The Aftermath

From WolfWikis

As perhaps the highest-profile American covert mission in Latin America to end in such disaster, the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion had long-lasting repercussions in the domestic spheres of both nations involved, as well as in the general Cold War and in subsequent covert actions of the CIA in Latin America. It is important to note here, too, that the "intense secrecy" that surrounded the operation "has also made it difficult to reconstruct [it]... because very little was put on paper."^[1]

In U.S. Domestic Politics

Within the US itself, the fiasco of the invasion resulted in a storm of recriminations and finger-pointing, and greatly tarnished the reputation of the Kennedy Administration. After the positions Kennedy had assumed during the presidential campaign, he would have appeared weak if he had backed down from supporting the invasion, and so he was forced to follow through with it. As foreign policy scholar Piero Gleijeses points out, though, this image of Kennedy backed into a corner "can be overstated: when Kennedy was first briefed, planning was rudimentary and fluid; it was under his watch that decisive changes were made."^[2] With this in mind, no doubt, Kennedy accepted responsibility for both the invasion and the fiasco that it became. As historian Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy's adviser and biographer, wrote, after the failure of the invasion "[t]he gay expectations of the Hundred Days were irrevocably over, the hour of euphoria past. Through the country and the world the debacle was producing astonishment and disillusion." ^[3] The young President, who had been in office only three months, had stumbled for the first time. Kennedy was not the sole recipient of blame, of course, nor did he take the brunt of it: Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, his deputy director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Directory of Operations Richard Bissell were all forced to hand in their resignations as a result of their role in the planning.^[4]

Kennedy explained his decision not to send in US troops to support the Cuban exiles through a variety of reasons. "Any unilateral American intervention, in the absence of an external attack upon ourselves or an ally," he told an assemblage of newspaper editors on April 20, "would have been contrary to our traditions and to our international obligations."^[5] Furthermore, an American attack on Cuban nationals would have opened the door for a Soviet attack on German nationals in Berlin.

Kennedy himself claimed that the invasion was a watershed in his presidency, and that while it was his first outright failure, "the hope and confidence inspired by the [previous] ninety days were entirely sufficient to absorb this error, if it were not repeated."^[6] To that end, he drew two often-referenced lessons from the Cuban debacle. First was to never rely solely on the advice of entrenched "experts" and to instead value the input of people he was personally close to, like his brother or Richard Goodwin. Second, he reorganized his relationship with his staff, making it clear that he was to be given unfettered advice, in an attempt to combat the phenomenon that historian Piero Gleijeses referred to as "ships passing in the night,"^[7] whereby different governmental agencies miscommunicated with one another while assuming that each would be bound by a variety of rules or expectations to doing differently from what they insisted that they would. ^[8]

The Cold War

President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev

Historian Alyaz Husain suggests that, in contrast to Eisenhower, Kennedy believed that the problems of "Cold War flashpoints" in Cuba and Berlin could not be viewed as separate from one another, and that this belief led to Kennedy's insistence on "Cuba's strategic value in the context of the larger Cold War."^[9] This, it would seem, became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the invasion served to drive Castro closer than ever to the Soviet sphere of influence. The most commonly cited reason for the failure of the invasion is the lack of US air support and, by extension, US forces in general. As Kennedy explained to former Vice President Nixon immediately after the bombing, "Walter Lippmann, the columnist, who had recently interviewed Khrushchev, had told [Kennedy] that the ill-tempered Soviet Premier was feeling 'very cocky.' [Kennedy] told Nixon, 'There is a good chance that, if we move on Cuba, Khrushchev will move on Berlin. I just don't think we can take the risk.'"^[10]

In response to the invasion, the Soviet ambassador informed the Kennedy administration that the USSR would "extend to the Cuban people and its government all the necessary aid for the repulse of the armed attack on Cuba." Like the US, the Soviets would supply arms and guidance to their ideological brethren in this struggle, but not manpower.^[11]

This would change a year and a half later during the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the most concrete outcome of the hostilities that began escalating prior to the invasion. On the day of the invasion, Castro had referred to the Cuban revolution as being socialist in character for the first time, and in December that year he announced that he was a Marxist-Leninist.^[12] Khrushchev, meanwhile, initiated the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, in at least some degree in reaction to the show of American ineffectualness in Cuba. As tensions between East and West continued to rise, the Soviets began in July of 1962 to construct missile bases in Cuba, in order to protect their newfound ally. Schlessinger, among others, asserts that Moscow had "calculated that the United States, with the Bay of Pigs still in the world's recollection, could not convincingly object to Castro's taking defensive precautions against another invasion." ^[13] This episode, perhaps the closest the Cold War came to unleashing nuclear annihilation on the world, can be intimately linked to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The U.S. and Latin America

Following on the success of the CIA's interventions in Guatemala during Operation PBSUCCESS, the disaster at the Bay of Pigs could be expected to have brought about a shift in the way that the Agency and the larger government approached covert operations in Latin America. Substantively, this was largely not the case, but the expectations behind operations underwent a large shift as a result of Kennedy's views during the Bay of Pigs. The United States would continue acting to undermine Leftist regimes or revolutions in Latin America, as for example in Nicaragua and Bolivia, but the expectation of actual US military support was not present as it was at the Bay of Pigs.

As Gleijeses has it, the success in Guatemala "reinforced the ethnocentrism that was rooted in the previous six decades of US relations with the region" and led to the inclusion of many of the same key players in the Cuban operation.^[14] The disaster at the Bay of Pigs, though, did not undermine such ethnocentric views, but instead drove home to the administration the importance of combating communism in the hemisphere. To quote Gleijeses again: "The lesson Kennedy drew from the Bay of Pigs was not that he should talk to Castro, but that he should intensify his efforts to overthrow him."^[15] This is in direct contrast to the reactions of the Cubans, who simultaneously proclaimed their allegiance to Marxism-Leninism as a result of the invasion but also extended something of an olive branch to the US. Che Guevara, for example, told Kennedy's representative Richard Goodwin that they wanted "a Modus vivendi" with the US wherein Cuba would "agree not to make any political alliance with the East-- although this would not affect their natural sympathies." This was a reasonable offer, Guevara thought, because the Kennedy administration "had public opinion to worry about whereas he could accept anything without worrying about public opinion."^[16]

After the invasion, the Kennedy administration pursued a less confrontational means of removing Castro from power, initiating the CIA Operation Mongoose to remove Castro from power by any means necessary and/or to overthrow his regime. Husain, for one, believes that this determination was the result of a "shared preoccupation" that lodged itself in the mind of the Kennedy brothers, becoming a "nearly pathological sense of determination" for an aggressive policy regarding Castro.^[17] This, he suggests, was due not only to the personal vendetta that the brothers felt as result of the first defeat the administration had suffered, but also to their vision of the interconnectedness of the Cold War struggle, and continued until the culmination of Cuban-American hostilities in the Missile Crisis. The long-running embargo against Cuba, which continues to this day to deny Americans access to Cuban cigars and Cuba access to economic well-being, was begun in February 1962, as part of the ongoing hostilities between the two nations.

Of the roughly 1,500 Cuban exiles involved in the invasion, 114 died and 1,189 were captured. Those captured were initially questioned in the Sports Palace in Havana, where they were questioned under a sign that read "Fatherland or Death. We Won." Cuba initially demanded a $62 million ransom for the men, but after 20 months of captivity, they were released in return for a shipment of drugs and food valued at $53 million.^[18] Of the loyalist Cubans involved in the battle, on the other hand, data is sketchy at best, but estimates seem to range from 4,000 to 5,000 killed.

Latin American Domestic Politics

Castro at a celebration of the anniversary of the failed invasion

Within Cuba, the invasion served greatly to shore up Castro's regime. In their meeting a few months after the invasion, Castro's close associate Ernesto "Che" Guevara told Richard Goodwin "he wanted to thank us very much for the invasion-- that it had been a great political victory for them-- enabled them to consolidate-- and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal."^[19] The people of Cuba, far from rising up against Castro as the CIA had planned or hoped, responded as a people whose sovereignty had been violated. Of course, the fact that Castro rounded up several thousand people he considered possible threats to his regime didn't hurt either. As historian Nita Manitzas analyzed it, "[a]t the Bay of Pigs and in the ensuing periods of isolation, embargo, scarcity, and discomfort, the bulk of the Cuban population responded as a national citizenry," and also that "the permanent presence of a menacing, hostile power only ninety miles away helped reinforce the shared sense of national purpose and empathy among the island's populace."^[20]

Furthermore, not only did the invasion give Castro an excuse to round up and imprison dissidents, but it proved his belief that the United States viewed his regime in an aggressive manner, and, because of his victory, strengthened his ideological positions. In a television broadcast the day after the invasion, Castro proclaimed "Imperialism examines geography, analyzes the number of cannons, of planes, of tanks, the positions. The revolutionary examines the social composition of the population. The imperialists don't give a damn about how the population there thinks or feels."^[21]

The initial training of around 600 of the Cuban refugee invasion force by US Special Forces teams had taken place in Retalhuleu, Guatemala.^[22] This was later one instigation among others for a revolt by nationalist officers of the Guatemalan army, who were angered by what they saw as a usurpation of the sovereignty of their nation by the US. The invasion also provided Castro and his compatriots with much of the cachet that they called upon in their subsequent "exporting" of revolution to other nations in Latin America. Most notable of these failed experiments is the 1967 revolution in Bolivia, which claimed the life of Che Guevara, through the efforts of both Bolivian counterrevolutionaries and the CIA.

Annotated Bibliography

External Links

[Charlie Rose Show, 4-13-2001] Arthur Schlesinger, archivist Peter Kornbluh, and invasion veteran Alfredo Duran discuss the 40th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

References