65 years ago this week on April 17th, 1961 the United States launched a military invasion against the sovereign revolutionary island of Cuba. The events are known as the “Bay Of Pigs Invasion”, when Cuba defeated the empire’s attempts at regime change in just three days. For these 65 years, many in the U.S. have tried to rewrite, downplay or erase this history, because an empire and its lackeys never like to admit defeat.
The ruling class in Cuba prior to the revolution was mainly the colonizer class of private capital: sugar and tobacco plantation owners, factory owners, slumlords; powerful families with Miami-connected, mob-tied gambling, drug, and human trafficking operations. People who had built their wealth on exploitation, slavery, and colonial violence particularly against African and rural populations. Administered and maintained by the brutal U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. All of this is quite similar to the U.S., though at a smaller scale, of course.
After the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, many in this class packed up their families and fled just 90 miles away to Miami, Florida. As one can understand based on an understanding of this class, most of those who fled were white, European Cubans, and the U.S. government welcomed them with open arms and special state assistance programs. Not out of compassion, but out of strategy and an essential comradery among colonizers.
During this time the C.I.A had already begun recruiting, funding, arming, and training many of these Cuban exiles. Following the mass exile they developed a paramilitary force known as “Brigade 2506” with over 1,400 of these extremist Cuban zealots, furious about their land, factories, properties, and industries being nationalized and redistributed to the masses.
Brigade 2506 was not some ragtag operation. These men were a very resourced terror cell, receiving high level training across the Black Belt South at U.S. military and CIA sites.
These counter-revolutionaries received tank and combat training from the U.S. Special Forces at Fort Benning, here in Georgia, and Fort Knox in Kentucky. They practiced underwater demolition and amphibious assault with Special Forces and Air Force specialists off the coast near New Orleans, Louisiana. Flight and aircraft gunnery training of the Brigade’s aircrews took place off the coast of Guatemala, led by generals from the Alabama Air National Guard. Boating skills and underwater (amphibious) invasions were practiced at occupied Vieques, Puerto Rico.
This wasn’t some small operation but an institution-wide conspiracy involving hundreds of participants, with the excited approval of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. To this point, the CIA even purchased cargo ships from a Cuban-owned company in Miami and placed the markings of the Guatemalan Air Force on bomber-jets owned by the U.S. military, all ‘processed’ in Okaloosa County, Florida. They did this specifically to maintain a so-called ‘plausible deniability’, the ability to deny outright involvement in the clearly illegal activities.
This is how Western Empires, especially the U.S., have always operated: never with honesty and always with trickery, deceit, loopholes, bribery, and violence.
When it came for the final air assault and invasion, codenamed “Mad Dog Flight”, four of the five bomber planes were flown by U.S. CIA contract pilots and members of the Alabama Air National Guard. So let’s be clear, this was a U.S. military operation through and through.
On April 15th, 1961, eight B-26 bombers owned by the CIA and piloted by Cuban Exiles, launched a surprise attack on three Cuban Air Force Fields, San Antonio de Los Baños, and Santiago de Cuba. The goal of this attack was to destroy Castro’s air capabilities through bombing, leaving only eight planes and seven pilots left to defend their country After these attacks, extremists left from the shores of Nicaragua and Norfolk, Virginia heading toward Cuba in the secrecy of the night.
On April 17th, 1961, these terrorist U.S. forces landed on the southwestern coast of Cuba called the Bay of Pigs, which is located in Matanzas, Cuba. They expected the Cuban people to essentially rise up and join them in this out of nowhere invasion. And they expected through this for the revolution to just crumble.
They were very, very wrong. When the five merchant ships carrying over 1400 extremist terrorist Cuban exiles arrived at the Bay of Pigs, they were met with the might of both the Cuban armed forces and civilian militias. Two of the U.S. ships were sunk.
Including the ship that was carrying most of the food and supplies and weaponry, and two of the planes that were attempting to give air cover to these ships were also shot down even despite the depleted nature of Cuba’s Air Force. The Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, met them head on, and the Cuban people did not waver.
Within just 72 hours or three days, the invasion was crushed decisively, and the surviving invader surrendered on April 20th. Most of them were publicly interrogated in the Cuban court system and then imprisoned. This was, y’all a completely humiliating defeat for the United States. Not too dissimilar to the humiliating defeat that we’ve seen in West Asia over the last few weeks for the United States and the Zionist against their assault on Iran.
This was one of the most decisive foreign policy failures in U.S. history at this time, and it was a defining victory for Cuba and for the Cuban Revolution.
Fidel Castro himself put it plainly in a speech when he said, “Our position is that we will fight to the last man, but we do not want direct aggression. We do not wish to suffer the destruction that aggression would bring. If the aggression comes, it will meet the total resistance of our people.”
And he says that the U.S. was, “bringing the world to the brink of war through their war-like spirit, their own contradictions and their economic problems. The U.S. factories only ran when they were building war materials and their regime was marching towards crisis.”
Now, 65 years later, does any of that sound. Familiar. Does that seem relevant to you?
As a show of good faith, the following year, in December, 1962, many of the Cuban extremists who stormed the beach were actually freed from Cuban jails and returned to the U.S., despite Cuba having no reason to do so at all.
And despite the principle actions of the Cubans, they would still be plagued for decades to come with over 600 assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and a 60 year long history of attempts at invasions, hotel bombings, kidnappings, literal kidnappings of Cuban children, political prisoners from Cuba being held in U.S. dungeons, the destruction of Cuban infrastructure, biological warfare against Cuban agriculture, economic warfare by the U.S. blockade and a string of terror attacks all sponsored by the us.
And so the Bay of Pigs didn’t just solidify the power of the Cuban Revolution. It emboldened liberation movements across Latin America and the global South, and proved that a small Caribbean nation standing on principles and the will of its people could face down the most powerful empire in the world, and perhaps in history and win. That’s not just Cuban history, that’s world history, and it’s a lesson that remains as urgent today as it was in April of 1961.
The Relevance For Today’s Imperialist Assault
This anniversary lands in the middle of a live threat against the island by the U.S.. On January 29th, the Trump Administration imposed an oil blockade on Cuba, threatening tariffs or warfare on any country that supplied fuel to the island. After kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Cuba’s primary oil partner, the administration attempted to sever the island’s energy lifeline bringing total blackouts and dire desperation. Cuba endured three months without receiving diesel, fuel oil, gasoline, or liquefied petroleum.
In response, international solidarity mobilized and by late March, the ‘Nuestra América Convoy’ delivered over 40 tons of aid, medicine, and solar panels from 33 countries. When the U.S. delegation returned home, dozens were detained and interrogated by Customs and Border Protection, many having their devices seized.
Meanwhile, President Trump has said publicly that he’d have “the honor of taking Cuba” and that Cuba is “next” once they are “finished” with their imperialist assault in West Asia against Iran. These statements were made at a billionaire investment summit in Miami on March 27th while the U.S.-Zionist war against Iran continues daily fragrant human rights violations. At the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has refused to rule out regime change, allegedly held secret back-channel talks with counter-revolutionary extremist groups, and seems to be on a full media campaign for U.S. invasion.
When Rubio and others speak and make bogus claims about the Cuban government, of course, they are unchallenged by the capitalist press corps, who prefer to help invent the reality of warfare than challenge it. This is most recently noted in Cuban President Díaz-Canel’s first-ever interview on U.S. television, in which reporter Kirsten Welker disrespectfully asks if he’d “step down to save Cuba.” Such a bizarre and disrespectful question assumes the supremacy of U.S. foreign policy demands, overlooks international law, and reinforces a narrative that Díaz-Canel is somehow “resisting” some kind of demand from the U.S.. She of course never asks, as no mainstream capitalist media pundits ever do, why the U.S. somehow has the right to decide the leadership of other nations.
Sixty-five years after the Bay of Pigs, the playbook hasn’t changed, and we may be watching it re-materialize stronger than before. The Trump administration clearly has its eyes set on “taking” Cuba, but even in the midst of blockades, destabilization, and potential invasion, the Cuban President and thousands more reaffirmed that they refuse to give up their sovereignty to become a slave to the U.S.. We must remain extra vigilant now, and build solidarity movements to stop the empire at its heels. Cuba is still standing, because aquí no se rinde nadie.