Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...idea. But at one of the formal meetings that Kennedy held on the subject after he became President, he was persuaded by the plan's advocates that "the simplest thing, after all, 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...
...Kennedy of the success of the CIA-sponsored overthrow of a pro-Communist Guatemalan government in 1954. Said Allen Dulles to Kennedy: "I stood right here at Ike's 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...
...proposed invasion. According to Schlesinger, the President strictly stipulated that "the plans be drawn on the basis of no U.S. military intervention." Sorensen recalls that stipulation with slight but highly significant differences. Kennedy, he said, insisted that there be no "direct, overt" participation of "American armed forces in Cuba...
...interests of 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...