“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

By J.J. Valdés

APRIL marks the 64th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. The failed 1961 invasion of Cuba was launched to topple Fidel Castro from power. During the intervening decades, no fewer than 20 books in English alone have been published about the operation.

For all the truthful information contained in these works, a good number of enduring myths appear in the pages. Many are doubtlessly unintentional, the result of incomplete knowledge or unrecognized misinformation carried forward by sequential writers. Others, however, decidedly stem from the deliberate seeding of disinformation by parties involved.

Let’s explore four such myths based on research documented in my recently published book about the invasion.

Exposing these false narratives is historically important because, as President John F. Kennedy himself underscored some months following the invasion: “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

MYTH 1 — A change in the target area doomed the operation

On January 28, 1961—barely two months into his term— Kennedy received his first official briefing on a planned, covert invasion of Cuba by exiles from that country.

The plan presented to him, which the CIA had developed under the Eisenhower administration, called for an amphibious and airborne assault on the small coastal city of Trinidad (population 20,000) in south-central Cuba.

Six weeks later, on March 11, Kennedy vetoed the Trinidad plan as “too spectacular.” In his mind, it resembled a World War II-type of amphibious assault which would have led many to suspect American involvement. The alternative plan he requested shifted the spot chosen to land troops to the Bay of Pigs: a rural, swamp-bordered region some 80 miles from Trinidad.

“[One of the] things . . . that virtually ensured the failure of the mission to remove Castro from power [was] the substitution of the Bay of Pigs for Trinidad as the invasion site,” said Albert Persons, an American C-54 pilot hired by the CIA to fly support missions over Cuba from Nicaragua, the location of the rear base and launch area for the operation.

Person’s views are shared by many in the Cuban exile community.

“Trinidad was an ideal location,” writes Cuban-American historian Victor Triay in his oral history of the exile fighting force. “Its neighboring mountains were well suited for guerrilla operations if such became necessary.”

That’s not all, adds Triay.

“Trinidad’s . . . population was known for its opposition to Castro. Casilda, a few miles away, had excellent deep-water ports . . . [from which] to resupply the beachhead,” he said.

This is true. However, the “lost opportunity” argument implicit with these statements ignores that the same features that made Trinidad “ideal” for an amphibious frontal assault — good port facilities — also made it a prime site for the defenders.

As the CIA presumed, it was known in Cuba that an invasion was coming; only the size of the invasion force and the date and place(s) targeted for landings were unknown to the Cuban government.

The existence of exile training camps in Guatemala had been revealed as early as June 1960 by that country’s Workers’ Party. Indeed, the installations had been officially denounced by Cuba in the United Nations on October 7 of that year. Consequently, defensive positions were established at key coastal points considered likely landing places, especially those that, like Trinidad, provided access to mountainous areas in from the coast. The Trinidad area specifically had already been the site of a thwarted invasion in 1959—Castro’s first year in power—by his Dominican Republic archenemy, strongman Rafael Trujillo.

In December of 1960 a wide network of defensive trenches was constructed around Trinidad and considerable forces stationed there. These consisted of six militia battalions supported by mortars, bazookas, artillery, and anti-aircraft guns, plus three companies of tanks. Smaller units were also placed on the small cays dotting the entrance to the city’s bay. Thus, contrary to the persistent myth, whereas the landings in the virtually undefended Bay of Pigs area had met only limited initial resistance, at Trinidad the invaders would have faced devastating opposition right from the outset.

MYTH 2 — Kennedy made a reckless, impromptu change to the size of a crucial pre-invasion airstrike

The clearly identifiable source for this myth is Richard Bissell, Jr., CIA Deputy Director for Plans and the mastermind behind both the Trinidad and Bay of Pigs operations. Following the invasion’s collapse, Bissell—who once described himself as a “man-eating shark”—set about self-servingly rewriting history.

Although CIA estimates deemed Castro’s air force all but useless, still the invasion plan called for airstrikes on Cuban aviation bases concurrent with D-Day landings on April 17, as well as two days prior.

In Bissell’s version of events, when Kennedy phoned him on April 14 (the agreed upon deadline) to authorize the next day’s strikes, the president, “almost as an afterthought,” asked how many aircraft would be involved. At Bissell’s reply of “sixteen” (the total number available), Kennedy reportedly expressed his disapproval and said that he only wanted a “minimal” number. It was this conversation, said Bissell, that forced him to reduce the number of participating aircraft, thus curtailing the raid’s efficacy. Compounded by the subsequent cancellation of the D-Day airstrikes, the surviving Castro air force planes went on to wreak havoc with the invasion.

Bissell’s rewriting of history disingenuously omits that, given Kennedy’s insistence on making the operation seem like an internal uprising, at an April 12 White House meeting he had agreed to stage only “limited scale” airstrikes against Cuban bases. As revealed in the CIA’s official history of Bay of Pigs air operations, the number of Douglas B-26 Invaders (known in the Second World War as the A-26) allocated to the April 15 strikes had been set at six on the very day of Bissell’s meeting with Kennedy. Then, on April 14, under pressure from CIA personnel in Nicaragua, Bissell allowed two more bombers to participate. This information did not come to light, however, until the official history report was declassified in 2011, 17 years after Bissell’s death in 1994. Alas, his post-invasion interviews and personal memoir (published posthumously in 1996) remain inveterate sources of disinformation about Kennedy’s supposed impromptu and reckless change to the pre-invasion airstrikes.

MYTH 3 — The CIA purposefully stripped the bombers of their tail guns

The B-26s that engaged in missions over Cuba had to fly over five hours just to make the 1,150-mile round trip from and to Nicaragua. This vastly curtailed the amount of fuel left for them to loiter over targets. Hence, according to this often-repeated falsehood, the CIA removed the tail gun turrets from the B-26s it procured from U.S. Air Force inventory to reduce the aircraft’s weight as a fuel-saving measure. This left the bombers completely at the mercy of rear attacks by Castro’s fighters.

In truth, as documented in the Air Force Almanac for 1962, in the years since the Korean War the B-26s had returned to USAF inventory as counterinsurgency bombers and reconnaissance aircraft devoid of tail guns. It is therefore false that the CIA purposefully removed the tail gun turrets from the B-26s as the aircraft were acquired without them from the air force. This fact, acknowledged in the CIA’s official history of Bay of Pigs air operations, has escaped the attention of invasion chroniclers.

MYTH 4 — Castro was on scene to command Cuban forces

A famous photograph of El Comandante Castro leaping off a Soviet-made T-34 tank has become internationally emblematic of his supposed direct participation in the fighting against the invasion. The image appears on a medal awarded in Cuba to veterans of the battle as well as on any number of printed media, including a Topps American Pie trading card (#117).

“No commander since Erwin Rommel in World War II came so close to his troops in combat, and no ruler since Napoleon led and inspired his soldiers by personal example,” posits one admiring academic.

However, the chronology of Castro’s actions during the invasion, as derived from published sources within Cuba itself, does not support the lofty contention.

Castro arrived from Havana at a command post 16 miles from enemy-held territory around 5 p.m. on April 17, 17 hours after the landings had begun. At midnight, an offensive was launched against the beachhead while he stayed at the command post expecting a quick victory. Three hours later, with no encouraging news from the front, he wrote a note informing field commander José R. Fernández of his return to Havana “within the hour.”

Although the message gave no reason for his departure, Castro would forever afterward maintain that he had left due to a report of another landing near Havana. Yet, as witnessed and recorded by Luís Baez, a Cuban journalist and life-long loyalist, Castro had phoned his Havana headquarters earlier that night and been told that the report was baseless. Perhaps the approaching dawn, with its concomitant threat of air attacks, was the real reason for his departure. To this day, Baez’s reporting on the crucial phone call is generally unknown to invasion chroniclers and Castro’s purported reason for leaving the theater of operations is repeated as historical fact.

Castro’s return to the area took place after dark on the third day, when victory was imminent. On the afternoon of the following day, with the defeated invaders on the run throughout the swampy region, El Comandante—first from the T-34 tank of the famous photo and subsequently from an SU-100 tank destroyer—fired on the deserted cargo ship Houston. The vessel, part of the invasion fleet, had been attacked early on during the first day of the invasion by Castro’s planes. Forced to run aground to prevent its sinking, the smoldering Houston was then abandoned inside the Bay of Pigs.

Fidel Castro’s total time in the Bay of Pigs area during the battle amounted to less than a fifth of the 60 hours that it lasted. Nevertheless, until his death in 2016 (at age 90), he continued to promote the enduring myth that he had, in effect, commanded his forces from the battlefield.

Since the year 2000, the rural command post that he briefly occupied has been enshrined as a museum. “This was the site of Fidel’s command post during the battle [against the invasion],” a billboard at the site proclaims. A full-size picture of Castro in a commanding posture supplements the disingenuous proclamation.

J. J. Valdés is the author of Besieged Beachhead: The Cold War Battle for Cuba at the Bay of Pigs published by Globe Pequot. An alumnus of Boston University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he is a writer with over thirty years of experience in historical research for the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies. Born in Cuba, he came to the United States with his family in the 1960s.