Cold War 317: The John Wayne Complex

The Bay of Pigs post-mortem continues, and it turns out the CIA approached Cuban resistance fighters who’d spent seven years fighting Batista…. and suggested they team up with Batista guys. Shockingly, that didn’t go over well. We also get into how the failed invasion actually drove Cuba into the Soviets’ arms, and we uncover a genuinely wild thread connecting the Bay of Pigs, the CIA, Dallas  November 1963… and Pocahontas.

The CIA’s plan for the Bay of Pigs was, in short, to land a brigade of exiles, hope the Cuban people spontaneously rose up, and call it a day. No backup plan. One in three odds of success, according to the Under Secretary of State’s own memo. Kennedy then cut the air strikes almost in half as an afterthought, and canceled the follow-up strikes at 11 PM the night the ships were already approaching Cuba…. which the guys on the beach didn’t find out about until they were looking up and wondering where the hell their air support was.

The CIA’s original plan for Cuba was a slow, subtle guerrilla operation…. then someone started adding things. A combined air and sea assault. A march on Havana. Possibly US troops. By October 1960, what began as a quiet covert infiltration had turned into D-Day Jr., and nobody seemed to notice the plan had completely gotten away from them.

The CIA’s master plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion was, apparently, a cakewalk. The frogmen hit the coral reef they thought was seaweed, a light shorted out and alerted the shore, the winches on the landing boats squeaked loud enough to wake the neighbourhood, and Castro’s planes showed up at first light exactly as promised. By day three, the brigade commander’s final radio message was “I cannot wait for you”…. which is also, roughly, what Washington was thinking.

Castro expropriated every American-owned asset in Cuba, got kicked out of his New York hotel for looking like a credit risk, and ended up hosting Malcolm X in a rundown place in Harlem…. which Khrushchev immediately recognised as the greatest PR move he’d ever seen. Meanwhile, Castro’s sister was collaborating with the CIA, his brother was furious about the farm, and Trujillo tried to smuggle weapons to Cuban double agents who were, of course, working for Castro the whole time.

Eisenhower signs off on a covert plan to overthrow Castro in March 1960…. a plan which, to be clear, is literally titled “Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime.” Subtle. Meanwhile Cuba starts nationalising US oil refineries, Washington cuts the sugar quota, and Castro responds by reading the expropriation of 26 American corporations aloud at a baseball stadium at midnight while handling a dove like James Brown with a cape. The coffins of Esso, Shell and United Fruit are eventually carried to the sea and hurled in, in the hope the Gulf Stream takes them back to Florida.

The CIA didn’t want Cuba buying weapons from Britain, so Allen Dulles quietly leaned on the British ambassador to kill the deal…. hoping Cuba would get desperate enough to buy from the Soviets instead, at which point the US could say “look, commies” and invade. Pick up the gun. Meanwhile, Gordon Gray – the man formally tasked with overthrowing Cuba – came from a family that ran R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which is interesting given that Cuba is, you know, where tobacco comes from. And then there’s William Morgan: Ohio-born, dishonourably discharged, convicted felon, snake charmer’s husband, Cuban revolutionary, frog leg tycoon, shot by firing squad one month before the Bay of Pigs.

A Belgian munitions ship called La Coubre blows up in Havana Harbour, killing somewhere between 75 and 100 people…. and Castro immediately points the finger at Washington, which is awkward given that the US had already been bombing Cuban sugar fields from Florida. Also at this funeral, Alberto Korda snaps a photo of Che Guevara that will eventually end up on condoms worldwide, and Castro coins the phrase that becomes the revolution’s motto: Patria O Muerte. The diplomats are starting to figure out what the CIA already knew months ago.

Mikoyan, Soviet deputy premier and ice cream king, rolls into Havana in February 1960 with a 40-person delegation, a science exhibit, and advice for Castro to just take all the American-owned land without compensation. Meanwhile, Cuba’s newspaper workers start inserting little clarification notes next to stories they disagree with…. which escalates until the clarifications are longer than the articles, and publishers start fleeing to Miami to write for the Herald. The oldest paper on the island holds an actual funeral for itself, complete with a coffin.

Cuba, 1959/1960, and Fidel Castro is desperately trying to walk the middle path…. no communism, no capitalism, just “humanism” – liberty with bread, bread without terror. Meanwhile one of his most senior commanders, Huber Matos, publicly resigns in protest at communist influence and ends up in solitary for 16 of the next 20 years. And then the Soviet Union’s most durable political survivor – the man who outlasted Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and personally controlled USSR ice cream quality standards – turns up in Havana.