Fifty years ago today, a brigade of 1,400 US-trained and -financed rebels was struggling desperately to keep alive an attempt to topple Fidel Castro and liberate Cuba from his communist regime.
But by April 21, 1961, four days after the initial invasion at the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), the invaders had run out of ammunition and were forced to surrender — victims of a monumental failure of will by Washington.
As Marine Col. Jack Hawkins wrote nearly four decades later: “Brigade 2506 was left stranded on the beach, shamefully misled and betrayed by the government of the United States of America” and its president, John Kennedy.
This was the first Nuclear Age challenge to the Monroe Doctrine, which views any attempt to interfere with states in the hemisphere — like the Soviet sponsorship of Castro, just 90 miles from the US shore — as an act of aggression requiring an American response.
America blew the challenge — with disastrous political results.
It helped convince the Soviets that Kennedy was weak and unwilling to risk open confrontation — leading directly, less than two years later, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Washington and Moscow nearly went to nuclear war.
It also led, down the line, to future Soviet attempts to infiltrate and destabilize Latin America.
Though the Bay of Pigs affair was initiated by the Eisenhower administration, JFK signed off on it — along with other attempts to assassinate Castro outright.
That an invasion by US-trained ex-pats was looming was no secret.
Yet JFK refused to order the most critical aspect of the invasion, as urged by Hawkins and other military officials: “complete destruction of [Castro’s] air force at the outset of the operation.”
Indeed, Hawkins had warned, “If Castro’s air force was not destroyed before the troop transports arrived . . . a military disaster would occur.”
Which is precisely what happened.
Eventually, Castro exchanged most of the survivors for $53 million in food and medicine.
At a ceremony in the Orange Bowl at which he was presented with their flag, Kennedy told the freed fighters: “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.”
Half a century later, they — and the rest of Cuba — are still waiting.
Fortunately, during the 1980s — when the Soviets pushed even harder into the Americas in places like Nicaragua and El Salvador — there were people in power like Ronald Reagan who understood that such aggression had to be resisted.
Its defeat there and, concurrently, in Eastern Europe was a decisive factor in the eventual collapse of the Soviet bloc.
The lesson? Perseverance pays.
Alas, there’s not much evidence that the current occupant of the White House understands this.