The Brilliant Disaster

JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs

Jim Rasenberger

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781439100479
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A "balanced, engrossing account" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review) of the Bay of Pigs crisis drawing on long-hidden CIA documents and delivering the vivid truth of five pivotal days in April 1961. At the heart of the Bay of Pigs crisis stood President John F. Kennedy, and journalist Jim Rasenberger traces what Kennedy knew, thought, and said as events unfolded. He examines whether Kennedy was manipulated by the CIA into approving a plan that would ultimately involve the American military. He also draws compelling portraits of the other figures who played key roles in the drama: Fidel Castro, who shortly after achieving power visited New York City and was cheered by thousands (just months before the United States began plotting his demise); Dwight Eisenhower, who originally ordered the secret program, then later disavowed it; Allen Dulles, the CIA director who may have told Kennedy about the plan before he was elected president (or so Richard Nixon suspected); and Richard Bissell, the famously brilliant "deus ex machina" who ran the operation for the CIA—and took the blame when it failed. Beyond the short-term fallout, Rasenberger demonstrates, the Bay of Pigs gave rise to further and greater woes, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and even, possibly, the assassination of John Kennedy. Written with elegant clarity and narrative verve, The Brilliant Disaster is the most complete account of this event to date, providing not only a fast-paced chronicle of the disaster but an analysis of how it occurred—a question as relevant today as then—and how it profoundly altered the course of modern American history.

PART I

HONEYMOON

April 15–October 26, 1959

1

“Viva Castro!”

April 1959

Washington, D.C., April 1959

WHEN, REALLY, did it begin? Was it the day in 1956 Fidel Castro landed on the coast of Cuba with a small band of followers to begin his quixotic campaign against the dictator Fulgencio Batista? Was it in the early-morning hours of January 1, 1959, when Batista, dressed in his New Year’s Eve tuxedo, piled cash and family members into an airplane and fled to the Dominican Republic, leaving the country in Castro’s hands? Was it, rather, fourteen months later, March 17, 1960, the day President Eisenhower approved the CIA’s “Program of Covert Action” to unseat Castro?

Or did the trouble between Cuba and the United States reach much deeper into the past, to Teddy Roosevelt’s triumph at San Juan Hill, to the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War and the succeeding decades of American intervention in Cuban affairs?

In fact, all of these episodes, and many more, were stations on the way to the U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba. Easier than narrowing the origins of the conflict is identifying the moment when it might have been avoided: when some measure of amity between Cuba and America still seemed possible; when Fidel Castro still appeared to many Americans to be the sort of man they could live with, accommodate, and even, perhaps, admire.

Such a moment arrived two years before the first bombs fell on Cuba—two years, in fact, to the day. Dwight Eisenhower was beginning his seventh year as president. Richard Nixon was vice president and the presumptive Republican nominee for the 1960 presidential election. John Kennedy was the junior senator from Massachusetts, still mulling a run at the Democratic presidential nomination. And Fidel Castro, three and a half months after conquering Cuba, was celebrating his triumph with a visit to America. His entry into U.S. airspace was a kind of invasion in its own right—a charm offensive. He came bearing a hundred cases of rum, countless boxes of Cuban cigars, and a warm abrazo for every man, woman, and child he met.

Castro landed on the evening of April 15, 1959, at Washington, D.C.’s National Airport. The time was two minutes after nine and Castro, typically, was two hours behind schedule, but this did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the fifteen hundred admirers awaiting him near the tarmac. “Viva Castro!” the crowd erupted as the door of the Cubana Airlines turboprop swung open and the man himself stepped out. “Viva Castro!”

He looked every bit the legendary guerrilla as he stood atop the airplane ramp, bathed in camera lights and the roar of the crowd. He was a large man, more than six feet tall, clad in rumpled green fatigues and high black boots, the uniform he and his cadre had worn through the battles of the Sierra. He carried an army kit on one shoulder, and an empty canvas pistol holster dangled from his belt. And the beard, of course: that famous beard Castro and his fellow barbudos had cultivated while fighting Batista’s troops in the wilds of Cuba. Barbudos translated as “bearded ones” but sounded like “barbarians,” a suitable cognate for the “bearded monster,” as one U.S. senator had already taken to calling Castro.

“Viva Castro!”

As the shouts rang up from the tarmac, Castro descended, followed by an avalanche of ministers, businessmen, bodyguards, and others whose roles were more difficult to define. The State Department had been trying to get a fix on Castro’s entourage for weeks, but the mercurial Cubans kept coming back with new numbers—thirty-five, then seventy, multiplying, at last, to ninety-four. For the State Department, the changing number was just another sign of the chaos that seemed to percolate around Castro wherever he went, as if he were making it up on the spot, dreaming it as it happened—it being the revolution, the new Cuba, this maddening creation called Fidel.

Castro was making his first appearance in the United States since riding into Havana at the start of the year, but the thirty-two-year-old rebel leader was no stranger to America. Newspapers and magazines had been tracking his exploits for years. The general outlines of his biography were familiar: the privileged but combative boyhood as the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner in eastern Cuba; the student years at Havana University, where he earned both a law degree (hence the honorific “Doctor” often attached to his name) and, more important, a devoted following in the bloody gangsterismo political scene of 1940s Havana. There had been a short-lived marriage in 1948, when he took a break from school and politics to travel with his new bride to America for an extended honeymoon. Given what came later, the most remarkable fact about this sojourn was how comfortably Castro had fit into the belly of the imperialist beast, studying English in New York City and enjoying the fruits of capitalism (including a new Lincoln) as much as any other red-blooded young man in postwar New York. Nonetheless, he had returned to Cuba after three months and resumed his life as a revolutionary.

It was in the summer of 1953 that Castro had first come to the attention of the American press. On July 26 of that year he led an attack on an army barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack failed miserably but made Castro a hero in Cuba. Castro was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Batista, in a gesture of goodwill unbecoming of a ruthless dictator, released him after just two. Castro went into exile in Mexico City, befriended a young Argentinean doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and raised funds to support a new attack on Cuba. In December 1956, in the company of Guevara, his brother Raúl Castro, and seventy-nine other men, Castro sailed across the Gulf of Mexico and through the Yucatán Strait to mount another quixotic attack on Batista’s forces. Nearly all the rebels were killed within days of landing, including Fidel Castro, according to Batista’s government. And so the world believed until Herbert Matthews, a writer for the New York Times, managed to track Castro down in the Sierra Maestra, where he found the rebel leader hiding among the peasants like a modern-day Robin Hood, not only alive but apparently prospering and gathering forces. Matthews’s articles from the Sierra Maestra made Castro into a worldwide legend, and the legend only grew as Castro continued to survive and pile up victories. When, at last, Batista fled Havana on New Year’s Day, many Americans were as thrilled as the exultant Cuban masses. An evil man had been deposed; a new man, young and idealistic and charismatic, had won the hearts and minds of much of the world.

And now here he was in the flesh, stepping onto the tarmac into a crowd of U.S. officials.

“Viva Castro!”

Before Castro could shake hands with Roy Rubottom, the State Department official there to greet him, a hundred or so fans suddenly rushed through a ring of police. Castro received the swarm of adulation with handshakes and hugs, then wended his way to a thicket of microphones. Generally, microphones inspired him to long and rambling orations. Not tonight. His voice was hoarse and soft, and surprisingly high-pitched for so large a man.

“I have come here to speak to the people of the United States,” he began in halting English. “I hope the people of the United States will understand better the people of Cuba, and I hope to understand better the people of the United States.”

He turned for the limousine parked on the tarmac, then strode right past it to a large crowd shouting from the other side of a chain-link fence. His security detail, including local police officers and forty agents from the State Department’s Division of Physical Security, scrambled to keep up. The State Department had already fielded numerous threats against Castro and had every reason to worry an assassin might try to gun him down. But the greatest danger to Castro, evidently, was going to be Castro himself. “He must be crazy,” one of the guards observed as Castro flung himself at the crowd.

CRAZY WAS A common assessment of Fidel Castro in certain quarters of the American government. Few Americans were sorry to see Batista go, and the United States had quickly recognized the new regime. But some officials, such as Roy Rubottom, the assistant secretary of state Castro left standing on the tarmac, were already expressing grave doubts about the new prime minister. Both CIA intelligence and firsthand reports from Cuba suggested that Castro was erratic, tyrannical, and bloodthirsty. Since arriving in Havana at the start of the year to take the reins of government, Castro had either ordered or allowed the executions of more than five hundred Batista supporters. Between executions, he’d delivered stupendous diatribes, some lasting as long as three or four hours and many of them laced with anti-American sentiments. American conservatives such as Senator Barry Goldwater were particularly alarmed by the tone of the new Cuban leader, but even the liberal and outspokenly pro-Castro New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell had returned from a March visit to Cuba with alarming tales of a man who slept a couple of hours a night, kept himself awake with high doses of Benzedrine, fell frequently into incoherence when talking, and had, in general, “gone haywire.”

The Fidel Castro who arrived in the United States in April 1959 may have been sleep-deprived and criminally indifferent to his own safety, but he was not noticeably incoherent or haywire. On the contrary, he struck most of those who met him during his eleven-day visit to America as reasonable and amiable, even charming.

Among those who would not get a chance to experience Castro’s charms firsthand was Dwight Eisenhower. The president had excused himself from meeting the Cuban revolutionary by decamping to Augusta, Georgia, to play golf. Eisenhower was not kindly disposed to revolutionaries in the first place; moreover, he was irritated by the circumstances that brought Castro to Washington. Generally, a foreign head of state would not think to visit America without an official invitation from the State Department. Castro had come, instead, by invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) to deliver the keynote address at the organization’s annual meeting on April 17. In Castro’s defense (and ASNE’s), he had accepted the invitation before he officially became Cuba’s prime minister. Still, it was an unseemly breach of protocol for him to show up like this, and Eisenhower was not pleased.

As it happened, Castro’s arrival in the United States came on a very difficult day for Eisenhower. That morning, the president had learned in a phone call that his longtime secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was resigning, effective immediately. For eight years, Dulles had been the ballast, if not the rudder, of Eisenhower’s anti-Communist foreign policy. Now he was in Walter Reed Army Hospital with terminal abdominal cancer. That John Foster Dulles should end his career on the very day Fidel Castro landed in America is one of those coincidences that would seem, like so many others of the next two years, to have been plotted by a roomful of cackling Soviet scriptwriters bunked up in a commune near the Kremlin.

THE MORNING AFTER his arrival, Castro awoke in a bedroom in the Cuban embassy on Sixteenth Street and began to practice his English. An aide ran out to buy him a comb and toothbrush. Castro was usually indifferent to personal hygiene, but he was eager to make a good impression on the Americans. He even managed to arrive on time for a luncheon later in the day with Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter. The men chatted cordially, then exchanged toasts. Castro bounced out of the lunch beaming. Herter, cane in hand, emerged sober but impressed. After the lunch, Herter informed President Eisenhower that he found Castro to be “a child in many ways, quite immature regarding problems of government.” A few days later, though, a State Department memorandum described the Cuban prime minister as “a man on his best behavior.”

This was, as far as it went, an accurate appraisal. Before coming to America, Castro had wired a New York City public relations firm to advise him. In addition to urging Castro to smile a lot, the publicists suggested, less astutely, that he shave his beard to adopt a clean-cut appearance. Castro wisely ignored the latter tip. The beard was part of his mystique. People loved the beard. Indeed, popular novelty items in America that spring were fake Castro beards woven from treated dog or fox hair. “When we finish our job,” Castro told one interlocutor, “we will cut off our whiskers.”

The most sensible advice the public relations executives gave Castro seems to have been this: tell them what they want to hear. And what they wanted to hear in the spring of 1959—“they” being government officials, the American press, and the public—was that Fidel Castro was not a Communist.

“What is your connection with communism, if any?” asked Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin when the Cuban visited the U.S. Capitol on Friday morning.

“None,” Castro replied, then went on to repeat variations of the answer for the next hour and a half. Afterward, senators and congressmen pronounced themselves cautiously satisfied. “I feel reassured about a number of matters I’ve been concerned about in Cuba,” said Senator Russell Long of Louisiana. Representative James Fulton, a Republican from Pennsylvania, pronounced Castro an “amigo nuevo.” Even Senator George Smathers of Florida, a persistent critic of Castro, came away impressed. He remained convinced that Castro’s government was “peppered” with Communists, but the prime minister, Smathers acknowledged, appeared to be a “good man.”

Everywhere the question was the same: Are you a Communist, Dr. Castro? Have you ever been a Communist, or do you sympathize with Communists? Everywhere Castro gave the same answer: No, he was not a Communist. Never had been. Never would be.

CASTRO’S TRUE IDEOLOGY in April 1959 is, even now, difficult to pin down. Certainly there were Communists around him and close to him, men who had fought alongside him in the Sierra Maestra and now served in his government and army. His brother Raúl and his chief adviser, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, both had strong ties to the Communist Party. Most informed American observers, though, concluded that Castro was telling the truth when he said he was not a Communist. He had never been in the Communist Party, and while he welcomed Communists into his revolution, he welcomed Cubans of other political stripes, too. As for his relationships with Communists in other countries, he had none. His first known contact with any Soviet official, in fact, came during his visit to Washington that April, when he exchanged pleasantries with the Soviet ambassador during a reception at the Cuban embass...