America and the Bay of Pigs Invasion: Causes and Failures

Introduction: A Tragic Mistake

By the time the United States found itself having to make excuses and apologies for the failed attempt at the Bay of Pigs to install a Cuban exile provisional government, the basis for invasion had long since been discussed, planned, abandoned, and reformulated. In April 1961, that reformulated plan resulted in what President Kennedy himself referred to as a "tragic mistake" (Higgins 1987). The failed attempt to land approximately 1,500 Cuban exiles on the shores of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs would, over the next several decades, be debated and argued — and has since been revealed for what it was: a combination of a U.S. president's belief that a show of force was essential to thwarting Communism in the Western Hemisphere; near-ridiculous misinformation fed to him by his CIA advisers; and a reluctance on the part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to step forward and aggressively advocate their military expertise. The Joint Chiefs privately predicted the plan's odds of failure as being far greater than its odds of success (Higgins 1987).

Historical Roots of U.S. Intervention in Cuba

Historically, U.S. support for what became the Bay of Pigs operation began long before the actual effort, and long before John F. Kennedy became president. The Platt Amendment was a document carefully constructed following Cuba's liberation from Spain, giving the United States the right to directly intervene in Cuba should American interests in the region be threatened by Cuban hostility toward the United States (Higgins 1987). This right to direct military intervention was later waived by President Roosevelt as he pursued a path steering America away from Latin American imperialism (Higgins 1987). The United States, however, maintained its right to continue occupying and operating a military Marine base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (Higgins 1987).

Following Roosevelt's death, American imperialism in South America was once again resumed as a course of political direction during the Truman administration (Higgins 1987). President Truman had to take seriously the threat posed by Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, a hardline leftist now threatening American business interests in the region — most notably the United Fruit Company (Higgins 1987). Nicaragua's dictator General Anastasio Somoza also felt threatened by Guatemala and Cuba (Higgins 1987). Truman held fast to a policy of non-intervention in Latin American internal conflicts, but this did not mean that he would ignore threats to American interests there (Higgins 1987). Still, there was little that Latin American leaders could obtain in the way of arms and military support from the Truman administration.

Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Road to Kennedy

President Eisenhower followed Truman, and because Eisenhower was a strong anti-communist, he put into place many of the people who would later provide the basis of information and encouragement to Kennedy — both in attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro and in pursuing the covert action that became the "tragic" Bay of Pigs (Higgins 1987). Historian Trumbull Higgins notes: "All the dilemmas faced by the Kennedy administration in Cuba in 1961 were already befogging the necessarily more cautious State Department in Guatemala during Eisenhower's first year in office" (Higgins 1987, 20).

The series of events that led Kennedy to the Bay of Pigs is complex in political terms, particularly regarding the key players — and especially CIA director Allen Dulles. Years later, autobiographies and books on the subject would suggest that many of the players sought to minimize their own roles in the fiasco, not least Dulles himself. To this day it remains genuinely unclear, given the many available sources, whether Dulles made hugely bad interpretations of the intelligence provided to him or whether he was simply inept. In some instances it would appear that Dulles was either outright deceitful or possessed an extraordinarily poor comprehension of the information supplied to him — the latter being difficult to credit given his position, experience, background, and education.

Kennedy's Anti-Communism and the Decision to Invade

Another element that strongly contributed to the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs was President Kennedy's own fervent anti-communism and his willingness — if not eagerness — to flex America's muscle in the face of Communist expansion. Kennedy's anti-communism, his ambivalence about a course of action, and his underlying fears are all evident in the following passage (Higgins 94):

"We must realize that any bluff will be called. We cannot tell anyone to keep out of our hemisphere unless our armaments and the people behind these armaments are prepared to back the command, even to the ultimate point of going to war. There must be no doubt in anyone's mind; the decision must be automatic: if we debate, if we hesitate, if we question, it will be too late." (John F. Kennedy, 1940)

Given these convictions, it becomes a compelling question why the president opted for a guerrilla-style invasion using Cuban expatriates and exiles rather than overt military action. Prior to Operation Mongoose, there had been an earlier plan — the Trinidad Plan — in support of an invasion of Cuba (Higgins 1987). Even though that plan, like Mongoose, involved the use of exiles as a guerrilla force, it would have been a militarily sounder operation, and it was the plan supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the latter one (Higgins 1987).

Conclusion: Converging Failures

The final conclusion about the United States government's support of the plan for the Bay of Pigs can only be one of all these elements coming together and being ignored by the United States. Clearly, Kennedy and the CIA — unlike the Joint Chiefs, who made their lack of support for the operation plain in retrospect — never fully grasped the incapacity, lack of training, and overall inadequacy of the exile brigade that was expected to invade Cuba, conquer the island, and establish a provisional government after ousting Castro (Higgins 1987).

In the end, approximately 1,300 men who landed on the beaches were neither capable of achieving their military objective nor able to escape when the operation collapsed. The Bay of Pigs stands as a cautionary example of what occurs when presidential ideology, institutional deception, passive military counsel, compromised operational security, and flawed planning all converge — with consequences that reverberated far beyond Cuba itself.

Works Cited

Blight, James G., and Peter Kornbluh, eds. 1999. Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Chomsky, Noam. 1993. Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture. Boston: South End Press.

Higgins, Trumbull. 1987. The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs. New York: W. W. Norton.

Lawrence, Mark Atwood. 2002. "The Kennedy Tapes." Presidential Studies Quarterly 32, no. 4: 810+.