Word: castros
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...might be to let the Cubans [meaning the exiles] go where they yearned to go-to Cuba." He also was not unmindful of what benefits a successful invasion could bring, and in early April all the hot inside talk in Washington was that "the Kennedys would knock off Castro soon...
Schlesinger and Sorensen stress the fact that early in 1960 President Eisenhower gave a go-ahead to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to train, supply and support anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Guatemala. It went without saying that those exiles would eventually strike at Cuba and try to overthrow Castro. Ike crossed no t's and dotted no i's as to the specifics of the plan. In Sorensen's words, Kennedy "inherited the plan, the planners and, most troubling of all, the Cuban exile brigade-an armed force, flying another flag, highly trained in secret Guatemalan...
...desk and told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed. And, Mr. President, the prospects for this [Cuba] plan are even better than they were for that one." There was a strong suggestion that Kennedy could not afford to back away from a long-prepared anti-Castro project and appear to be soft on Communism-softer than the Republicans had been. If the Cuban exile brigade were disbanded, it was argued, they would fan out all over Latin America, and explain how the U.S. "had lost its nerve" in the fight against Communism. "Having created the brigade...
...keeping things quiet, Kennedy vetoed the original plan-approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff- for the exiles to land at Trinidad, a town on the southern coast of Cuba, 178 miles southeast of Havana with, as Schlesinger says, the "advantages of a harbor, a defensible beachhead, remoteness from Castro's main army, and easy access to the protective Escambray Mountains." But Kennedy thought a Trinidad landing would be "too spectacular...
Again, by the accounts of both Sorensen and Schlesinger, Kennedy was done in by his advisers. He was assured that the invasion might well set off an anti-Castro uprising in Cuba-which constituted a bad misreading of the political situation. Moreover, he had been told all along that if the invasion as such failed, the anti-Castro forces could melt into the mountains and fight as guerrillas. According to Sorensen, the trouble was that Kennedy, who could not have looked at a map very carefully, did not realize that from the Bay of Pigs, "the 80-mile route...