Cuban, American Veterans Remember Bay of Pigs

H A V A N A, Cuba, March 22 -- This time there was no invasion, just an invitation.

Forty years after the Bay of Pigs invasion, the former adversaries, American and Cuban, have come together for a conference in Havana, the Cuban capital.

Old soldiers, spies and politicians gathered to relive the historic battle, which was a fiasco for the American-backed Cuban emigres who were hoping to overthrow Fidel Castro.

As the American delegates arrived by plane, they were greeted by their former foes.

"Very glad having you here," said Jose Ramon Fernandez to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Fernandez was the field commander of Castro's troops, who successfully repelled the 1961 attack. Schlesinger was an adviser to U.S. President John F. Kennedy, who had ordered the attack. (Schlesinger himself had been one of the few in the White House to oppose the invasion.)

Bahia de Cochinos

The invasion was an unmitigated disaster for the attackers. On April 17, 1961, 1,500 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs (Bahia de Cochinos in Spanish).

The exiles had been secretly trained for the invasion by the CIA, but the mission went wrong from the start. Supplies were lost at sea, the wrong ammunition was dropped from the air, and the battle itself was a tragedy, with almost 300 dead and more than 1,000 taken prisoner.

The Cubans had known the attack was coming. "It was not a surprise," Fernandez said. "It was very badly done."

Schlesinger agreed: "The whole thing was ludicrous. It was badly conceived and badly carried out."

What happened at the Bay of Pigs explains a lot about the deadlock in Cuban-American relations to this day. The battle was much more than a humiliating American defeat. It was also the foundation of 40 years of distrust.

Sharing Secrets

As the conference got under way today, thousands of pages of classified documents were released from both sides. This was an idea so new in Cuba that Cubans had to specially make a stamp that reads desclasificado (declassified).