The Bay of Pigs

Abstract

In The Bay of Pigs, Howard Jones has given us the finest narrative yet written about that calamitous event in United States-Cuban relations. Writing with an arresting style and drawing on a bevy of English-language sources, Jones re-creates the drama of the Bay of Pigs. He brings to life not only the operation on Cuba's southern shore but also the tensions among policy makers in the U.S. government as they tried to destroy the Cuban Revolution. Woven together, these two threads of the story fashion a tapestry of tragedy and hubris. The ill-fated invasion remains a tragedy because of those who lost their lives in the assault against, or in the defense of, their beloved homeland. Those in Washington who arrogated to themselves the right to alter the course of Cuban history did so without noticeable circumspection. The failure of April 17, 1961, exposed the enormity of their hubris. The general history of the Bay of Pigs is well known. Especially revealing here is the account of how the site of the invasion was chosen from two alternatives, neither of which offered any hope of success without U.S. air cover. The lies that Americans told invasion leaders about military assistance are a reminder of how security assets are easily jettisoned in pursuit of competing interests—in this case American prestige. U.S. aid to the counterrevolutionary forces did not materialize because of the foolish belief that the administration of John F. Kennedy could maintain plausible deniability about its role in the operation. With an American, Grayston Lynch, the first to land and the first to fight at the Bay of Pigs, plausible deniability quickly became the fiction it really was.