Before setting off for Cuba this week, on a cultural tour of the island nation, Clay and his guests stopped in at the Bay of Pigs Museum in Little Havana, Miami.
Earlier this week I took the guests on our Cuba Cultural tour to the Bay of Pigs Museum in Little Havana, Miami. One out of five Cubans now lives in Miami — 2 million expats, on the whole, an extremely cohesive and prosperous community. The museum we visited (me for the second time) tells the story of the Bay of Pigs fiasco (April 17-19, 1961) from the anti-Castro but not exactly pro-American point of view. The Bay of Pigs operation, cooked up by the CIA and the Eisenhower administration at the end of his second term, inherited by a skeptical and uncertain JFK, failed miserably. The Miami museum is manned by veterans of the bungled invasion. There were 1,500 of them, trained, armed, and transported by the United States to the south coast of Cuba.
Absolutely everything went wrong. Details of the “clandestine” operation were well-known in the United States (and Cuba), with detailed news stories published in the weeks leading up to the invasion in the New York Times and other newspapers. The landing was supposed to occur in darkness — it happened in broad daylight. The landing site was arguably the worst place on the south coast of Cuba to dump 1,500 men — there were reefs and mangrove swamps — and the “nearby” mountains where they expected to regroup stood scores of miles away. Perhaps the most decisive factor in the geopolitical debacle was President Kennedy’s refusal to send in the air strikes that the CIA, the U.S. military, and the Cuban “freedom fighters” expected.
The CIA and the other plotters believed that Fidel Castro was so unpopular that the minute the strike force landed, the people of Cuba (some 11 million) would rise up spontaneously and overthrow the regime. They could not have been more wrong. Castro was still widely popular in 1961, and even those disillusioned with his rule had a large stock of residual loyalty to the revolution he had brought to Cuba in 1959. They all knew that the vicious, pro-American strongman, Fulgencio Batista, had to be driven off the island. It was Fidel who had made it happen.
Fidel Castro was able to quash the Bay of Pigs invasion effortlessly. A couple of hundred invaders were killed and the rest were imprisoned. Finally, in late 1962, the Kennedy administration — led by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy — was able to ransom the soldiers by way of approximately $53 million in agricultural aid. Most of them wound up in South Florida.
Our host Carlos, now 81, was just 17 years old when he landed at the Bay of Pigs. He’s a beautiful, handsome, gentle, bemused, and still passionate man. Carlos began by telling us that a new museum is being built nearby, with lots of electronic bells and whistles. Why? “Because we’ll (survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion) all be dead soon.” He is making an Excel chart of the survivors — perhaps 200 are still alive. Carlos was imprisoned for 21 months. He and more than 200 others had to share a single toilet! Where are the Geneva Conventions when you need them? His own defense lawyer urged the court to execute him (and the others) because that would be preferable to torture and bestial living conditions.
It was an honor to listen to Carlos in Little Havana. One doesn’t have to agree with his politics or point of view to feel deep respect for his integrity and dignity. He told us to ask tough questions. We did. He answered every one of them with grace and often with self-deprecating humor.
Question: Could the invasion have worked?
Carlos: No, probably not.
Question: Does much blame fall to the Kennedy administration for failing to send in the secondary air strikes?
Carlos: Yes, maybe, but we don’t hold a grudge.
Question: What should America’s policy toward Cuba be today?
Carlos had no answer. The sense was that things are just what they are, and there is no satisfying answer. He does not expect to see a more enlightened government in Havana in his lifetime. Perhaps his grandchildren, he said.
Question: If a more liberal government came to power, would you go back?
Carlos: No. I’m an American citizen. I love America.
Question: What will happen when Raul Castro (Fidel’s brother, now 93 years old) dies?
Carlos: Fidel’s grandson has a yacht as big as Bill Gates’? Nothing will change.
We watched an extremely moving 20-minute documentary featuring interviews with surviving members of the 2506 Brigade. Carlos was one of the talking heads in the film — about a dozen years younger than he is now. At the end, a caption under a photo of each of the nine interviewees noted what they would most want to see if they ever returned to Cuba.
It was a truly extraordinary morning. We all felt deep respect and sadness for our host, for what my friend Steve called “the myth of the lost cause,” for the endless tragedy of Cuba, exploited by U.S. banks, the mafia, the United Fruit Company, the U.S. military; and more recently by the USSR (think of the Cuban Missile Crisis); and of course by the frequently tyrannical and misguided Castro government.
Later this week, we will be going to the actual Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. We will swim in the bay, observe the impossible geographic conditions that thwarted the 1961 invasion, stay overnight in an Airbnb within sight of the bay, dine at a rooftop restaurant … and visit a second Bay of Pigs museum. This second one telling the story from a pro-revolution, pro-Castro point of view, wherein the “freedom fighters” are called thugs and “misguided mercenaries” and the U.S. is regarded as a 3,000 pound Yanqui gorilla that has for 60-some years refused to let the Cuban people engage in their own “pursuit of happiness.”
You cannot visit Cuba with an open mind and not realize that there are no simple narratives here, no perfect villains or saints. There are several legitimate points of view about the history and destiny of Cuba and its tortured relations with the United States. No one perspective deserves to dominate. America’s 250-year engagement with Cuba has not produced a relationship satisfying to anyone. The simple fact is that Cuba — the jewel of the Caribbean — is stuck in a state of severe poverty and privation; the United States bears a heavy responsibility, but not alone.
Meanwhile, 2 million Cubans live in Miami and look with nostalgia, sorrow, and longing at the grand but desperate island only 90 miles away.
Editor’s note: Read more about Clay’s cultural tour of Cuba.