[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]
On three
lesser-known figures who reveal the contours and aftermaths of the failed
invasion.
1)
Richard
M. Bissell Jr.: If, as I made the case for in yesterday’s post, clandestine
relationships with foreign regimes defined much of 20th century
American foreign policy, than figures like Bissell—an economist turned the CIA’s
chief of clandestine operations in the 1950s and early 1960s—deserve a far
more prominent place in our collective memories than they currently occupy. When
President Eisenhower decided (not long after Fidel
Castro’s successful 1958 revolution) that an invasion of Cuba was necessary
to counter the perceived threats posed by the nation’s new Communist government,
he put Bissell in charge of planning that operation, and it was Bissell who
recruited, organized, and trained the numerous U.S. and Cuban figures at the
operation’s heart.
2)
Sergio Arcacha Smith:
One of those Cuban figures was Smith, a Cuban American exile who moved to New
Orleans and helped form two of the most prominent anti-Castro organizations, the
Cuban
Revolutionary Council (CRC) and the Friends
of Democratic Cuba (FDC). The organizational and fund-raising efforts of
such communities, as well as their intense desire to return to Cuba and
overthrow Castro’s regime, were instrumental in the recruitment of participants
in and the planning of the invasion. And when the invasion went bad and President
John F. Kennedy cut off air support for the forces on the ground, figures
like Smith became bitter enemies to Kennedy, leading to the lingering
questions of whether Smith and his New Orleans community played any role in
Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
3)
José Basulto: Many of those
who participated in the invasion were captured, imprisoned and interrogated,
and in some cases executed by the Castro regime. But some managed to escape and
return to the United States, and one of those surviving Bay of Pigs veterans is
Basulto, a CIA-trained spy and saboteur who had previously infiltrated Cuba and
played a role in the aborted invasion. He has continued to work in opposition
to the Castro regime for the decades since, most notably by forming the
aviation group Brothers
to the Rescue, which is either a humanitarian aid organization or a
terrorist group, depending on
whom you ask. All a reflection of how the Bay of Pigs invasion was far from
an isolated incident, and illustrates a half-century of complex, evolving Cuban
American histories and relationships.
Special Guest
Post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?
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