transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] Hello, and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avirgan. Welcome back to 50 Weeks That Shaped America, Week 16. This is part two of our look at the bungled invasion of Cuba, aka the Bay of Pigs fiasco. To reset, we are in April 14th of 1961. Kennedy has been president for a couple of months now, and he is meddling a little bit in this plan. The CIA has been working on for a good, better part of a year at this point to go in, attack Cuba, and try and spark a populist uprising. We will get into how that goes down over the days of April 15th, 16th, and 17th. But here, as always, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt and Kellie Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Speaker 2:
[00:52] Hello, Jody. Hey there.

Speaker 1:
[00:54] All right. Kennedy has said eight planes instead of 16. You can do it with that. And on April 15th, 1961, the plan goes into action. So eight planes hit three Cuban airfields. They knock out about half of Castro's air defenses, which is not enough. And they knock out half and they used half the number of planes. So maybe if they'd used the full number of planes that the CIA had recommended, they would have been able to really buy themselves some cover here. One of the really fascinating tidbits here is we mentioned this last episode. We talked a lot about this last episode. The idea here was not to frame this as a US invasion. The whole idea here was to make it seem like and really spark an internal Cuban uprising. So on the morning of April 16th, a bullet-riddled plane lands at the Miami Airport, and the pilots come out and they gather the press around them, and they proclaim that they are defected Cuban fighter pilots who have been so swept up in this initial spark that they've defected from Cuba, and have blown their planes to Miami, and are here for the cause to fight against Castro. Reporters, to their credit, kind of look around and look at the plane, and they say, man, that looks like a really fresh paint job on that plane there that says Cuba on the side of it. And wait a minute, don't Castro's planes have plastic noses, and this one is solid metal? You know, Castro eventually would hear, would get wind of this and say, even Hollywood wouldn't try to film such a story with such awful facts at the heart of it. But it's a nice little emblematic moment of how sloppy and slapdash this attempt was.

Speaker 3:
[02:29] Yes, that is just like, I can't think of, I mean, shout out to the journalists who were like, wait a second. But there is something about like how the United States keeps trying to create this narrative, this propaganda that like, it's all going to fall apart, it's all terrible, people are leaving, it's bad, bad, bad. And they just can't get that to stick.

Speaker 2:
[02:54] And Kellie, they would do it for the next 60 years. Yeah, that's true. It's like, I think they're still saying it.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[07:47] It reminds me of the television show Lost, where it's just like everything is unnecessarily cryptic and you try to like, you could just look. The invasion has already started. You can just say what you're going to say.

Speaker 3:
[07:59] Because it sounds very Dr. Seuss to me. It's giving red fish, blue fish.

Speaker 4:
[08:04] One fish, two fish.

Speaker 3:
[08:05] Red fish, blue fish.

Speaker 1:
[08:08] There is a great book that I think I read in high school called The Fish is Red, which is a history of US meddling in Cuba. It goes through the whole history of starting with Bay of Pigs. But then, as we know, over the decades, they would send Castro cigars laced with LSD, and then he would write a note back being like, thank you, send me more cigars. They had this whole plot to make his beard fall out because they thought the beard was the source of his power. Anyway, this is The Fish is Red. Go check out my book. So much shenanigans over the years. But basically, let's just put it bluntly, nobody rises up within Cuba. Kennedy, I think, kind of sees that this is not going the way that they were hoping. Even though the formal invasion is planned for the next day, at 9:30 PM, he actually cancels the next day's follow up airstrikes. Their cover story is blown. He doesn't want to make it worse. The CIA protested like, look, we're doing this thing, let's move ahead. But Kennedy just basically is like, no, no more airstrikes and tries to send message to Nicaragua where this is all being staged to say, let's call this off, let's cool our jets, literally. The pilots are already on the runway and already about to take off and they don't get the message. So the planes go back in the air, things are still forging ahead. We mentioned last time that Kennedy had done a lot of tweaking along the edges of this plan in the weeks leading up to it. He was also the one who really pushed towards an overnight dawn invasion. So all of this is starting to go over the course of the evening of the 16th into early dawn of April 17th. So at 1 a.m. April 17th, Brigade 2506, again named after their fallen comrade, starting with number 2500, they hit the water and the first problem they encounter is that seaweed in those spy photos is actually coral. The ships all run aground a hundred yards offshore and so the men have to jump out and try and make their way through the water. Some reports are like shark-infested water, shark-infested, I just feel like, I don't know. Corals enough, it's fine. Corals enough.

Speaker 3:
[10:09] It feels very Hollywood.

Speaker 1:
[10:10] People love to say shark-infested. But yeah, their weapons are getting wet, their radios are getting wet, their water logged. I mean, you know, by the time they reach the beach, and many of them don't, it is not prime fighting conditions. Exactly. By dawn, basically everything is breaking down. Castro knows what's happening. He still has some air defenses. They start to arrive, Cuban planes reach the beach, and they start to sink some of the ships. The Rio Escondido, which is the biggest supply ship, is loaded with explosives and airplane fuel, and it takes a direct hit and just explodes in the middle of this bay. CIA freaks out. They order the remaining ships to pull back to international waters. The commander on the ground, Pepe San Ramon, gets on the radio and says, don't desert us, don't desert us. But the ships keep backing away, backing away. Meanwhile, back in Washington, they're just watching this play out. They're kind of helpless. Not much they can do. April 18th, next day, at noon, Kennedy gets a message from an advisor that basically says, the Cuban armed forces are stronger. The popular response is weaker. Our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped. It's a pretty bad trifecta of updates. Kennedy turns to a senator at a congressional reception that night and goes, the shit has hit the fan. So, there you go.

Speaker 3:
[11:30] It's an understatement.

Speaker 1:
[11:32] The remaining brigade holds the beach for two days, waiting either for help from the CIA and these boats that have retreated or for this popular uprising that they were promised, and neither of those arrives. By the time they started to get into April 19th, they're left with just nothing but bad choices. So first, they're like, well, okay, Kennedy, what do you want to do? Do you want to do like a full on military invasion to go get our troops and sort of finish the job? He says no. He says one hour of jet cover from 630 a.m. to 730 a.m. on the morning of April 19th, in order to, you know, shore up what we've done, get our forces out, try and sort of like rescue what we can. So the jets are flown by the Alabama Air National Guard. These are Americans now, American forces, not Cubans. You know, all along, the US was able to tell itself a story. They're like, oh, we're actually just supporting Cubans. We've got Cubans at the heart of this. There's a Cuban dissidence. Now all of a sudden, there are American forces flying in to provide this cover. They arrive an hour late, in part because there's a time zone confusion between Nicaragua and Cuba.

Speaker 3:
[12:33] It's like, come on, man.

Speaker 1:
[12:35] A few are shot down. Castro, you know, he parades some of the American bodies for international press. He makes a big show of this. And, you know, Alan Dulles is talking to Nixon that night and says, quote unquote, everything is lost. The final tally is 89 people killed, almost 1,200 people taken prisoner. Basically all of them. Yeah, all the ones who made it to the shore. A lot didn't make it to shore. Castro doesn't execute them. He holds them for 20 months. And, you know, to jump ahead a little bit, he eventually then trades them back for it turns into a hostage crisis. He trades them back for fifty three million dollars in food and medicine. So that is the bungling. I don't know if there's any details there that pop out of you or anything else you want to talk about. And then I do want to turn a little bit to you know, this means in the months ahead and then obviously in the decades ahead.

Speaker 2:
[13:27] I mean, you've got the details. These people can't fly, they can't read a timetable. The US and I think most importantly, like, the US had promised those rebels something that they did not deliver on. They sent them out there with nothing, a little training and bad intel and no air cover. It's just like, I would not be surprised if the folks who ended up being taken hostage didn't feel betrayed by the United States for not following through on their commitments.

Speaker 3:
[14:01] Yeah. And I sometimes wonder, like, what is at the heart of that? Is that like American hubris? You know, this idea that it shouldn't take much, you know? Sure, we get a few guys, we go in. Or is it, you know, like, I'm I'm I don't know if America has either overestimated its power or underestimated Cuba or if it's just a combination of, like, you know, indecision and ill planning. There's so many things that go into making this a disaster. But yeah, it doesn't get better after this. That's for sure.

Speaker 2:
[14:34] The US has definitely gotten bamboozled many times by people saying that they're like the leaders of the resistance.

Speaker 5:
[14:41] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[14:41] And then believing what they want to believe when those people talk to them.

Speaker 5:
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Speaker 1:
[17:03] OK, we've hinted at it a little bit, but I do want to sort of go back to the second half of 1961 and going forward. You know, what is, as you see it, Kennedy's takeaway from this and how does it affect the rest of his time in office?

Speaker 3:
[17:19] I mean, I would say for Kennedy, he probably feels less confident in whose advice he can take. Because I feel like for Schlesinger's part, he was giving him solid advice and he wasn't taking it. And then for all the other military leaders and for all the efforts of the CIA, he still implemented their plans, but he still didn't take up all of it. You know, he still kept cutting them short. And so to me, there's something about Kennedy's indecision or inability to be able to have discernment and make like strategic decisions on his own or with the expertise of people who really know that really revealed itself in this moment.

Speaker 2:
[18:10] And in a lot of ways, Kellie, there's a battle of experts, right? On the one hand, he has like Ted Swarson and his brother Bobby Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger and they have a particular kind of experience. But then you have these CIA leaders and generals and things who are giving him other kinds of advice and he is relying on their military experience and he becomes very shy of relying too much on those kinds of experts. He's definitely not going to be a fan of CIA schemes going forward.

Speaker 1:
[18:38] I mean, he tells Schlesinger, I have learned one thing from this business and that is we have to deal with the CIA. No one has dealt with the CIA, which is not the worst takeaway, maybe not the best way to get to that lesson.

Speaker 2:
[18:50] But also, I mean, I will say in Kennedy's, because I've been pretty hard on Kennedy during this, in Kennedy's defense, after the Bay of Pigs, he comes on, he takes responsibility. He says, look, essentially, the buck stops here. I'm the person on who this responsibility falls. And it is four months into his presidency, like a big black mark, like the thing against Kennedy, the knock on Kennedy was he was so young and so inexperienced and he comes in and is part of this big mess in the first few months of his presidency. And his inner circle really shrinks after this because he's like, man, I can't.

Speaker 1:
[19:26] Right. And his brother seems to have a much more trusted role in the wake of all this as well, which obviously would have all sorts of implications for civil rights and so forth. That's not to say that Kennedy gives up on the idea of overthrown Castro. I mean, another part of this story is that, like, within weeks, you know, they're right kind of back at it. I mean, they definitely they do a, you know, they do an investigation, congressional investigation. They conclude that, like, this should have been transferred to the Defense Department in November of 60. The CIA was way in over its head. But, you know, they also come out of that. And Kennedy's like, we cannot allow Castro to be a president long term. He wants to kind of in many ways make up for the failed invasion in January of 62. He says the top priority of the US government, all else is secondary. No time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared in the goal of removing, of deposing Castro. There was another operation, Operation Mongoose, that only many years later was revealed. That was kind of just as disastrous. But you know, they're kicking around plans to do full scale invasions. All the while, we should add, denying that they were involved in the Bay of Pigs at all. Up until the nineties, the US government did not admit that they were involved in the Bay of Pigs. Which again, to reiterate, like Castro is talking about it, the New York Times is reporting about it. People are like leaking to the press, like everyone kind of knew that this scheme was happening. But nevertheless, they formally deny it. Okay, so I just want to go through the list of reaction and fallout. So we have the lessons that Kennedy sort of learns internally. What are the lessons that Russia learns or what does Russia play into this? This is ostensibly all about the domino theory and the geopolitics of it all. We mentioned in the first episode that Russia and Cuba weren't super-duper close in this moment, that actually maybe Russia wanted Cuba more than Cuba needed Russia. But this seems to push both of them actually closer to each other than before.

Speaker 2:
[21:21] Well, the Soviet Union sees that Kennedy is a little wobbly and that the US is focused on trying to depose Castro. And so now the Soviet Union has a reason to want to shore up Castro. Castro has a reason to want to team up with the Soviet Union. And this is going to lead to what is basically the peak conflict of the Cold War, which is the Cuban Missile Crisis, that this kind of relentless focus on Cuba is what ultimately then leads the Soviet Union to put missiles in Cuba. And that's a story for another day, but it is one of the closest moments the world came to nuclear war as a standoff between the two. And I'm not sure, I mean, it's hard to do counterfactuals. Would that have happened without the Bay of Pigs? It's hard to say, but the Bay of Pigs does not help.

Speaker 1:
[22:13] Does it not help with Cuba feeling like it's more, it's like a critical pawn piece?

Speaker 2:
[22:20] That it's a critical pawn piece, it's clear to the Soviet Union how important Cuba is to the United States and how under threat Cuba is. Yeah. And so the Soviet Union understands there's an opportunity there to make an alliance and to grow closer to Castro.

Speaker 3:
[22:38] And I talked earlier about how Russia really needed Cuba. Cuba didn't necessarily need Russia. That changes after The Bay of Pigs. We're now, you know, Cuba is much more like, hey, let's make this alliance happen. Because if we're going to continue to get bombarded by…

Speaker 1:
[22:56] We have a threat in our backyard.

Speaker 3:
[22:57] Yeah. Yeah. Then we're going to need some allies. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[23:01] Yeah. You know, the counter-intuitive, obviously, you mentioned that just twelve, what, fourteen months later we get the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is a argument to be made, and I've heard people make this. I think Malcolm Gladwell, when he did a thing on the Cuban Missile Crisis, did this, you know, that actually the Bay of Pigs taught Kennedy a lesson in resistance and patience, and that if he hadn't learned that lesson in April of 61, then maybe he wouldn't have been as cautious in October of 62 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was, in the end, you know, he was listening to his advisors. He was trying to gather, see the forest for the trees. He wasn't sending people in. I don't know what you buy of that. We don't need to fully engage with that, but it is a sort of interesting provocation.

Speaker 2:
[23:50] It was my problem, it was counterfactual. If Kennedy was innately more patient and didn't do the Bay of Pigs, then he would have been brasher when it came to the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Speaker 3:
[24:01] That's the question.

Speaker 2:
[24:03] That's the idea.

Speaker 3:
[24:04] That he would have learned a lesson about not being brash.

Speaker 2:
[24:08] That's because he would have been a different person who wouldn't have been brash in the first place. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1:
[24:14] Yeah, I will point out, of course, that of the many conspiracy theories around Kennedy's death, one is that the CIA did not like him. And as we see here, they have a real falling out in the wake of this. And so I think this is in large part the origin story of that particular conspiracy theory. And it is true. The CIA and Kennedy did not get along throughout all of this, even though he has to continue to rely on them to do some, to do some meddling. Okay. As we start to wrap up and before we do the kind of, should this be a plaque, should this be a plaque, you know, where's the plaque, et cetera, et cetera. Let's take the big sweeping view because, you know, I think listeners have clearly, as we've described all of these ill thought out plans, this reliance on dissidents, this idea that, you know, we're fighting this righteous cause, that it will be a lot easier. You know, we're hearing the parallels over and over and over. And so, you know, my take is largely speaking, I don't think we learned that big lesson coming out of this. I mean, not that many years later. We're going into Vietnam and we are largely charging in in the same way and thinking that like a bunch of, a bunch of guys in a room with a bunch of maps and a bunch of toys can sort of make it happen.

Speaker 2:
[25:22] The bigger lesson that the US does not learn, given that we are doing this in Iran right now, regime change isn't easy.

Speaker 7:
[25:31] No.

Speaker 2:
[25:31] And I'm not sure we have a ton of examples of it working.

Speaker 1:
[25:34] No.

Speaker 2:
[25:35] You know, this is a case where the, actually like the regime change doesn't happen. Like the decapitation that the US tries for, again, 50 years, they never, they never do it. But even if they had, that's the head is not the body. Like, A, you don't know which leader comes next, but you also don't know what that instability releases. You don't like, you don't know what the people in that country want. And you don't have control over all of those forces. That CIA dream of the people rising up and becoming a pro-American country, like it is a fantasy. And there's so much of these CIA programs, and just like US policy in general over the course of the Cold War, but also today that is purely fantasy driven. And that is no way to run a country because it's how you get bogged down in these wars and how you destabilize huge regions of the world.

Speaker 3:
[26:38] Oh my gosh. I mean, Congo is the perfect example of that. I think of the CIA, you know, assassinating Patrice Lumumba and then bringing in Mbutu after that. And just like you get decades of dictatorship and a fallen state, and none of it leads to anything progressive. It's just more chaos after more chaos.

Speaker 1:
[27:01] I keep coming back to this kind of combination of very high-minded, idealistic, kind of almost apocalyptic notions of kind of the fight that we're in, in this case, communists versus anti-communism. And then that married with like very tactical, like a bunch of guys with a bunch of money and a bunch of toys, and the sort of free rein to like muck things up. And it's worth pointing out, well, this whole story started with Eisenhower as president. The last thing Eisenhower does is he's leaving office as he warns about the military industrial complex. And there is so much of this, is that when you have all these tools at your disposal, and you have all this, you know, all this free rein, you're going to use it. You're going to use it. You're going to go find a reason to use your weapons.

Speaker 3:
[27:50] A hammer will always find a nail, yes.

Speaker 2:
[27:53] And just as a reminder, because this is true in all the time periods that follow as well, all of those toys that are being used abroad also get used at home.

Speaker 3:
[28:02] Of course.

Speaker 2:
[28:02] Your civil liberties at home are damaged by this just as much as these regimes are abroad.

Speaker 3:
[28:08] Yeah. All right.

Speaker 1:
[28:09] Well, let's turn to our final sort of set of questions here. I guess we'll start with, should this be a movie or TV show? Surprisingly, very little actually out there about this.

Speaker 3:
[28:18] One thing this can't be is a movie. I will say that because it's so botched and such a disaster. And I feel like a lot of these movies, your James Bond or your CIA or your sort of military industrial complex films, they are like Hollywood commercials for the Marines and the Navy or whatever. Like there are these big PR campaigns where people are like, oh, that's great. Let me go sign up. You know, like you can't have a movie like this that just looks like the United States is inept.

Speaker 2:
[28:50] It's the GOAT. Yeah, yeah. Not the greatest of all time, but like the GOAT.

Speaker 1:
[28:56] Yeah, the embarrassing one. But here's the way I think the movie could happen. So you can't make the movie where Kennedy's the hero and the CIA guys are the hero who are watching this thing. You can't make a movie where Castro is the hero because you can't make that for a US audience. But what about the dissidents? Could your protagonist be one of these true believer Cuban dissidents in Florida who gets, you know, called to action and then gets caught up in this awful hairbrained scheme? And he's the one who's then stranded on the beach as he watches his boat explode and drift away. He's the one who has to go through the coral. He's the one that gets sold out by all sides. There's maybe a middle path there where you could turn that into a movie. I don't know if I want to see that either.

Speaker 3:
[29:35] It absolutely has all the elements. Desperate and dismal.

Speaker 2:
[29:37] But Kellie, let me sell it to you this way. Hostage for 20 months. Let's Jody pick the wrong hero. What if the historian was the hero? Oh yes, Schlesinger. Cassandra in the middle of it all. Schlesinger for the win. None of the historians is heroes in movies.

Speaker 1:
[29:51] Very different movie. Far fewer explosions. Now I would watch that.

Speaker 3:
[29:54] Schlesinger all day.

Speaker 1:
[29:55] Fair enough. Maybe we'll have a historian at the heart of the miniseries. Plaques. There is an underwater plaque put up by Cuba about some of the Cubans who were killed. But it's like if you go diving in the coral reef, you'll see that plaque.

Speaker 2:
[30:07] That's amazing. We need a list of all the underwater plaques. I'm into that.

Speaker 3:
[30:11] Yeah, and sculptures too. There's some underwater sculptures that are pretty cool.

Speaker 1:
[30:14] There isn't like a little plaque in Nicaragua that says, this is where they misread the time zones and flew the planes an hour later, anything like that.

Speaker 2:
[30:22] But not a lot of US plaques. No. I think these days. But what about Miami? Does Miami not have to the noble dissidents?

Speaker 1:
[30:30] Yes, I'm sure they do. I wouldn't be surprised if the bar where these dissidents drank and cooked up these schemes is still hell of a ground.

Speaker 2:
[30:38] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[30:38] Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[30:39] Drinking a Cuba Libre and reading plaques.

Speaker 1:
[30:43] All right. Well, listeners, if you're in Miami, let us know how much Bay of Pigs stuff there is floating around there, or if people just prefer not to talk about that incident. But I'm glad we talked about it.

Speaker 2:
[30:53] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[30:54] That was very interesting. Coming up next to our series, a very different time, a very different story. But we will go to the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. Then we will talk about Plessy versus Ferguson and Jim Crow. We're going to talk about the Hard Hat Riot. We've got a bunch of stuff coming down the pike, including a special that we're very excited about heading into June. I'll tell you all about in the coming weeks. But a reminder that you can be a subscriber, a paying subscriber at our newsletter, and you will get all of these episodes early and ad free. Also a reminder that we have a merch store with a bunch of semi-quincentennial merch up and running. You can find a link to that at our website, thisdaypod.com. Nicole Hemmer, thanks to you as always.

Speaker 2:
[31:32] Thank you, Jody.

Speaker 1:
[31:33] And Kellie Carter Jackson, thanks to you.

Speaker 2:
[31:35] My pleasure.

Speaker 1:
[31:40] This Day is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent artist produced listener supported podcasts. Don't forget to sign up for our America 250 Watch newsletter. Every Thursday, you'll get exclusive access to analysis and information about the semi-quincentennial commentary from our team and a list of fascinating things that happened that week throughout history. And on Sundays, for our paid subscribers, you get early ad-free access to our 50 Weeks That Shaped America series plus other bonus conversations throughout the year. Join in, find out lots more, support the show at thisdaypod.com. You can also follow This Day Pod on Instagram, Blue Sky and on YouTube. Get in touch with ideas or feedback at thisdaypod.gmail.com. Jacob Feldman is our researcher, Khawla Nakua does our transcripts. Special thanks to Audrey Mardavich, Yuri Losordo and everyone at Radiotopia. Extra special thanks to you for listening, subscribing, rating and reviewing and telling others about the show. My name is Jody Avirgan. We'll see you soon.

Speaker 6:
[33:13] This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

Speaker 7:
[33:43] Radiotopia, from PRX.