Bay of Pigs and Realism
A Perfect Disaster: The Bay of Pigs Invasion and Realism D-Day, April 17, 1960; Brigade 2506 lands in the Bay of Pigs, a small beach in southern Cuba. Backed by former president Dwight Eisenhower, endorsed by current president John F. Kennedy, and masterminded by the Central Intelligence Agency, the plan to overthrow Fidel Castro, Prime Minister of Cuba, had been months in the making (Dunne 1). By the summer of 1959, as former Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista was overtaken by Castro, charges of communist takeover in Cuba were rampant in Washington, especially in Congress (Dunne 5). With the United States embroiled in the Cold War, a largely ideological battle between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States, the United States’ adopted a policy of containment, in hopes of preventing the spread of communism to the Western Hemisphere. Once communism had spread to Cuba, with Castro being largely influenced by the Soviet Union, the United States had quietly decided to take action to remove Castro from office (Jones 13). As noted in Joshua Sandman’s article, Analyzing Foreign Policy Crisis Situations: The Bay Of Pigs, the CIA pushed forward in planning, as Cuba began receiving large shipments of arms from the Soviet Union (3). As plans for the invasion came together, relations between the two countries slowly deteriorated, culminating on that fateful day when Brigade 2506 landed in Cuba. As Howard Jones notes in his book The Bay of Pigs, “a series of events strongly suggested Castro’s allegiance to communism,” including Castro’s forcing of US interests out of Cuba, the expropriation of one billion dollars in US companies, and Castro’s increasing military and economic relationship with the Soviet Union (10). As Castro’s anti-American and pro-Soviet actions continued, American interests in Cuba began endangered and thus prompted the Eisenhower administration, along with the CIA, to begin plotting a propaganda campaign in Cuba and Latin America against