Besieged Beachhead : The Cold War Battle for Cuba at the Bay of Pigs

On New Year’s Day 1959, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement overthrew the ruling regime in Cuba, bringing the Cold War to the United States’ doorstep and setting the island nation and its superpower neighbor on a collision course. The battle came in April 1961 on the southern coast of Cuba at the Bahía de los Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. In a minute-by-minute chronicle that is as even-handed as it is dramatic, J. J. Valdés gets to the heart of this Cold War debacle, from the beaches of Cuba to the corridors of power in Washington and Havana.

Long entangled in Cuba’s economy and politics, the United States watched Castro’s revolution carefully and grew wary as Castro drew closer to the Soviet Union. Within a few months, the CIA, with President Dwight Eisenhower’s approval, was recruiting and training Cuban exiles for a paramilitary force to topple Castro. By early 1961, when John F. Kennedy became president after campaigning on a hard line on Cuba, the CIA plan had taken on a life of its own, and policymakers believed the window for action was closing. Kennedy gave the go-ahead, but not before making changes that limited the U.S.’s involvement and weakened the invasion.

Early on April 17, 1961, 1,400 men of Brigade 2506—Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala—began landing at the Bay of Pigs, just over 100 miles southeast of Havana. Nearly everything went wrong. Engines failed. Coral reefs snarled landing craft. Castro’s planes destroyed ships carrying vital ammunition and medical supplies. The weather turned poor. The parachute drops were widely dispersed. Khrushchev rattled the nuclear saber, spooking Kennedy from ordering assistance he was reluctant to provide anyway. Over the course of three days, the Brigade clawed inland, gaining a few toeholds, but the exiles—outnumbered and undersupported —were no match for the 20,000 men Castro, who assumed personal command of the defense, massed near the beachhead, armed with a staggering quantity of Soviet weaponry. By April 19, the invasion had failed, its 1,200 survivors taken prisoner. What had been intended as a Cold War masterstroke ended in embarrassment. The Bay of Pigs disaster would deeply influence the Cuban Missile Crisis eighteen months later and shape U.S.-Cuba relations up until the present.

Decades in the making, Bay of Pigs draws from English and Spanish sources in the United States and Cuba to tell this story as it has never been told before, shedding light on events that have been shrouded in secrecy, myth, and propaganda for six decades.