BAY OF PIGS

Bay of Pigs

Bay of Pigs

Introduction

The Bay of Pigs invasion was a US designed and supported plan to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro Ruz. Amid growing US-Cuban tensions over the direction of the Cuban revolution, in March 1960, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) proposal to train Cuban exiles in Guatemala for an invasion of the island nation. The CIA anticipated that early successes in the invasion would ignite an internal popular uprising that would topple Castro. This proved to be incorrect (Blight & Kornbluh, 1998).

Discussion and Analysis

Newly elected President John F. Kennedy learned of the plan shortly after his election in November 1960. He came to office determined that Castro be removed from office for betraying the ideals of the revolution, which had brought an end to Fulgencio Zaldivar's dictatorship in 1959 and, with it, Cuba's old order. In response to Kennedy's request for an assessment of the plan, on March 19, 1960, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported that it could be carried out without U.S. public involvement but that its success depended on that of the anticipated uprisings inside Cuba. The presidential adviser on Latin American affairs, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, cautioned against the plan. They did not think the United States could escape identification with the invasion and that the plan would therefore have a disastrous effect on U.S. relations with Latin America (Higgins, 1989).

The Cuban brigade landed at the Bay of Pigs (Bahia de Cochinos) in the early morning of April 17, 1961, five days after departing by ship from Puerto Cabazes, Nicaragua. Without additional supplies or air cover, some 1,200 soldiers of the invading force surrendered to Castro's army within two days. Another 114 were killed. At the time, several reasons were given for the invasion's failure. Castro had long anticipated an attack, and he, like others, had witnessed the brigade being trained in Guatemala on U.S. television newscasts. On February 1961, CBS news learned about the training site and broadcast pictures of it on Walter Cronkite's evening news. Additionally, his spies had infiltrated the Cuban community in Miami, who spoke about the plan. In response, Castro rounded up and interned known dissidents across Cuba, thereby limiting the possibility of an internal uprising. On the military side, two diversionary landings scheduled for April 14 and 15 had to be aborted because of bad weather, and an exiled pilot had landed his damaged aircraft at Homestead, Florida, the day before the invasion, where he announced that he and others had strafed Castro's military planes at the Havana airport. Kennedy canceled a follow-up air attack. The remaining Cuban planes kept the exile brigade pinned down until Castro's army arrived at the invasion point. Once the attack began, Cuban shore batteries destroyed two supply ships sitting offshore (Wyden, 1979).

According to Janis, groupthink has a number of antecedent conditions in addition to high group cohesiveness. For instance, it is encouraged where the group ...