A Predictable Disaster at The Bay of Pigs
On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces successfully overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. The Batista government was unpopular, and many average Cubans welcomed Castro’s rise to power. However, there was a faction of Cubans that deeply resented the ouster of Batista by the impudent upstart Castro, and many of these people fled Cuba for destinations like the United States.
Castro had a long list of grievances against the United States for its historical meddling in Cuban affairs and sought redress by nationalizing private property primarily owned by American corporations. Moving further, Castro established ties with other socialist governments and aided and abetted socialist revolutions in the region.
All of this was quite distressing to the United States’ Eisenhower administration, which quickly imposed economic sanctions and cut off diplomatic ties with the Castro regime. Secretly, in 1960, the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency, tasked the CIA to begin plans to invade the island nation to remove the troublesome Castro.
In January 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President of the United States and inherited the Cuban situation and plans to invade. The Kennedy administration gave the scheme the green light, and a CIA-funded group of 1,400 disgruntled Cuban dissidents and counter-revolutionaries began their operation to free Cuba.
On April 15, three invasion force planes bombed Cuban military air strips, and two days later, the full brunt of the free Cuba forces landed on the island, with the bulk of the insertion at Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs, along the south-central shore. From the beginning, the invasion was a disaster. Castro’s forces of 20,000 troops vastly outnumbered the invaders and quickly routed the attackers. Within two days, Cuban forces took 1,100 dissident fighters prisoner, and the CIA-funded invasion ground to a humiliating stop.
Many fingers were pointing at who to blame in the aftermath of this political and military disaster. Was it the US military? CIA? Or even the President himself? Weeks later, President Kennedy told journalist Hugh Sidey[1],
“I want to know how all this could have happened. There were 50 or so of us, presumably the most experienced and smartest people we could get, to plan such an operation. Most of us thought it would work. I know there are some men now saying they were opposed from the start. I wasn’t aware of any great opposition. Even Bill Fulbright [Senator, who later claimed to have heatedly protested the invasion plans] was not so outspoken as he claimed. After the last briefing which he attended, he took me aside and told me he could see there was a lot more to this plan than he had realized.
But five minutes after it began to fall in, we all looked at each other and asked, ‘How could we have been so stupid?’ When we saw the wide range of the failures we asked ourselves why it had not been apparent to somebody from the start. I guess you get walled off from reality when you want something to succeed too much.”
In the book “A Hero for Our Time,” Kennedy, in response to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s statement,
“We could have recommended against it, and we didn’t.”,
suggesting that blame should be shared amongst many people in the administration, said,
“Absolutely not. I am the president. I could have decided otherwise. It is my responsibility.”
Although this was an ignominious start to his administration, Kennedy was quick to learn the lessons from the botched attack and was able to apply these learnings to the Cuban Missile Crisis just 18 months later.
Insight and Application
Although Kennedy inherited a moving juggernaut of invasion planning, in hindsight, he realized that there were several things that he had failed to do to assess the situation and verify the validity and practicality of the strategy.
First, military brass was highly confident of the invasion strategy, which should give anyone new to the idea pause for deliberation. Kennedy failed to challenge his military commanders on the plan and demand they provide him with victory and failure scenarios.
Second, it was evident that many of the people privy to the invasion decision did not speak their minds on the practicality of the invasion and chose to remain quiet, going along with the scheme. Critical reasoning was suspended, and groupthink reigned supreme.
Finally, the invasion of Cuba was a single plan presented for execution. The absence of alternate plans disallowed conscious deliberation of different strategies for regime change. Eighteen months later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy demanded and received multiple strategies for consideration, allowing for a well thought out de-escalation of the standoff by the world’s foremost nuclear powers.
In the Catholic Church, during the canonization process to declare someone a saint, officials will appoint someone to the role of advocatus diaboli, or Devil’s advocate, for the express purpose of arguing against the conferment of sainthood. The Devil’s advocate’s job is to look for reasons not to confer sainthood to the candidate and to oppose God’s advocate’s arguments in favour of sainthood. By deliberately considering both sides of the debate, the Church approaches its decisions on who will be granted sainthood with much greater clarity. Leaders would be wise to do the same.
[1] http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,106537,00.html
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