Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova

Author:Humberto Fontova [Fontova, Humberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Politics, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781596988224
Amazon: B009W1UOD6
Barnesnoble: B009W1UOD6
Goodreads: 17045815
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2005-02-24T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

OPERATION CUBAN FREEDOM—NOT!

“Freedom is our goal,” roared Pepe San Roman to the men he commanded. “Cuba is our cause. God is on our side. On to victory!”1

Fifteen hundred men crowded before San Roman at their Guatemalan training camps that day. The next day they’d embark for a port in Nicaragua, the following day for a landing site in Cuba called Bahia de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. Their outfit was known as Brigada 2506, and at their commander’s address the men erupted in cheers.

Every man in Brigada 2506 was a volunteer. They included men from every social stratum and race in Cuba—from sugarcane planters to sugarcane cutters, from aristocrats to their chauffeurs, and everything in between; some were family men, some were teenagers. Only a hundred of these volunteers had military backgrounds, but their gung-ho attitude impressed their American trainers, who were veterans of Omaha Beach, Bastogne, Corregidor, Inchon, and Iwo Jima.

Only two days later, one of these men, air chief Reid Doster, learned that the Kennedy administration had canceled the scheduled airstrikes. “What? Are they nuts? There goes the whole f—ing war!”2

First off, the administration’s Best and Brightest nixed the original landing site at Trinidad. This coastal town a hundred miles east of the Bay of Pigs was originally chosen by the CIA and military men because it was a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment. Rebellions had started there three months after Castro’s takeover in January 1959. Also, the nearby Escambray mountains crawled with anti-Communist guerrillas who would join the invaders, and the local militia were known to be disloyal to the Reds. A concentration camp holding six thousand anti-Communist prisoners was located right outside Trinidad. The planned invasion supplies included weapons for them. Just as important, only two major roads led to Trinidad from the north, so any Castro troops moving in would have been sitting ducks for the Brigada’s air force.

But landing in a populated area like Trinidad was deemed “too noisy” by the New Frontiersmen. They had a fetish about hiding America’s role in the invasion. So, back to the drawing board for the planners—who returned with a landing site at the Bay of Pigs, a desolate swamp. This was worse from a military standpoint but had a good chance of success—given total air superiority and the complete obliteration of Castro’s air force. This was stressed by the military and CIA planners, just as it’s stressed here by me.

JFK’s civilian wizards further demanded that the invasion take place at night. (That way nobody would notice it, you see.) The military planners gaped. From Operation Torch in North Africa through Normandy through Saipan and Okinawa through Inchon—nothing like this had ever been attempted. All those took place at dawn.

No matter. The Knights of Camelot had spoken.

Amazingly, the initial landing went fairly well. The beachhead and an airstrip were secured in the first few hours. Castro’s soldiers were falling back, others surrendering, many others switching sides. “So many were surrendering I was actually worried!” says my cousin Alberto “Pilo” Fontova.

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