Bay of Pigs

Bay of Pigs Paper

When John F. Kennedy became President of the United States on January 20, 1961, he inherited every policy decision that Eisenhower had yet to carry out. (1) One of these was the planned invasion of Cuba to depose Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement. The Central Intelligence Agency had recruited and trained Cuban exiles to conduct the invasion. The operation became known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion after the point that the Cuban exiles made their landing. The planning of the invasion began with the 1959 defeat of Fulgencio Batista, the former president of Cuba. The CIA believed that the use of Cuban exiles would work because of their perceived success in the 1954 coup against President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. In the 1954 coup against Arbenz, the CIA had used disgruntled Guatemalan military officers and Agency provided air support to aid in the coup. In the Bay of Pigs, there would be no such saving graces. The air and artillery support the US promised was either canceled or so delayed that Castro's forces easily repelled the invading forces. Additionally, the CIA had no understanding of the environment in which they were operating. In Guatemala, there had been differing factions to exploit within Arbenz's government. In 1961 Cuba there were no such factions left on the island. This was due to any that had opposed the 26th of July Movement fleeing the island in the wake of losing their benefactor. This meant that the invaders had no support to meet them once they arrived. This led to the spectacular failure that is now associated with the Bay of Pigs. By 1961, the CIA had grown confident enough in its abilities to conduct such an operation. However, they operated with undeserved confidence, as they had not learned how to conduct such operations in hostile nations. It is by looking at the CIA's overconfidence in their ability to pull off the Bay of Pigs Invasion that we see how Fidel Castro and the Cuban government were able to assert their sovereignty, and become a regional power despite the lopsided odds stacked against them.

The impetus for the Bay of Pigs was an established US policy against the encroachment of Communist governments into the Western hemisphere. US government officials had established this policy by two public addresses. The first was at The Tenth Inter-American Conference in March of 1954 by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (2) In his speech, Dulles told the delegates that:

This conference was shocked by the dastardly attack on members of the United States Congress by those who professed to be patriots. They may not themselves have been communists. But they had been subjected to the inflammatory influence of communism which avowedly uses extreme nationalism as one of its tools. (3)

The next attack came from the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, who warned the Soviet Union to, "stay out of this hemisphere. And don't try to start your plans and your conspiracies over here." (4) US representatives gave these speeches because they believed that the Soviet Union was attempting to establish a proxy state in Guatemala. (5) This was wholly unacceptable to the US government, because despite their purported opposition to a Communist "invasion," the US was more interested in maintaining regional hegemony. This was due to the long-established foreign policies that the US had used to legitimize its actions in Latin America. The two most significant of these were the Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary. These policies had kept US troops in almost every country in the Caribbean basin since 1898. But now the US government had an even greater supposed justification for its practices. As anthropologist Lesley Gill notes in her book, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, that the label of Communist was "an enormously elastic category that could accommodate almost any critic of the status quo." (6) And to drive this point home, John F. Kennedy made sure to drive home the point that the US government would not tolerate any changes to the status quo in his inauguration speech.

People often remember John F. Kennedy as one of the most progressive US presidents of the twentieth century. While much of this is true, he was not above playing into the realpolitik needed to be a Cold War leader. And his inauguration speech reflects this sentiment, where he gave the following challenge to the world: