5/12/17

Cuba, Part III

Some loose ends from our Cuba trip:  The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

THE BAY OF PIGS

The beautiful bay.

Is gorgeous.  A real tourist and diving attraction.  Back in 1961, the story was much different.  At the height of the Cold War, here were suddenly Communists, a mere 90 miles off the Florida coast. Late in his second term, Eisenhower and the CIA hatched a plot to invade Cuba to remove Castro and his ilk. Three months into his presidency, JFK decided to implement it. 

The plan was for this force to land on the beach at the Bay of Pigs and immediately declare themselves the official Cuban government.  Then they could invite the US to come in and help round up the revolutionaries.  To this end, the CIA recruited fighters among the Cuban exiles in Miami, a move that was soon more public than secret.  In fact, the Cubans knew so much about what was planned that they were sitting on the beach on that dark night in 1961, waiting for unsuspecting force to arrive. More than 100 of the incoming force were killed.  Of the remaining 1,200, a few were tried and shot.  Almost all the rest were eventually returned to the US in exchange for a ransom of $53 million worth of baby food and medicine.

What a mess.

I didn’t know much at the time – I was 15 and uninterested in world affairs – and even I could tell it was a dumb idea.  The Cubans have a museum there at the Bay and are very happy to show Americans around and remind them how badly things went.

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

In October of 1962, US spy planes discovered that Russia was constructing nuclear missile sites on Cuba. After much agonizing, President Kennedy called for a “quarantine”, a naval blockade of the island country, to stop the arrival of any additional military supplies. Then he demanded the removal of the missiles already there and the destruction of the sites.  And the world held its breath. 

 

I thought we were all going to die.

But we didn’t!

The Cubans knew almost nothing about this while it was happening.  It was a thing between Russia and the US.  They only learned later.  Phew.  Secretly, in exchange for Russia backing down, the US would remove its missile sites from Turkey and Italy. Our Cuban guide said the missile sites in Turkey were never removed. He was misinformed.  Ahem. The last missile was removed in the spring of 1963.

Most of this information came from the JFK presidential library site.  https://www.jfklibrary.org