Word: escambray
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...would never start a military operation without meticulous planning and an unshakable commitment to win, fired their guns in rage at the departing ships. Incredibly, none of Kennedy's CIA or military advisers had warned him that, faced with disaster, the invaders could not simply slip into the Escambray Mountains and carry on as anti-Castro guerrillas. The mountains were too far away, separated from the landing site by swamps, and the invaders had been given no training in survival tactics...
...Pigs, for example, the CIA assured everybody that the invasion force could "melt away" into the mountains if it were beaten on the beaches. But nobody bothered to check on just where the mountains were. "I don't think we fully realized," Schlesinger writes airily, "that the Escambray Mountains lay 80 miles from the Bay of Pigs, across a hopeless tangle of swamps and jungles." Surely somebody deserves censure for failing to consult...
...Cubans have tried to stay and fight - usually small bands of desperate men operating in the central Escambray Mountains and in Castro's old Sierra Maestra stamping grounds. They face the full might of a 200,000-man army (plus 100,000 militia reserves) equipped with the best of everything Russian, including supersonic MIG-21s based outside of Havana. They also face Raul Castro, who used to be quite a guerrilla fighter himself but now heads the counterinsurgency operations and treats it as rather a sport...
...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...
...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 to the Escambray Mountains, to which he had been assured they could escape, was so long, so swampy and so covered by Castro's troops, that this was never a realistic alternative...