerrilla army digs in.
Then there are those who leave the island altogether. Castro labels them subhuman. He calls them escoria, meaning scum, and gusanos, meaning worms. Once they leave, the exiles' former lives are erased. Their properties are confiscated, some of which are doled out to leading revolutionaries. Che Guevara has a particularly nice one given to him in the salubrious part of Havana.
24-year-old Eduardo Sayas-Basan is one of those who decides to leave. We've met Eduardo in previous episodes. He's the descendant of a well-to-do, well-connected family that thrived during the Batista years, but then is targeted and punished by Castro. He's alarmed by Fidel's disdain for the rule of law. Extrajudicial punishments carried out in his name and according to his whim. In September 1960, Eduardo makes his way to Florida.
But he doesn't intend to stay for long. He's heard there are plans afoot to knock Fidel off his perch, and he wants to be part of them. As chance would have it, Eduardo, a champion swimmer back in Cuba, has got skills that could come in very handy.
The first thing I did, I went to the office of the Frente Revolucionario Democrático that was already organized by the CIA. And there I was told that they were looking for frogmen for a future invasion of Cuba. And knowing my background as a swimmer, I said, this is the natural thing for me.
The CIA has been scheming against Castro for several months, with the blessing of President Dwight Eisenhower. As Cold War tensions with the Soviets grow, the increasing influence of communism in Cuba presents a concern for the White House. When Eisenhower's term ends in January 1961, one of his final acts in office is to formally sever US-Cuba diplomatic relations. When the new president, John F. Kennedy, takes power, the CIA presents him with a plan
The US will train and arm more than a thousand Cuban exiles. The group that Eduardo has now joined, its name is Brigade 2506. Supported by aerial bombardment, the brigade will launch an amphibious invasion. This in turn will precipitate an uprising elsewhere on the island, ultimately leading to the fall of the Castro regime. Worst case scenario, Castro's defenses prove stronger than expected.
If so, the invaders will disappear into the nearby Escambray Mountains. There they'll form a formidable army with the guerrillas already resisting the revolution. Either way, Fidel is a goner. And yet, Kennedy hesitates. There's a bigger picture here. How might the Soviets react? The president wants Castro gone, but to him the plan reads like a recreation of D-Day. It's too noisy, he says.
Any invasion must be covert, quiet and precise. International security depends upon it. Peter Kornblur is Senior Analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C.
Kennedy's response was, look, it's not just the issue of Cuba that's at stake. If we are taking it upon ourselves to openly invade smaller countries because they're on our border and we feel insecure about them, then, you know, Nikita Khrushchev can walk into West Berlin and say the same thing. And then we have World War III on our hands. And that's basically Kennedy's rationale about being cautious about this. Kennedy is assured that the U.S. can have its cake and eat it.
a scaled-down invasion plan can still be a roaring success. It's not just the military and intelligence establishment who feel this way.
It is important for you to realize that the 1,500 men that participated had total confidence on the capability of the United States. So the fact that the Americans were training us, were financing us, were planning the whole operation, it never crossed my mind that we were going to lose.
Most of the Exile Invasion Force is taken to Guatemala for intensive training. But not Eduardo. As one of several frogmen, his training will take place on an island near Puerto Rico. We train for about two months. Beach surveying, beach landing at night and working with explosives and different type of guns. The frogmen will spearhead the mission.
As the invading ships approach the shore, they will push ahead, clearing obstacles and lighting the path for the hordes to follow. Eduardo has no previous military experience. The closest he's ever come to the heat of battle is a swimming gala at the Havana Yacht Club. Now he's training to lead a full-scale invasion of his homeland. The personal stakes are enormously high.
I left a wife and a son that was two months old at that time. But I felt it was my duty to do something, that it was the right thing, that it was the right cause. And my wife understood that. No one in my family felt that I was making a mistake.
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As Eduardo begins his training, Fidel Castro is himself out of Cuba. In September 1960, he arrives in New York for a ten-day trip. It's predictably eventful. Before the United Nations General Assembly, Castro sets a record for the lengthiest address in the institution's history. He speaks for nearly four and a half hours. Capitalism and US imperialism get it in the neck.
Though how many are still listening after the full 269 minutes is unclear. During his time in the Big Apple, Castro is protected by American police officers. Ironic, considering that at this very moment, the CIA is brainstorming ways of killing him. For months, plans for an invasion of Cuba have been running in tandem with plots to eliminate its leader. There are any number of disgruntled people willing to participate.
First in line are the US Mafia dons, who lost giant sums when the revolution took possession of their nightclubs and shuttered their casinos. CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell reaches out to them. They spitball ideas, spiking Fidel's cigars, placing a deadly sniper among the masses at one of his rallies. None of them leads to anything, but the spymasters continue to scheme.
An increasingly unusual cast of characters is drawn into the drama. Among them, according to her own testimony, is one of Fidel's lovers. Back in February 1959, just weeks after the revolution, 19-year-old Marita Lawrence arrives in Havana from New York. She's accompanying her father, the owner of an ocean liner, on a business trip. Marita's daughter, Monica, takes up the story.
She was bored with New York, didn't want to go to secretarial school, so she stowed away on her father's ocean liner. They had docked in Cuba, and a boat with a bunch of beards came towards this big ocean liner. My grandfather was asleep, so my mother took it upon herself to greet this boat of beards. And the main beard was Fidel Castro. Fidel charms the girl and her father. Marisa is intoxicated.
It was a very vibrant, exciting time in Cuba. So that was part of the intoxication, the romance with this handsome man in this exciting Caribbean place where everybody wanted to be. Who wouldn't be intoxicated and excited at 19 to be there with this leader? It must have been quite exhilarating for her.
Soon, Marita is moved into Fidel's suite at the Havana Libre Hotel, his residence and HQ. She is his latest conquest, but what follows is highly contested. According to Marita's testimony, she becomes pregnant with Castro's child, but in her eighth month, Marita claims she's forced into an induced labor and has her child taken from her before being sent home to New York.
Monica says she believes her mother's account to be true. I can only imagine her confusion and pain and loneliness. This is a 19-year-old girl who's pregnant, and we just need to remember that. Upon her return to the U.S., the FBI turns up at her door. They question her at length and find much of her story credible, as detailed in the official report of the interview.
At this point, Marita is approached by Frank Sturgis. Once a gunrunner for Castro, Sturgis now works with the CIA against him. He wants Marita to return to Havana on a special mission: to kill Fidel. Marita will later assert that to force her compliance, Sturgis and his colleagues exploited her fragile emotional and psychological state.
That's what they did. Constant badgering, constant manipulation, constant telling her she had to do this in the name of God, God and country. They beat her up mentally, emotionally, until she succumbed and said, all right, I'll go back and kill him. A plan is formulated. Marita flies out to Havana.
She was given poison capsules to go ahead and put this in Fidel Castro's food, drink, whatever, to eliminate him. She's going back, she's terrified, but she feels that this is what she has to do. Once in Havana, Marita stops off to change into the army fatigues that Fidel gave her back in 1959. She then makes her way across town to the Havana Libre.
In her purse is a key to Fidel's suite and the poison capsules, which she's wrapped in tissue paper and concealed within a small jar of skin cream. She enters the hotel and walks across the foyer. In the lift, she rides her way up to the 23rd floor. Her heart is racing. She told me as she's walking through the hotel, she's panicking, going to kill somebody. She doesn't kill. She's not a killer.
She's thinking, will I put this in his drink? Is he gonna spasm out? Is he gonna drop dead in front of me? When she arrives at Castro's suite, so Marita says, she unlocks the door. The suite is empty. She slips into the bathroom, hands shaking. She retrieves the poison capsule from the jar of skin cream. But they're ruined, she discovers, gummed up and useless. As she exits the bathroom, in walks Fidel.
He greets her with a broad, nonchalant smile. Staring right at her, he asks, Are you here to kill me? Marisa is lost for words. He gave her his gun. He said, you want to come kill me? And he handed it to her. And she looked at him and she fell apart. And he said to her, he says, you can't kill me. Nobody can kill me. As Marisa tells the story, the drama ends with her and Fidel going to bed. A final melodramatic twist that sounds like a scene from a Bond film.
Yet, Fidel Castro's biography is crammed full of barely believable tales. Many of them, as is the case with Morita's story, contain more than a germ of truth. And compared to some of the other assassination schemes that the CIA will soon develop, this one is pretty pedestrian. In March 1961, President Kennedy receives a revised version of the plan to invade Cuba.
Brigade 2506 will no longer come ashore at the city of Trinidad as originally planned. Instead, they'll land at a more remote spot, an inlet known in English as the Bay of Pigs. Furthermore, the invasion will take place under the cover of darkness, and the invaders will receive far less support in terms of aerial bombardment and reinforcements. Kennedy remains twitchy. He's not the only one. To experienced military planners,
The Bay of Pigs is a terrible invasion site. Not only is it swampland, but it's much further away from the Escambray Mountains, in which the invaders are supposed to seek refuge should they encounter difficulties. Added to that, the bay is in one of the most pro-Castro parts of the island. The chances of a local uprising to aid the invaders are very small. Perhaps most alarmingly, the amount of air cover now proposed is clearly inadequate.
One official in the State Department reckons there's a two-in-three chance that the invasion will fail. But the voices of dissent aren't heeded. On April 4, 1961, President Kennedy gives the go-ahead. The date of the invasion is set for 13 days from now, April 17. Eduardo and his fellow frogmen now leave for Puerto Cabezas, an isolated port in Nicaragua.
Greeting them on arrival are the 1500 other members of the brigade. For five days they kick their heels. The details of the plan are unknown to any of them. It's not until the 13th that they're briefed. The specifics of Eduardo's task are laid out. Eduardo, four comrades, and their commanding officer from the CIA are to make their way onto the beach. There they are to strategically place lights, angled so that they can only be seen from the sea.
With these guides in place, the rest of the brigade can launch the invasion. They're also informed, inaccurately, that there will be extensive support from the US. American pilots will fly several bombing raids to neutralize Castro's air force, they're told. US destroyers and submarines will be on standby to assist from the sea. Eduardo is elated.
I remember our trainers telling us, you know, some of you might not make it, but you never think it's going to be you the one who's going to die. So that we were going to be defeated at the Bay of Pigs invasion? Never. In Cuba, preparations are also underway. By now, the world and his dog knows the CIA is training a force of Cuban exiles.
It's headline news in the New York Times, and it's a constant topic of conversation in Cuba too. Carlos Eyre, 10 years old at the time, recalls hearing whispers that something big is on its way. There were all sorts of rumors about what was happening. This is what happens in a totalitarian society. There's nothing but rumors. And after a while, you learn not to believe every rumor when you first hear it. Eventually, the signs become too obvious to doubt.
American surveillance planes make 15 flights over the island in the first half of April. Castro mobilizes the population. Across Cuba, militias prepare to assist the regular army in repelling a US attack. For them, Fidel's new slogan is sacrosanct: "Patria o muerte" – "Homeland or Death". Lifelong Havana resident, Ileana Yaza, later to be a government official,
recalls how the prospect of invasion reinforced her anger at the U.S., as well as her total faith in Fidel. We were expecting an invasion because Cuba had nationalized many American industries. I was pregnant and I remember that all of us had a suitcase repaired with things because we expected bombing in
in Havana because it had happened before in Latin America. Now for us Cubans, the important thing was that Ucidelo was there. He became part of the fight and was already part of the militia. We had training and we were ready to die and fight the invasion until the last breath of our lives.
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In Havana, young Carlos Eyre is in bed when the attack begins. At this point, nobody in his family is giving thanks for Fidel. In fact, they're hoping this might spell the end of him.
It was early morning. It was before dawn. I thought it was thunder, but it turned out to be bombs. The planes were flying very, very low over our house because the airfield they were trying to bomb was no more than 10 blocks away. And our whole house was shaking.
Our neighbor got up on his roof with a pistol and was shooting at the airplanes with a pistol. Very effective. They were flying very low though, right? The rest of that day was very chaotic, but I was very happy. Not because they were bombing, but happy because there might be an end to this nightmare. That's what it felt like. The initial plan had called for 16 bombers, but in a phone call with the head of the CIA the previous day,
President Kennedy had wondered aloud whether that wasn't a bit excessive. "No problem," says the CIA, "we'll halve it. Eight bombers instead of sixteen." Unsurprisingly, the operation is therefore only a semi-success. Cuba's air force is damaged, but nowhere near destroyed. Equally unsurprising is Castro's response to the raid.
That's when they rounded up tens of thousands of Cubans. Anyone who had any connection to the invaders was rounded up, including my uncle. He was rounded up because his son, Fernando, my cousin, was already in prison.
Fernando was arrested because he was carrying weapons in the trunk of his car, which were to be distributed around Havana so that there could be an urban uprising. When the men landed at the Bay of Pigs, they rounded up anyone they thought could aid in any way the counter-revolutionary insurgents. Then the prisons filled up. They didn't even have enough room for prisoners.
American disappointment at the outcome of the raid rapidly morphs into deep embarrassment. To give the illusion that Castro's military is in revolt, the US planes had conducted their missions masquerading as Cuban aircraft. But when one of the planes lands in Florida, published photographs quickly expose the ruse. Castro also appears on television, mocking what he calls the Americans' cheap and desperate ploy that's designed for domestic consumption.
The following day, he speaks to the world. At a public funeral for casualties of the attack, Castro uses the S-word for the first time. What the imperialists cannot forgive, he tells a sea of mourners in Havana, is that we have made a socialist revolution under their noses. It's deliberately provocative, the first time he's ever described the revolution as anything other than a nationalist cause.
Right now, Eduardo and the rest of Brigade 2506 are cutting northwards through the Caribbean Sea. Reports via the radio inform them of the attack on the Cuban airfields. There's jubilation aboard the ships. The assumption is that this is just the first of a series of bludgeoning assaults. The door is ajar. All the invaders need to do is push. What they haven't accounted for is the Kennedy administration's pervading doubts about the whole project.
That evening the President again gets on the phone to the CIA. He orders a further last-minute tweak to the plan. The bombing raids planned for the second and third day of the invasion are scrapped entirely. "The world is watching," says Kennedy. "U.S. involvement must be kept hidden." Around two hours later, at 11:30 p.m., the ships carrying the brigade drop anchor, roughly one mile from the Cuban coast.
Eduardo and five of his fellow frogmen clamber aboard a smaller vessel, a rubber raft, for the final leg of their journey. At first glance, they don't much resemble an invasion force. Each of them is dressed in dark green, with tennis shoes on their feet, baseball caps on their heads. But their hands and faces are caked in black paint. They carry Colt .45 pistols and Thompson submachine guns. Other than the quiet hum of the raft's motor,
They edge towards Cuba in silence. A hundred yards out, they spot a problem. CIA intel has it that this beach should be deserted, deathly quiet and cloaked in darkness. Instead, there's a bar, lit up like a Christmas tree and full of partying Cubans. They adjust their landing spot. As soon as they do, they hit another obstacle the CIA has failed to spot. Coral reef tears through the bottom of the raft.
All six men are forced to jump into the sea. In the distance there's a faint rumbling. Then a bright light on the beach comes into view. It moves closer to the water's edge. And that's when suddenly this jeep comes and turns towards us and we started the fire. Imagine, this was the first time that I had fired at a human being.
So it was very emotional. I remember the feeling in my mouth of fear and the beginning of combat. It was very, very dramatic. The jeep neutralized, Eduardo makes it to land. He's now, theoretically, able to complete his main mission, placing lights across the beach. Soon about 70 of his comrades make it onto the sand, but their landing craft is badly damaged by the coral.
With this hazard lurking under the water, it would be reckless to summon any more men. Not until the sun comes up, at least. There's nothing to do but wait for dawn. At 3:15 AM, Castro receives a phone call. It's the news he's been anticipating for weeks. The worms are back, and they're crawling all over the Bay of Pigs. But he's puzzled. Why would the Americans deliver soldiers to such an inhospitable place? And in complete darkness?
It's almost as if they don't know what they're doing. Or perhaps it's a smoke screen. Is this landing a diversion? To draw attention from a larger invasion that will soon unfold elsewhere. It's not long before Castro is on the phone again, giving orders. His main aim is to use what air force he has left to attack the US ships looming off the Cuban coast. His instructions are unambiguous. Give the Yankees hell. As the sun comes up, visibility improves.
The coral reef is navigable. The invaders are finally able to come ashore. To the frogmen's delight, all goes smoothly, and soon they hear the roar of aircraft overhead. But these are Castro's planes. Suddenly bullets and bombs rain down on the beach. The men scatter. They take shelter where they can. Eduardo is stunned. He'd fully expected the Cuban Air Force to be in pieces, pulverized by American bombing days earlier.
But he tells himself there's no need to panic. Their backers will soon be riding over the horizon. Yet as the day wears on into evening, the Americans are nowhere to be seen. I was the radio operator of our group and they were saying the ships are coming back with ammunition and with the supplies that you need. So hang in there, hang in there. Never happened, never happened. It isn't until the following day that Eduardo is reconciled to the unthinkable.
A friend of mine, he put his arms around me and said, Eddie, we have been abandoned by the Americans. That's what it dawned on me that we really have been abandoned.
Horrible. Horrible. I say horrible because we knew full well the consequences of the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. We knew that we were either going to be executed or that we were going to have to spend many, many years in prison. What about my wife? What about my son?
you start thinking about your family and the consequences. It's very, very depressing. Had the US swooped in, at least some section of the local population might have risen up in support, but not now. In any event, dislike of Castro doesn't necessarily translate into support for Brigade 2506. Historian and author Alex von Tunzelmann.
They've just kicked out this massive dictator. They've just kicked out this idea of American influence. And now suddenly what is very clear is it's a very, very American backed force made up of the kind of former landowners that are associated with Batista is the way they see it. So actually all the kind of, you know, villagers and so on in this area massively support Fidel Castro. Massively. They do not rise up and join the invaders because rightly or wrongly, they see those people as basically traitors.
The invaders are on their own. Taking over the island is off the agenda. Now they just have to stay alive. As the evening encroaches, Eduardo helps to dig foxholes near the spot where they first landed. Somewhere to rest and recuperate. But when the next morning arrives, it's more of the same. Cuban fighter planes swarm the beach again. Bombs and bullets hammer down. In the direct line of fire is the bar.
That well-lit night spot that had given Eduardo his first ominous surprise on the morning of the invasion. But not all his comrades are as eagle-eyed. Unaware that the bar is being targeted, four men dart towards it for refuge.
I told my fellow frogmen I'm going to warn them. So I get up and start running towards them. They think I am the militia and they all start shooting at me. Thank goodness they only hit me on my knee. But I then started to yell at a password which was "Aguila Negra" "Black Eagle" "Black Eagle" and they realized that I was not the enemy but it was too late.
Wounded, Eduardo is rushed off the beach to a nearby house for treatment. Unable to move, he stays there for the rest of the day. With him are another wounded frogman, three comrades who promised they won't abandon them, and the dead bodies of several other brigade members. In the distance is the sound of artillery fire. Castro's soldiers are closing in. That afternoon they steamroller the invaders' defenses.
Over the coming hours, more than a thousand of the surviving members of Brigade 2506 are captured. Around 5:00 PM, Eduardo becomes one of them. He and another wounded comrade are put in the back of a car.
There was a militiaman with a machine gun guarding the two of us in the backseat. They put the radio on and it was Radio Swan, a CIA station, saying that Che Guevara had been killed and all type of lies. My whole world, all of what I have thought about the United States crumbled.
The militiamen would say, "Are you married?" "Yes." "You have children?" "Yes." "Well, you're either going to be executed or you're going to serve a long time in prison. So I want you to know that." At first, Eduardo is taken to Havana, but soon there's a change of plan. Eduardo is driven southeast. They're heading back to the beach. He fears the worst.
I think that they were going to exit Urus at the Bay of Peaks and say that we had died in combat. But when we arrived, the international press was already there.
were three or four hundred prisoners, and someone must have told Fidel Castro, "Look, there are too many. We cannot execute those. They're demoralized. Why don't we put them in television so that the people of Cuba can see, and they would be very apologetic and so on and so forth?"
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Quite whose idea it is to parade the captives on television is unknown.
though it sounds like pure Fidel Castro. Either way, it's central to the way Castro takes control of the narrative. Across five days in late April, numerous prisoners are interrogated live on Cuban TV. The brigade are presented less as invaders, more as victims. Patsies set up to fail by the US Empire. On the final day, Fidel himself arrives, a starring role in the series finale.
He talks one-to-one with the captives, some of whom he knows personally. Cuba, after all, is a small place. Its political and social elite minuscule. It all adds to the drama unfolding live on screen. Fidel speaks at exhausting length with his trademark flourishes. All hail the glories of the revolution. God damn the wickedness of Uncle Sam. The show is interactive. The watching public gets involved.
Telegrams from supporters offer their support for Fidel and trash the turncoats. Some prisoners stick to their guns. They refuse to denounce the invasion. But there's only going to be one winner here. As the broadcast concludes, members of the brigade give Castro what he wants. One pledges to fight against any foreign enemy who comes to tread on our soil. The entire story has been flipped on its head.
Watching at home, Carlos Herr and his family were in disbelief. And they were all saying the same thing. You know, we were left stranded. They turned their backs on us. They stabbed us in the back. They being the United States. And my parents kept saying they must have been brainwashed to say that. They must have been tortured to say that because it was unthinkable that the United States would betray these men. It turned out it was true.
Many in Washington also feel stung. There's an extraordinary moment in the CIA's war room where the CIA men are lying around, apparently white with remorse and fatigue. One held his hand across his face as if hiding. One was scratching his wrists viciously until he was bleeding. And one of them just vomited into a waste paper basket. Complete horror among the CIA, visceral horror. Could things have ever gone differently?
Was Kennedy's desire for covert regime change doomed from the start? Now, how do you take a full-fledged paramilitary operation with over 1,500 troops and make it covert? And that's the key issue. This could never have been covert. If Kennedy wanted to overthrow Castro, he should have committed, you know, open U.S. military troops. But there were clear reasons why he didn't want to take that option. In the months immediately after the failed invasion,
A detailed report is written by Lyman Kirkpatrick, Inspector General of the CIA.
This document was over 100 pages long and relied on contemporary CIA records as well as interviews with the key leaders of the invasion itself. It held the CIA accountable for not only misrepresenting the odds of success to the president of the United States, but undertaking basically an open invasion of a smaller country that was completely beyond control.
not only the capability, but the actual mission of a U.S. intelligence agency. It was so strongly worded that the director of the CIA demanded that all 20 copies of this document that had been made be returned to his office. And he ended up throwing most of them into a burn bag or a shredder and destroying them.
The planning for the Bay of Pigs will come to be known as a classic example of what psychologists call "groupthink." A collective desire for the invasion's success had blinded those involved to the defects of the plan, defects that were screamingly obvious from the start. While the inquest in Washington begins, the invaders are imprisoned for three weeks at the Havana Sports Stadium in grim, unsanitary conditions.
After the interrogations, Fidel claims that between them, the invaders own two banks, five mines, ten sugar mills, seventy factories, and 9,666 houses. This is the old Cuba, says Castro. The Cuba of entrenched wealth, greed, and inequity. The men are all handed yellow t-shirts. The symbolism isn't subtle.
These are garments for yellow worms, as Fidel has taken to calling them. Negotiations begin for the release of the prisoners. It's a protracted business, which is fine by Fidel. He is in no rush to end Kennedy's extreme embarrassment. In this clash between a US president and the leader of a tiny nation, there's no doubt who's holding all the cards. By mid-July, there are still no breakthroughs. The prisoners are taken to Principe Castle in Old Havana.
an austere, forbidding eighteenth-century fortress surrounded by a moat. They're led to a dungeon in the bowels of the castle. This is known as La Leonera, the Lion's Den. For eight months, they languish in this dark, dank space, along with their quixotic dreams of a new, or perhaps old, Cuba. It isn't until March 29th, 1962, that the men are put on trial before a special military tribunal.
The venue is the courtyard of the Principe Castle. A thousand plus men crammed in, to be tried en masse for treason. As the tribunal assembles, disorder breaks out. When the leaders of the invasion appear, the rank and file of Brigade 2506 shout and cheer. The temperature is instantly raised. Scuffles break out among the defendants and their armed guards. Order is restored, but the tone is set for the next four days.
the prisoners reject the show trial script. Outside Cuba, the trial generates immense consternation. Kennedy fears that Castro's desire to stamp out opposition and snub his nose at the United States could result in mass executions. The US president is also plagued with guilt, with formal diplomatic relations long since severed. Kennedy reaches out to Castro via the Brazilian government. His message is unambiguous.
Clemency is morally right and politically savvy. There is still the possibility of a lucrative deal to be done. Cash in exchange for the prisoner's safe return. Kennedy's message might inform Castro's next move. In the pre-dawn hours, the Cuban Prime Minister, still Castro's official title, walks through the empty silent corridors of the Principe Castle. Guards unlock a set of weighty doors and throw them open.
Fidel walks into a room where hundreds of prisoners are being held. Without forewarning, the invaders are now face to face with the man they despise. Fidel Castro comes to our cell block about 2 o'clock in the morning and says, "Good evening, fellows. How are you doing? Are they treating you well?"
As if he were one of our best friends, he spoke for about two hours with us. He says, I have good news and bad news. What can I tell you first? Well, tell us the good news. Good news, I'm not going to execute anybody.
So, bad news, you're going to be sentenced to 30 years in prison, or they're going to have to pay a ransom for each of you. We have divided the prisoners in three groups. The three leaders of the invasions, there's a price tag on them of half a million dollars. About 200 of you, you have a price tag of $100,000.
and the rest of the prisoners are going to be worth either $50,000 or $25,000. On April the 8th, the prison sentences are announced to the world, but Eduardo is free to go. The injury he suffered when shot in the knee means he is one of 60 wounded men allowed to go back to the U.S. for medical attention. A couple of weeks later, I was in the United States, embracing my wife and my son.
I was so lucky, less than a year after the Bay of Peaks invasion, I was in Miami with my wife and my son. I mean, you cannot imagine, there were more than 20,000 people waiting for us at the Miami airport, waiting for the 60,000, unbelievable. It's not until several months later, December 1962, that the remaining invaders are released.
Castro agrees to hand over the prisoners in exchange for 53 million dollars worth of food and medicine. But by that point, the drama of the Bay of Pigs has been surpassed by something much more frightening for everyone involved. Something that puts Cuba front and center in the Cold War and throws the very existence of life on Earth into the balance. But that's next time, as we explore the ins and outs of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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