A Force of Anti-Castro Cubans Land at the Bay of Pigs on the Southwestern Coast: April 17, 1961
- Catholic Textbook Project
- Apr 13
- 5 min read
This text comes from our book, The American Venture.
The 1950s was a time when European colonies in Africa and Asia were loosening themselves from their European masters to form their own independent states. While in some places this was done peacefully, insurgent violence beset other regions—such as French Indochina in East Asia, where, in 1954, Communist Vietnamese rebels defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Winning its independence, Vietnam was divided into two states: an autocratic republic in the south and a Communist dictatorship in the north. When North Vietnam opened a guerrilla war against the south, Eisenhower sent military advisers and supplies to South Vietnam. By the time Kennedy took office, the number of American military personnel in Vietnam had grown to 3,000. Kennedy expanded the American presence, sending “Green Berets” as a special counter-insurgency force to South Vietnam.
Closer to home, in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara led a revolution against the brutal dictator, Fulgencio Batista. It was not long before the small rebel force swelled with peasant recruits as well as members of the urban middle class. On New Year’s Day, 1959, Batista fled Havana, and Castro took over the reins of government.
Castro had called for an end to political imprisonment, restoration of popular elections, a congress, a free press, and the division and distribution of large land holdings among peasant farmers. Gradually, however, he began to move towards Communism. When Castro, ruling as sole dictator, began confiscating sugar plantations and major industrial holdings (many owned by Americans), President Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba and forbade Americans to trade with the island. Then in 1961, Castro proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist. Besides not fulfilling any of his revolutionary pledges—Cuba had no elections, no congress was formed, the peasants did not receive land holdings but were sent to work on communal farms—Castro closed Catholic churches. The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, then extended credit to Cuba and agreed to buy the island’s chief commodity, its sugar crop, thus cementing an alliance between Cuba and the Communist bloc of nations.
Like Eisenhower, Kennedy wanted Castro driven out of Cuba. Trained by the CIA, a force of anti-Castro Cubans in April 1961 landed at the Bay of Pigs on the southwestern coast of Cuba. Their hope to foment a revolution was disappointed, however, for Castro was still popular, and the invasion was crushed by the Cuban army and air force. The failure for the Bay of Pigs fiasco fell squarely on Kennedy, who publicly took the blame for it.
Then by early fall of 1962, the U.S. government learned that the Russians, who had been sending military personnel to Cuba, were building missile sites on the island. Though the Russian ministers said the missile sites were purely for Cuba’s defense, American intelligence had shown that they were emplacements for nuclear missiles and would thus place major American cities in the range of nuclear destruction. Kennedy demanded their removal. He placed a naval “quarantine” around the island to block ships carrying missiles to Cuba. (This was really a blockade, but because a blockade is an act of war, Kennedy called it a quarantine.) Kennedy, too, hinted that if the Soviets did not dismantle the missile sites, the U.S. would launch a missile strike on Cuba.
The U.S., thus, put its nuclear armed B-52 bombers on the alert, along with submarines armed with Polaris missiles. ICBMs were made ready, while the army, navy, and marines were mobilized in Florida and in the Gulf ports. For a few tense days the world waited, wondering if it stood on the brink of the long-dreaded nuclear war. Khrushchev, however, no more wanted such a confrontation than Kennedy did. On October 26, the Soviet premier offered to evacuate the missiles if Kennedy agreed not to invade Cuba. The next day, he included a demand for the removal of the American missile emplacement in Turkey, where nuclear warheads targeted Soviet cities with destruction. Kennedy responded by saying he would publicly agree not to invade Cuba and confided that he had already decided to remove the American missiles from Turkey. So ended the “Cuban Missile Crisis.”
The Cuban missile crisis was not the first indication of decaying relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. There was the question of West Berlin, which Khrushchev wanted united with Communist East Berlin and placed under an international force that included the Soviets. Kennedy, however, refused these demands. Khrushchev’s motive in these demands was to stop the fleeing of East Germans into West Berlin; since 1949, some three million had crossed from East Berlin into the western sector. Having failed at uniting East and West Berlin, Khrushchev settled on another expedient to stop the leakage of Germans from the East—a wall. On August 13, 1961, the Soviets began the construction of the Berlin Wall, to cut East Berlin off from all contact with free West Berlin. The wall would remain a poignant symbol of the Iron Curtain until it was torn down 28 years later, when the Soviet Union fell.
The space race between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. intensified under Kennedy. In April 1961, the Soviets became the first to send a manned spacecraft around the earth. The United States responded a month later by rocketing its first “astronaut,” Alan Shepard, into space. Then on February 20, 1962, American astronaut John Glenn orbited the earth three times in five hours. After a Russian satellite photographed the dark side of the moon, Congress acted. With President Kennedy’s support, the House and Senate voted to spend more money on what was dubbed “Project Apollo.” Kennedy promised that Project Apollo would send a man to the moon.
The Cuban Missile Crisis did not end the serious threat posed by the nuclear arms race. Before the crisis, in August 1961, Khrushchev had broken a verbal agreement he had made with Eisenhower and resumed testing of nuclear bombs that involved exploding them in the open atmosphere. On April 25, 1962, Kennedy followed suit and ordered first the resumption of underground nuclear tests and then of atmospheric tests in April 1962.
The Americans and the Soviets had been talking about how to ban atmospheric tests since the late 1950s. Public fears over the effects of radiation fallout from such tests encouraged such talks. A ban was also seen as a way to slow Soviet progress in developing more effective and powerful weapons. Though talks broke down in 1960, the next year, both sides reached an informal agreement to halt atmospheric testing. Test ban talks, however, then stalled.
The failure to achieve a nuclear test ban treaty seemed to promise an endless nuclear arms race between the superpowers—a prospect President Kennedy dreaded. Kennedy favored a limited test ban treaty (“limited” because it would only ban atmospheric tests)—but how could the U.S. and the Soviets achieve it? It was Khrushchev’s message ending the Cuban Missile Crisis that gave Kennedy hope. Alluding to the test ban treaty, the Soviet leader had suggested that “perhaps now, we can step back from danger, we can together make real progress.”
Nevertheless, the road to achieving the treaty held obstacles. The U.S. allies, France and Germany, opposed such a treaty. Khrushchev faced opposition within his own government and the scorn of Communist China if it appeared he was giving in to the United States. To break the stalemate, Kennedy made a decisive move. In a speech he gave at American University in Washington, D.C., on June 10, 1963, the president signaled his support for a test ban treaty. Less than a month later, on July 2, Khrushchev announced that he too was ready to sign such a treaty.
On August 5, 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain met in Moscow and signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Approved by the Senate, the treaty was signed by President Kennedy on October 7, 1963. It went into effect three days later.
Thus John Kennedy and Khrushchev took the first step along the path of détente between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
