Bay of Pigs

Bay of Pigs invasion

In April 1961 putting into effect a plan initially formulated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, U.S. President John F. Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion to topple Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

The plan was for a U.S.-trained and equipped force of Cuban exiles to invade Playa Girón in the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) on the south coast and spark a popular uprising against Fidel Castro, which would overthrow his regime and end Cuba’s Communist experiment.

Ill-conceived from its inception, and plagued by mishaps and missteps, the invasion failed, becoming a major foreign policy embarrassment for John F. Kennedy and solidifying popular support for Castro within Cuba. A few months later, Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara thanked a Kennedy aide for the invasion, which Guevara claimed “enabled [us] to consolidate” the revolution and “transformed [us] from an aggrieved little country to an equal.”


The Bay of Pigs fiasco also had major repercussions for the cold war, helping to precipitate the Cuban missile crisis, convincing the Kremlin that John F. Kennedy was weak and indecisive, and steeling Kennedy’s resolve to stand up to the perceived menace of global communism.

Operational planning for the invasion began in March 1960, headed by Vice President Richard Nixon. This was in the wake of the successful CIA sponsored incursions into Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), which resulted in the installation of governments friendly to the United States.

The CIA secretly recruited a Cuban exile force of some 1,000 men, called Brigade 2506, which underwent training in south Florida and Guatemala. The original landing site near Trinidad, Cuba, was later changed to the Bay of Pigs. Operations began on April 15 with a failed effort to destroy the Cuban Revolutionary Air Force.

captured united states soldier

Two days later, four privately chartered ships transported 1,511 Cuban exiles to the Bay of Pigs, accompanied by CIA-owned landing crafts carrying supplies. Fighting was fierce and lasted for four days (April 17–21). Casualties are estimated at 2,000 to 5,000 Cubans and 200–300 invading exiles. John F. Kennedy refused to send in air support or the marines, fearing the consequences of clear evidence of direct United States involvement.

The Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces soon killed or captured most of the invading force. Soon afterward, 1,209 captive exiles were put on trial. Around 20 were executed or otherwise killed, the remainder being released within two years in exchange for $53 million in medicine and food.

victorius cuban army

The botched invasion was a major blow to the Kennedy administration and gave a major boost to Castro at home and abroad. Kennedy’s vacillating leadership during the Bay of Pigs prompted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to challenge the U.S. administration more directly by placing nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, leading to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.

Until his assassination in November 1963, John F. Kennedy endeavored to demonstrate his strength in confronting the Soviet Union and its allies in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, a foreign policy stance attributable in large part to the Bay of Pigs debacle.

Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro

Head of the Cuban Communist Party and leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro is one of the major world figures of the second half of the 20th century. One of the longest-lived heads of state in modern times, and one of the most controversial, Castro was born out of wedlock on August 13, 1926, a few kilometers south of the Bay of Nipe in then-Oriente province (present-day Holguín) in eastern Cuba.

His father, Angel Castro y Argiz, was a Galician immigrant and owner of a large sugar estate; his mother, Lina Ruz González, was a servant in Angel’s house and, after Fidel’s 17th birthday, Angel’s second wife. As an adult, Fidel grew estranged from his parents, maintaining close relations mainly with his younger brother Raúl, who also became one of the revolution’s premier leaders.

Graduating from the Jesuit high school Belén in Havana in 1945, Castro entered the University of Havana the same year. In 1947 he joined the moderately reformist and anti-imperialist Orthodox Party (Partido Ortodoxo), led by Eduardo Chibás. In 1948 he traveled to Bogotá, Colombia, for a student conference being held alongside the ninth meeting of the Pan-American Union.


There he witnessed and participated in the extraordinary events of the Bogotazo, in which liberal leader Jorge Gaitán was assassinated and Bogotá erupted in massive street violence. The events are considered to have had a major impact on his thinking on the role of violence and popular insurrection in sparking social change.

Returning to Cuba, he married Mirta Díaz Balart, daughter of a wealthy Cuban family. He earned his law degree in 1950 and joined a small firm in Havana whose work focused mainly on the poor. Intensely interested in politics, he became a parliamentary candidate in 1952, only to see the elections cancelled following the coup by General Fulgencio Batista.

Determined to challenge the regime, he and his brother Raúl plotted and carried out an assault on the Moncada barracks in eastern Cuba on July 26, 1953. The assault proved a military defeat but a political victory, with his four-hour “History will absolve me” speech at his October 1953 trial propelling him into national prominence.

Imprisoned for less than 20 months of a 15-year sentence (released in May 1955 in a general amnesty), he went into exile in Mexico and began organizing his 26 July Movement, composed of Cuban exiles and other Latin Americans, including Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Forming the nucleus of a guerrilla army, he and his followers returned clandestinely to eastern Cuba on December 2, 1956, where for the next two years they waged a guerrilla war against the Batista regime. Seizing power on January 1, 1959, he was still vague about his ideology, which by his public statements could be characterized as broadly nationalist and focused on issues of social justice. From 1959 to 1961 the revolution radicalized and became integral to the cold war. In December 1961 he announced, “I am a Marxist-Leninist.”

Since 1959 he was the undisputed leader of the Cuban revolution and government—revered by some, despised by others (especially the Miami-based cuban exile community)—and renowned for his volcanic energy, hours-long speeches, and hands-on leadership style. In early 2007 his death appeared imminent, but he remained in power until his resignation in February 2008.

Cuban Migration to the United States

Cuban Migration to the United States

Movements of people from Cuba to the United States comprise a longstanding feature of both countries’ histories. The panic of 1857 prompted numerous Cuban cigar manufacturers to move their operations to Key West, Tampa, and elsewhere along the Florida coast.

During and after the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), several thousand Cubans formed exile communities along the U.S. eastern seaboard—especially in Key West, Tampa, Ocala, and Jacksonville, Florida, and further north in New York City. The 1850 U.S. census shows 969 persons of Cuban birth living in the United States, with most (275) in Louisiana and 23 in Florida.

By 1860 there were 2,056, with 55 in Florida. That number more than tripled by 1870, reaching 6,515, with about half (3,014) in New York and less than a fifth (1,147) in Florida. By 1880 the figure rose slightly to 7,004, with Florida (2,625) surpassing New York (2,253), followed by Louisiana (652) and Pennsylvania (359, with 309 in Philadelphia).


In 1900, in the aftermath of the Cuban War of Independence and the U.S. military intervention and occupation of the island, 11,243 Cuban-born persons were listed, including 6,645 in Florida (3,378 in Tampa, 3,015 in Key West) and 2,251 in New York. In 1910 the number rose to 15,725, remaining stagnant to 1920 (15,822). All of the above figures likely undercounted the actual number.

A much larger movement of Cubans to the United States began with the Cuban revolution, which came to power in January 1959. From 1960 to 1962 an estimated 195,000 Cubans immigrated to the United States, mostly professionals and members of the middle class, with most settling in Miami, Florida; Union City, New Jersey; and New York City.

The exodus continued in several waves through the 1960s and into the 1970s, becoming integral to cold war politics, welcomed by the U.S. government and materially harming the Cuban economy, even as the exoduses proved politically useful to the Castro regime.

The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) allowed undocumented Cuban immigrants to stay in the country and gain permanent residence after one year, rights not extended to any other immigrant group. In 1980 some 125,000 Cubans, the so-called Marielitos, emigrated to the United States in the Mariel boatlift. In the summer of 1994 at Castro’s invitation, an estimated 33,000 Cubans made the journey.

The exodus prompted the U.S. government to negotiate an agreement with Cuba, in September 1994, in which the United States agreed to admit a minimum of 20,000 Cubans annually, and emigrants intercepted at sea would no longer be permitted to enter the United States.

In 1995 the 1966 CAA was revised to incorporate the so-called wet-foot, dry-foot policy, which stipulated that undocumented Cuban immigrants who reached U.S. soil (“dry feet”) would be permitted to apply for permanent residence status in one year, while those intercepted at sea (“wet feet”) would be sent back to Cuba or to a third country.

The 2000 U.S. census enumerated 1,241,685 persons of Cuban ancestry in the United States, comprising 3.5 percent of U.S. Hispanics and 0.4 percent of the U.S. population of 281.4 million. Most lived in Miami– Dade County, Florida, with 525,841 Cuban-born, the single largest national group among large influxes of Haitians, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others from the 1980s especially.

As a result of these demographic changes, the politics and culture of south Florida have undergone profound shifts, with relatively affluent, politically conservative, and vehemently anti-Castro Cuban Americans increasingly shaping the region’s economy, politics, and culture.

Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962)

Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962)

In what many experts consider the closest the world has yet come to nuclear war, for 13 days in October 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union faced off over the Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the end, the Soviet Union backed down, agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for the removal of U.S. nuclear missiles in Turkey, and the crisis passed.

The Cuban missile crisis left an enduring mark on U.S.- Soviet relations, heightened U.S. resolve in other cold war conflicts, and appeared to demonstrate the viability of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence through mutually assured destruction.

The long-term roots of the crisis lie in the atmosphere of mutual hostility and distrust engendered by the cold war. In the shorter term, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev hoped to use the provocation to force the United States to remove the 15 Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, which were within striking distance of Moscow.


In addition, the botched April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba heightened revolutionary leader Fidel Castro’s fears of a follow-up U.S. effort to topple his regime. The Bay of Pigs events also persuaded Khrushchev that U.S. president John F. Kennedy was weak and indecisive and would back down when confronted with the reality of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Declassified documents and a series of conferences among participants from the United States, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union have confirmed that the events of October 1962 brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear holocaust than officials at the time realized.

Scholars have meticulously reconstructed the chronology of events marking the crisis. Through the summer of 1962 the Soviets built a variety of military installations on Cuba, as confirmed by aerial reconnaissance, though U.S. intelligence analysts did not believe they included nuclear weapons.

On October 14, 1962, a U-2 spy plane photographed military bases around San Cristóbal, Cuba, demonstrating the existence of nuclear installations. Khrushchev, with Castro’s approval, had deployed launchers for at least 40 medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles, capable of reaching all of the continental United States except the Pacific Northwest.

For the next two days, U.S. analysts poured over the photographs. Kennedy and his national security team were briefed on their findings on the morning of October 16, the beginning of the “thirteen days.”

His team devised two plans: an invasion of the island, and a naval blockade—the latter, by international law, an act of war. Kennedy opted for the blockade, announced in a televised address to the nation on October 22. The next six days were the height of the crisis.

On October 28, one day before the U.S. deadline for launching an invasion of Cuba, Khrushchev agreed to remove the launchers in exchange for the U.S. removal of its missiles from Turkey. Many scholars argue that the outcome of the crisis prompted a more muscular U.S. response to perceived Communist aggression around the world, and contributed to deepened U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

Cuban Revolution (1959)

Cuban Revolution

On January 1, 1959, a broad-based insurrectionary movement—with Fidel Castro at its helm—overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and inaugurated the Cuban revolution, a process of social transformation that continues to the present writing.

Its ideology was at first broadly nationalist and democratic, but by 1961 the revolution was proclaimed unambiguously socialist and Marxist-Leninist. One of only a handful of social revolutions in 20th-century Latin America, the Cuban revolution had a major impact not only within Cuba but around the world.

In Latin America, the revolution encouraged the formation of leftist and neo-Marxist ideologies and movements of national liberation, sparking a florescence of guerrilla groups in the 1960s and after that hoped to duplicate the successes of the Cuban revolutionaries.


The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua (1979–90), for instance, found much of its inspiration in the events in Cuba, as did other national liberation and guerrilla movements from Mexico to Argentina.

By bringing a Marxist-Leninist regime to the historic “backyard” of the United States, the Cuban revolution was also a major event in the cold war. Its effects were felt in Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, and scores of other nation-states around the world, particularly in the two decades following Batista’s ouster.

The revolution found its long-term origins in the structural dependency of Cuba on the United States since the thwarting of Cuban independence in 1898 and the U.S.-imposed Platt Amendment of 1901, which prompted denunciations of “Yankee imperialism” across the island; and in the poverty, economic inequalities, and political disfranchisement of the Cuban people under a series of dictatorial regimes.

Most narratives of the revolution begin with the rise of the Jesuit- and university-educated lawyer Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries. On July 26, 1953, Castro—at the head of a group of 134 men— attacked the Moncada barracks in Oriente province in eastern Cuba. The assault was quickly defeated but catapulted Castro into national prominence.

At his trial in October 1953, he delivered a brilliant speech, later turned into a pamphlet and becoming one of the defining texts of the revolution, whose title repeated its closing words: “History will absolve me.” Sentenced to 15 years in prison, Castro became something of a folk hero for his eloquent denunciations of the Batista dictatorship and the island’s social injustices.

Released on May 15, 1955, in a general amnesty, Castro traveled to Mexico to form a guerrilla army of Cuban exiles. In February 1956 he announced the formation of his 26 July Movement, and on November 25, with 81 other men, departed Tuxpan, Mexico, aboard the yacht Granma, headed for eastern Cuba, which they reached on December 2.


The guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra in 1957–58 is the topic of an expansive literature. Led by Castro, his brother Raúl, and the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the rebels gradually earned the trust of the peasants and workers who comprised the region’s majority.

It also established contacts with politically disaffected labor leaders, workers, students, intellectuals, and other activists in Cuba’s major cities, especially Havana, whose protest movements soon dovetailed with Castro’s. After a complex series of events that found the Batista regime increasingly beleaguered, Castro’s forces entered Havana in triumph on January 1, 1959.

On seizing power, the revolutionaries embarked on a program of social transformation that focused on nationalization of major industries and broad- ranging reforms in land ownership, housing, rents, food, and related spheres. Since a large proportion of Cuban land and industries were U.S.-owned, the stage was set for confrontation with the United States.

Hostile rhetoric intensified on both sides as the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, under pressure from business interests and anticommunists, interpreted events in Cuba through the prism of the cold war. In February 1960 the Castro regime signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in which the Soviets agreed to sell Cuba oil at a discount and buy Cuban sugar at a high price.

In June Standard Oil, Texaco, and Shell refused to refine Soviet oil, prompting the Castro regime to nationalize their refineries. In retaliation the Eisenhower administration cancelled its commitment to buy its annual sugar quota of 700,000 tons, which the Soviets quickly assumed.

What had begun as a national liberation movement quickly escalated into a cold war battleground, with the Castro regime, in effect, trading U.S. economic dependency for Soviet dependency. On December 2, 1961, following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and U.S. trade embargo of April, Castro proclaimed: “I am a Marxist-Leninist and will remain a Marxist-Leninist until the day I die.”

Early efforts to diversify the economy largely failed, plagued by bureaucratic micromanagement and overplanning, and over-reliance on the concept of the socialist “New Man,” in which economic incentives were to be displaced by revolutionary fervor. From 1964 the regime opted to increase the economy’s reliance on sugar, culminating in the disastrous policy goal of producing 10 million tons of sugar by 1970.

The effort failed and had negative economic effects for years. Efforts to improve the living standards of ordinary Cubans met with greater success. Government programs in housing, health care, education, and related spheres are generally considered the biggest successes of the revolution.

By the 1970s hunger, malnutrition, homelessness, and illiteracy had been all but eliminated, while the Cuban health-care system ranked among the most developed in the world. On the negative side of the ledger, political oppression increased markedly, with all organized opposition to the regime banned, thousands of dissidents jailed, and freedom of speech severely curtailed.

Beginning in 1960 and continuing in several waves thereafter, the regime’s intolerance of political dissent and socialist economic policies prompted tens of thousands of middle-class and professional Cubans to migrate to the United States, where large exile communities formed, centered in Miami.

Internationally, Cuba became a beacon of hope for revolutionaries across Latin America. To the chagrin of his more cautious Soviet patrons, Castro announced his intention to export revolution to Latin America.

The plan’s most ardent proponent was former minister of industries Che Guevara, whose “foco” theory of revolution, which held that a small group of dedicated revolutionaries could win peasant support and spark a social revolution, was put to the test in Bolivia in 1967. The expected mass uprising did not materialize, and Guevara was captured and killed by the Bolivian army.

Castro remained the head of the Cuban Communist Party through the 1970s and 1980s, as the bureaucracy expanded and the revolution grew increasingly institutionalized. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of its approximately $4 billion in annual subsidies, combined with the continuing U.S. trade embargo, the revolution entered a “Special Period” that saw a decline in living standards and in all major industries.

In the early 2000s, Cuba was one of only a handful of countries worldwide explicitly espousing communist ideology. In early 2007, with over 1 million Cubans and Cuban Americans in Miami and elsewhere anticipating the regime’s demise, Castro appeared on the brink of death, with speculation rife on whether the revolution could survive without him. He resigned the presidency in favor of his brother, Raoul, in February 2008.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Ernesto Che Guevara Poster

An iconic Latin American revolutionary whose visage remains emblematic of leftist and Marxist struggles throughout the continent and world, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna joined Fidel Castro’s 26 July Movement in late 1955.

An exceptionally effective guerrilla leader, his charisma, intelligence, and revolutionary idealism soon made him one of the leading figures of the early years of the Cuban revolution.

He was the primary impetus behind the notion of the socialist “New Man,” at the core of many Cuban government policies in the early 1960s, in which revolutionary fervor was seen as more fundamental than material incentives (such as wages and benefits) in propelling workers to produce.


Convinced that Cuba’s successes could be duplicated in other countries through what he called the “foco” theory of revolution, in which a small band of revolutionaries could spark a mass insurrection and topple dictatorships, he journeyed to Bolivia in 1967 to test his theory.

The anticipated popular uprising failed to materialize, and after a few months he was captured and executed by the Bolivian military. His writings on revolution and guerrilla warfare remain classics of the era.

Born on June 14, 1927, to a wealthy landowning family in Rosario, Argentina, Guevara was a frail and sickly boy, suffering asthma that plagued him throughout his life. Raised Roman Catholic, because of his asthma he was educated mainly at home by his mother, Celia de la Serna y Llosa, and his four siblings.

His father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, was a businessman and for a time ran a mate (tea) farm owned by his wife. Both were committed leftists.

From his mother, to whom he remained emotionally close throughout his life, he acquired his lifelong passion for books, learning, and politics. In 1943 when Guevara was 16, his family moved to Córdoba.

Ernesto Guevara with Fidel Castro

After completing his high school studies he began studying engineering. In 1947 he and his family moved to Buenos Aires, where he entered the university to study engineering before switching to medicine.

In 1951 he and a friend embarked on a yearlong motorcycle journey through South America, where he saw firsthand the continent’s poverty and social injustices (as portrayed in his journals and dramatized in the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries).

Graduating from medical school in 1953, he journeyed through Bolivia and Peru to Guatemala, where he witnessed the social revolution under President Jacobo Arbenz.

After Arbenz’s overthrow in a U.S.-orchestrated coup in 1954, which steeled Guevara’s anti-imperialism, Guevara journeyed to Mexico and established contact with Cuban exile Fidel Castro. Convinced that Castro was the visionary revolutionary he had long sought, he joined Castro’s 26 July Movement and soon became one of its leaders.

The group embarked for Cuba in November 1956, and for the next two years Guevara played a central role in the guerrilla war against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, earning a reputation as a skilled and sometimes ruthless commander.

After Batista’s ouster in January 1959, Guevara was appointed to the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, and later became president of the National Bank, minister of industries, and ambassador to the United Nations. During this period he developed his ideas regarding the socialist New Man and his foco theory of revolution.

After failing in several attempts to launch socialist revolutions in other countries (including Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Congo), in late 1966 he traveled to Bolivia in the hope of sparking a mass insurrection.

On October 8, 1967, he and his bedraggled forces were captured by the Bolivian military, and the next day he was executed. He is widely considered one of the most important revolutionary figures of the 20th century.