Sixty years after Bay of Pigs, Biden can find opportunity in Cuba after decades of policy failures
Sixty years after Bay of Pigs, Biden can find opportunity in Cuba after decades of policy failures | Opinion
BY KATARINA WONG
APRIL 15, 2021 03:30 PM
On the night of April 17, 1961, the CIA-backed Brigade 2506 reached the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern shore. The intention was to overthrow Fidel Castro’s socialist government and install as interim leader José Miró Cardona, a former member of Castro’s government and the head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a pro-democracy exile group.
The brigade was quickly met by 20,000 of Castro’s forces. Two days later, the operation was resoundingly quashed. In this humiliating defeat, more than 100 brigade members were killed and almost 1,200 surrendered. As Michael Bustamante writes in his newly published book, “The Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile,” “regardless of the later debates about the plan’s execution, at base, the idea that 1,500 men would be met as liberators and initiate the toppling of a government still backed by the better part of a population of 6 million remained an inherently faulty premise.”
Since then, the United States has continued its antagonism. For more than 60 years, the trade embargo has not only cut off commerce between our countries, the United States also makes it difficult for other countries to take up the slack by threatening to levy sanctions or fines against them for trading with Cuba. Isolation may have been a tactic intended to force the island’s government into submission, but it’s only led Cuba to make alliances with China, Venezuela and the USSR — and now again with Russia — that generally don’t care about American interests and, at times, work against them. In addition, the Cuban government set up a network of shell companies to further circumvent the embargo, which it relies on “based on how much pressure it is getting from Washington,” according to a recent Miami Herald story.
In the meantime, millions of Cuban citizens are caught in the crosshairs of this toxic stalemate. Although I was born in the United States after the Bay of Pigs, I’ve traveled regularly to Cuba since 1979 to visit my family there and have seen firsthand the impact of the embargo on Cubans. Our trips aren’t vacations spent on beaches sipping daiquiris. They are the only way we can bring necessities — clothing, food, medicine, mobile phones, memory sticks, appliances — to relatives who live in a country where ration cards are still used.
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