Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

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.