Fernando Marquet - Bay of Pigs Survivor and Cuban refugee

  A number of Cuban exiled patriots tried to take back the country from Castro’s communist-supported dictatorship.  They naively, as it turned out, expected their attack would promote a wave of anti-Castro sentiment that would result in popular support for their invasion and the overthrow of Fidel Castro.

  But because of poor planning, poor intelligence and lack of anticipated U. S. air support, the attack was a disastrous failure.  Within three days all of the one thousand invaders had been captured or had surrendered.  Most were placed in jails, where some were ransomed or some, like Fernando, managed to escape and make their perilous way back to the States.

  As background to this moment in history, after January 1, 1959, when Castro overthrew Battista’s corrupt regime, he was popular at first, and he did much to raise the health standards and the literacy rate.  But he confiscated property and nationalized industries and quickly lost the support of the wealthy and middle classes. He put dissidents in jail or executed them, suppressed free speech and free elections and took away the democratic freedoms Cuba had enjoyed.

   By 1960 President Eisenhower invoked economic sanctions against Cuba and cut off diplomatic ties.  He also encouraged the CIA’s training of a force of about one thousand Cuban exiles who wanted to invade their homeland in the hope of freeing it.  President John Kennedy went further, in authorizing the attack.

  But Castro, in Havana which is only 90 miles from the southern coast of Florida, had anticipated the attack, and had prepared for it.  The army had mobilized and cleared the streets so the populace was unable to rise up.  The army had 8,000 troops defending the bay against the 1,000 troops invading.

   For Cuba, this meant fifty more years of Castro’s regime, and counting.  The effect of this failure for the United States was an embarrassing loss of respect for our foreign policy in the Cold War. The discovery eighteen months later by our U2 spy plane, that the Russians had put missiles in silos in Cuba, showed how little respect the USSR had for US military might.

  It took a strategic stand-off between Kennedy and Khrushchev, with the threat of nuclear retaliation, to force the issue.  Russia was the one to blink first, and withdrew their missiles.  It is one of the big “if’s” of history, if the Bay of Pigs invasion had turned out differently.