1961: the Bay of Pigs invasion: fifty years ago, the U.S. backed a secret plan to overthrow Cuba's new Communist regime. The U.S. and Cuba have been at loggerheads ever since.

• Author: Depalma, Anthony
• Position: TIMES PAST

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In the days immediately after Fidel Castro's bearded guerrilla fighters seized power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, the United States government wished the rebels well.

'The Provisional Government appears free from Communist taint and there are indications that it intends to pursue friendly relations with the United States" Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-'61) in a memo.

It seemed like a promising start between the two neighbors, only 90 miles from each other. But the goodwill did not last long.

By the end of the year, Eisenhower had approved a secret plan to overthrow Castro that two years later became the Bay of Pigs invasion. And half a century later, the failed coup is widely recognized as a misguided monument to the fear and suspicion on both sides in the Cold War, a Watershed moment that has left the U.S. and Cuba at odds ever since.

"The U.S. had already broken ties with Cuba by the time of the Bay of Pigs," says Ted Henken, a Cuba expert at Baruch College in New York. "But you could say the invasion was the final, ultimate, and irrevocable divorce."

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For the Cuban exiles who participated, the attack was a chance to rescue their homeland from Castro and the Communists.

"We were full of hope," recalled Alfredo Duran, a Cuban exile from Miami who landed at the Bay of Pigs when he was 22. "We believed we were going to win or die"

Cold War Rules

What did the U.S., with all its power, have to fear from tiny Cuba, which is about the size of Pennsylvania and in 1959 had a population of less than 7 million?

The U.S. and its allies were in the midst of the Cold War with Communist countries of the East, led by the Soviet Union and China. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. * were allies in World War II, but they mistrusted each other. When Germany was defeated in 1945, the two superpowers competed fiercely for global influence. The Soviets installed Communist regimes in most of Eastern Europe after the war, and there was little the West could do about it.

But when the Soviet Union took an interest in Latin America, in what looked like a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine--President James Monroe's 1823 policy that warned European colonizers to stay out of the Western hemisphere--the Eisenhower administration was determined to stop it.

Washington kept a close eye on Cuba after the new regime came to power. There was an uproar in the U.S. when hundreds of Castro's political opponents were executed without fair trials. Then Castro seized the farms, homes, and businesses of Cubans and Americans without compensation. Castro's increasingly belligerent anti-American tone also led Washington to fear that Cuba would strengthen its ties with the Soviet Union, and a secret plan to overthrow him was developed.

But under the unwritten rules of the Cold War, the U.S. could not be directly involved in military actions that the Soviet Union might consider threatening (though the two powers sometimes used other nations, called proxies, to fight on their behalf). Both sides knew that such open aggression could trigger an all-out nuclear war.

The C.I.A. (Central Intelligence Agency) plan was to secretly train a small number of anti-Castro exiles for a guerrilla insurrection similar to the one Castro himself had mounted to seize power from Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista (see timeline, p. 18).

Preparations for the invasion coincided with the 1960 U.S. presidential election, which Democratic Senator John E Kennedy of Massachusetts won. He was inaugurated in 1961 and inherited the Cuba invasion plans.

By then, Castro had beefed up his armed forces with weapons from the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, so the C.I.A. called for a larger invasion force and an amphibious landing somewhere on the coast...