HAVANA, Cuba.- The failure of the invasion of Playa Girón – or the Bay of Pigs, as it is also known more geographically – allowed Fidel Castro’s regime to score one of its greatest propaganda goals.
The triumph of the government forces in the battle that took place between April 17 and 19, 1961 is considered by Castro propaganda as “the first great defeat of Yankee imperialism in Latin America.”
It is as if they had faced the 82nd Airborne Division instead of a brigade of 1,200 poorly trained exiles, whom, equipped by the Soviets, they outgunned, and more than nine times in the number of combatants on the ground ( On the Castro side, some 15,000 men fought, including soldiers, police and militiamen).
The defeat of Brigade 2506 was mainly due to the poor coordination of the invasion by the CIA and the hesitations of President John F. Kennedy, who reluctantly and reluctantly carried out the plan he inherited from Eisenhower, his predecessor, to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime.
This plan, which Kennedy considered had a remote chance of success, consisted of the invaders conquering a beachhead where they could install a provisional government that would request a military intervention from the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United States.
The chosen site, a point on the muddy coast of the Bay of Pigs, south of Cuba, became a trap for the invaders, deprived of the air support that the Americans had promised them. Castro’s aviation, which had not been as damaged by the air strikes on April 15 against the airports of Ciudad Libertad, San Antonio de los Baños and Santiago de Cuba, as the invasion planners assumed, was able to dominate the sky and machine-gun he saved the invaders, who had been practically abandoned to their fate and who were unable to do more than what they did during the 65 hours that the battle lasted.
There were 176 dead on the government side, 111 on the invaders and 1,189 were taken prisoner.
Kennedy, with his laziness, sent Brigade 2506 to a carnage and gave Fidel Castro a victory, more than anything propaganda and that allowed him to consolidate the communist dictatorship by obtaining more military aid from the Soviet Union.
Kennedy must have been influenced, when deciding not to involve US military forces in an intervention to overthrow the Castro regime, by the popular support that he still had at that time, which would have meant facing strong resistance and provoke a bloodbath that would have earned the United States international revulsion and the animosity of many in Latin America and other parts of the world who still idealized the Cuban Revolution.
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2024-04-17 11:32:51
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