Bay of Pigs Invasion
The U.S. has never been the perfect by any means but we keep trying for perfection nonetheless. One of those stories that shows the US messing up is the incident in Cuba called the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The story is of the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs is one of mismanagement, overconfidence, and lack of security. The blame for the failure of the operation falls directly in the lap of the Central Intelligence Agency and a young president and his advisors. The fall out from the invasion caused a rise in tension between the two great superpowers the, US and The Soviet Union and ironically 34 years after the event, the person that the invasion meant to topple, Fidel Castro, is still in power. To understand the origins of the invasion and its ramifications for the future it is first necessary to look at the invasion and its origins. The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 started a few days before on April 15th with the bombing of Cuba by what appeared to be defecting Cuban air force pilots. At 6 a.m. in the morning of that Saturday, B-26 bombers bombed three Cuban military bases. The airfields at Camp Libertad, San Antonio de los Baoos and Antonio Maceo airpo
The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was caused by misinformation and mismanagement, the consequences of that was egg in the face for the Americans and an increase in tension between the superpowers at the height of the cold war. We will only have to wait and see if the Americans have really learned their lesson and will not miss another opportunity to set things right in Cuba. As for senior White House aides, most of them disagreed with the plan as well, but Rusk says that Kennedy went with what the CIA had to say. As for himself, he said that he "did not serve President Kennedy very well and that he should have voiced his opposition louder. He concluded that I should have made my opposition clear in the meetings themselves because he [Kennedy] was under pressure from those who wanted to proceed."(Flynn pg. 4) When faced with biased information from the CIA and quiet advisors, it is no wonder that the president decided to go ahead with the operation. The second problem was the nature of the bureaucracy itself. The CIA was a new kid on the block and still felt that it had to prove itself, it saw its opportunity in Cuba. Obsessed with secrecy, it kept the number of people involved to a minimum. The intelligence wing of CIA was kept out of it; their Board of National Estimates could have provided information on the situation in Cuba and the chances for an uprising against Castro once the invasion started. Also kept out of the loop were the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff who could have provided help on the military side of the adventure. In the end, the CIA kept all the information for itself and passed on to the president only what it thought he should see. Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, in Political Science Quarterly of 1984, based his analysis of the Bay of Pigs failure on organizational behavior theory. He says that the CIA " supplied President Kennedy and his advisers with chosen reports on the unreliability of ! After the initial bombing raid of April 15th, and the landing of the B-26s in Florida, pictures of the planes were taken and published in newspapers. In the photo of one of the planes, the nose of it is opaque whereas the model of the B-26 the Cubans really used had a Plexiglas nose, Castro's forces and the extent of Cuban dissent." Of the CIA's behavior he concludes that,
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Approximate Word count = 4063
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page double spaced)
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