Politics

Author: Richard R. Tryon and others

Forty Years Later, Cuba Still Inspired by Bay of Pigs

By Andrew Cawthorne
Reuters

This is the first in a series of four features running in the next few days to mark the 40th anniversary of the failed Cuban exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

BAY OF PIGS, Cuba (April 11) - The battle is long over, and now the only "invaders" at Cuba's Bay of Pigs are tourists lolling in the sun, or the millions of crabs crawling daily in and out of the sea during spring mating season.

Forty years after President Fidel Castro's troops crushed a U.S.-backed invasion by Cuban exiles, the beaches and swamps that formed the battleground of one of the Cold War's most emblematic conflicts are a leisure and wildlife paradise.

Not that anyone forgets what happened here.

Many foreign tourists say they are drawn to the Bay of Pigs' two main beaches -- Playa Giron and Playa Larga -- as much for its military history as its idyllic sands, shallow Caribbean waters and unspoilt marine life.

Billboards on roads into the area remind visitors: "Here is where the mercenaries reached" or advertise: "Playa Giron -- the first imperialist defeat in Latin America."

And several museums in the zone bear testimony to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces' victory within 72 hours over the 1,500 members of the doomed, CIA-trained 2506 Brigade, who failed to form a proper beachhead, let alone topple Castro, after disembarking in the early hours of April 17, 1961.

At the main museum in Playa Giron, visitors can take photos of themselves next to pieces of downed planes, or pore over an exhibit of the word "Fidel" scribbled in red, which local lore says was written in blood by a Cuban slain by the invaders.

CUBA SAYS "WAR" STILL ONGOING

Banish the thought, however, that this is all history.

For Cuba's communist leadership, the wider political war with the United States and the anti-Castro Cuban American community, was only just beginning at the Bay of Pigs.

Four decades later, that conflict is still going strong, albeit on different battlefields, and Cuba is promising its people another Bay of Pigs victory in the future.

"We may take years, perhaps quite some time, but they will continue suffering defeat after defeat and will not obtain any victories other than Pyrrhic ones," Castro told a recent rally.

He was referring to the "Battle of Ideas", a 16-month-old ideological counter-offensive of rallies and media campaigns on the island, led by Castro and intended to demonstrate the superiority of local-style socialism over Western capitalism.

It was borne out of the campaign to bring home young shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez -- whose return from Miami in mid-2000 after a 7-month custody dispute was considered by Castro as great a victory as the Bay of Pigs.

"Days away from the 40th anniversary of that unforgettable battle, where we defended the independence of our fatherland and the right to true revolution, in the battle of ideas we dare to predict that a gigantic Giron awaits the imperialists," Castro added in his speech to nearly a quarter of a million Cubans at one of the now-weekly mass rallies.

U.S. OPPOSITION MAY FIRM UNDER BUSH

Cuba, and many others throughout Latin America, name the April 17-19, 1961, battle after Playa Giron, whereas the English-speaking world generally refers to the Bay of Pigs.

Cuba hopes the anniversary of the conflict will remind its people and the world, not only of a glorious past victory, but also of ongoing U.S. "aggression" to Havana like long-standing commercial sanctions or support for internal dissidents.

President Bush, the 10th U.S. leader in the White House since Castro's 1959 revolution, has pledged to keep a tough line on Cuba with no letup to the embargo until "freedom" is gained for the islanders.

"Far from a lessening or ceasing of the U.S. administration's belligerence toward Cuba, it is being maintained and reinforced," Cuba's Vice-President Jose Ramon Fernandez, a top commander at the Bay of Pigs, told Reuters.

"The Playa Giron battle has transcended the scenario where it took place. It symbolizes an event of enormous implications, the first U.S. defeat in Latin America and the Caribbean," he said. "The event's interventionist nature continues to characterize U.S. foreign policy today."

While the Bay of Pigs battle is a source of sorrow to many Cuban Americans in Florida -- where some still cannot forgive then President John F. Kennedy for not authorizing direct military support to Brigade 2506 -- in Cuba it is generally a source of pride.

Some, however, are rolling their eyes at the inevitable political tub-thumping accompanying the anniversary.

"SICK OF POLITICS"

"It was a specific moment in Cuban history when everyone was prepared to fight for their country. It was a moment of great revolutionary effervescence," said Martha Beatriz Roque, a leading Cuban dissident.

"However, many Cubans are barely interested in the anniversary because they are so full of politics at the moment -- daily speeches and round-tables on the TV, demonstrations and so on. People are just saturated with politics," she added.

Roque, who like other Cuban dissidents wants reforms to Castro's one-party political system and freedom for jailed activists, said the world should remember the "internal war" Cuba has suffered in the last four decades due to a "totalitarian" political leadership.

"I think that before reconciliation with the United States, there should be reconciliation with the Cuban people," she said. "Here inside, we are suffering the consequences of a war worse than Giron, 40 years of suffering from this system."

At an academic conference in Cuba last month, Castro, now 74 but with a firm grip on power, met with ex-foes from the Bay of Pigs era, including veterans of the 2506 Brigade, former CIA agents, and relatives and former senior aides of Kennedy.

Fernandez, and other senior Cuban leaders and ex-soldiers, even walked the beaches side-by-side with the U.S. delegation in town for the conference.

By contrast, local dissidents are still treated like pariahs, frequently denounced as "counter-revolutionaries" and "traitors", and denied any space on state media or to form legal opposition parties.

SOBER MEMORIES

Beyond the politics, the Bay of Pigs anniversary is a time of sober reflection for the survivors. Nearly 300 soldiers, and more than 150 civilians, died during the invasion.

Cuba took more than 1,000 prisoners.

"In war, if you're not afraid, you're abnormal," 73-year- old veteran Venerando Jesus Cabrera, who fought as a militiaman at the Bay of Pigs, said as he recounted what he called "the phenomenal combat" of the battle.

"At first you are afraid, then as you start advancing, the fear disappears, and when they kill a comrade beside you, you become a hero or a martyr, because you charge forward like a madman after that," he said in an interview at his modest apartment in Havana.

Cabrera saw 21 comrades die around him.

Would he do it again?

"If tomorrow, there was an invasion here, and I couldn't lift a rifle, I'd stand up on a trench to stop the enemy bullets from reaching my comrade Fidel," he said. "Because Fidel for us is not a god. Fidel is a friend, a father, a grandfather, a brother, not only for all Cubans, but for the poor and dignified of this planet."


Commentary:

Wow! The Castro propaganda machine is working as well as ever! One would read the above account and easily conclude that:

a. The U.S. invaded Cuba forty years ago and was soundly beaten by Castro and his loyal forces.

b. One would think that the plan to free Cuba after letting and helping Castro win the revolution might have been badly planned and poorly executed because of the plan.

Nothing could be further from the truth! To understand what really happened, one has to read the words attributable to former U.S. Ambassador William D. Pawley such as these:

“On the eve of the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy directed his close adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., to draft a “White Paper” on our relations with Cuba. Spruille Braden, a former ambassador to Cuba, later characterized it as “One of the most indefensible documents I have ever seen issued by a presumably responsible official, adding: “The best that can be said for it is that it displays such ignorance and lack of understanding as to explain in considerable measure the tragic bungling of the catastrophe in Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs).”
The White Paper advocated what it called the “authentic and autonomous revolution of the Americas,” meaning that the Castro program of expropriation and socialism was free of the Soviet taint. It repeated the myth that Castro was a “traitor to the (Communist) revolution,” ignoring that his movement had been Moscow-inspired from the first. Likewise out of ignorance, the authors heaped praise on David Salvador, a notorious Communist labor leader.
As Braden pointed out: “to speak, as the White Paper does, of the ‘rapacity of the (Batista) leadership’ and damn such splendid characters as Saladrigas and hundreds of others like him, is calumny, cheap demagoguery and a despicable act, unworthy of a responsible government and foreign office.”
Even the U.S. Information Agency found this Schlesinger document “too racy and liberal.” the Harvard professor, however, was armed with White House authority. Schlesinger said that when he brought his manuscript to Kennedy, the latter was “generous in his comment, but wanted to eliminate one observation because it might be offensive to Castro.”
In their conferences with the new Commander-in-Chief, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA discovered that at every possible point on the conduct of the plan to free Cuba from the Castro regime, Kennedy whittled down the invasion operation and narrowed its prospects for success. In a desperate effort to salvage the plan, Allen Dulles told the President on March 11th:
“Don’t forget that we have a disposal problem. If we have to take these men out of Guatemala, we will have to transfer them to the United States (if the invasion plan is scrapped - WDP), and we can’t have them wandering around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.”
The point evidently made a big impression. In his last-minute decision to go ahead with the invasion Kennedy told Schlesinger that he had pared down the project to such an extent that “the cost, both military and political, of failure was now reduced to a tolerable level ... if we have to get rid of these 2500 men it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States, especially if that is where they want to go.”


Anyone who reads the above words will come to know that the celebrations in Havana now that include a parading of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the American who helped Kennedy dismantle the Eisenhower approved plan that Pawley helped create, will know that the Cubans have been forced to live with the same misery that the Russian people were forced to endure by Stalin and his successors, because mis-guided Americans thought that Castro was a patriot only out to save the people from Batista’s dictatorshi. It was one that allowed human development in a society that was more free than the one that replaced it.

Instead of joining such a phony celebration, we should be condemning those that would heap honor on Castro and his leftist cronies from the U.S.