The Bay of Pigs

February 18, 2008

PLAYA GIRON - "The invasion of the American mercenaries is very important in our history, but there aren't many people now in the village who remember it," Julio said. "Giron has grown a lot since then. There were only a few houses here at the time. It was much smaller. My mother remembers the invasion and she remembers how the hotel by the sea was flattened by bombing, But I was very young at the time."

Playa Giron stands almost at the mouth of what we know in English as the Bay of Pigs. It's hard to overestimate the significance of the place for Cuba, since the invasion was not only repelled - "Primera derrota del imperialismo Yanqui en America Latina" according to Castro and the billboard at the site - but it led Cuba to ask the Soviet Union for protection against further incursions and from there to the Cuban missile crisis. It also led to more rather than less support for Castro - the CIA had predicted a popular uprising once the landing had happened - and the USA's promise never to invade again installed Castro even more firmly in control. For those who planned the events of 14 April 1961, things couldn't have gone more wrong.

The road to the coast from Jagüey Grande was dead flat. It ran through marshlands and nature reserves where spike-leaved bushes marked our way and horses and sheep grazed on short grass and vultures sat on posts and watched us with a professional eye. There were flamingos, too, although not the flocks of 10,000 that the area has known. It would be easy for Cuba to overdo what they, too, could have seen as their "day of infamy" but there's a feeling that time has moved on and that the area is now more concerned with looking forward, with concentrating on preserving nature - including crocodiles - than in reviving mixed feelings about the past. Mixed feelings because, of course, what Cuba calls simply "La Victoria" was achieved at the cost of many more Cubans than Americans dead. Their memorials, curiously cold and uniform and clumsy things, dot the side of the road where they fell.

The road to the coast is dotted by standard, though strangely cold, memorials to those who fell while defending their land.

There are also billboards, more in the style of information panels than outright gloating, showing where the "mercenaries" were rounded up in mass. One poster shows dejected American soldiers being led away to captivity by Cuban soldiers who look barely any different. Which is hardly surprising since, while the invasion army was trained, led and accompanied by professional American soldiers, those who leapt into the water and waded ashore to lead a popular revolt that never came were all Cuban. They were the Cubans who had fled to Florida and elsewhere when the Castro revolution nationalised their holdings in 1959. Aggrieved by how things turned out, they were easily organised into an invading army.

Cuba refers to them not as "Americans" but as "mercenaries", a word which has a polite linguistic distinction but which, I wondered, could also hint at a bitterness of treachery. Those who weren't killed were all rounded up in 72 hours. The CIA, it seemed, hadn't thought that if it could see the flat and remote area of the Bay of Pigs as a good invasion site, then so would have the Cuban army. But it was worse than that; not only had Castro, who knew a bit about invasions and guerilla fighting, personally spotted the potential while touring his new country but his spies in America had tipped him off that the mercenaries were coming.

American "mercenaries" head for captivity.

The questioning of prisoners, a two-room museum dedicated to Playa Giron's role explained, was shown on television for hours. It was all in Spanish, of course, and many people must have recognised former neighbours, employers and even friends.

Outside the little museum at Playa Giron, aircraft and tanks that fought off the invasion.

"The social composition of the mercenary brigade," said a panel in the museum, "revealed the interests that they hoped to re-establish. An analysis of prisoners demonstrated that 800 of them, or their families, had owned 370,628 hectares of land, 9,666 houses or buildings, 70 factories, 10 sugar refineries, five mines and two banks. They also included 135 soldiers of the tyrant Batista, and 65 criminals among whom were three known murderers and torturers."

They were exchanged for a promise of millions of dollars of medicine and medical supplies that had been denied because of the American embargo, although the US government didn't ask for the body of an American professional pilot shot down in the raid because it proved, according to the Cuban government, that while the troops may have been hired hands with a motive, the shadows behind the events were Washington's. The body was eventually sent back when Jimmy Carter became president.

The wrecks of American ships in the bay of Playa Giron are now the delight of scuba-divers. Those who don't stay in the hotel by the beach can be taken there in buses somewhat more ancient than the history of the place.

Our road there followed the bay almost all the way, with views of a deep blue ocean, my first sight of the Caribbean. The water lay languidly until the wind began to blow. Who knows how many millions of years ago, a small area of rock collapsed into an underground fault and created a hole of an average depth of 70 metres. At half that depth, a tunnel opened from the hole into the sea and water rushed in under what is now the roadway.

The earth fell and the sea rushed in, creating an idyllic pool 70 metres deep.

Through it to this day swim brightly coloured fish never seen in Europe outside aquariums. One, a light bright blue, shaped like a rugby ball, appeared to have a silly grin that curved up the height of both cheeks. Another, shorter and more cylindrical, had learned over the years that most predators attack from the rear and they had developed bright yellow patches in the shape of bright, tiger-like eyes, complete with pupils.

Brightly coloured fish of the sort never seen in northern Europe outside an aquarium

We swam in the pool, which was free and so little signposted that you had to know it was there, and then enjoyed the antics - and noise - of a party of Cubans who arrived after us after a bus journey long enough to have half-emptied the rum bottles that they carried with them.

Cubans do not, as was said of the British, take their pleasures sadly. Two Cubans can create enough happy noise for 20. Two dozen rum-filled Cubans... Well, you can do the sums for yourself. The total, in any case, was enough for a severe German woman whose peace in other people's country had been disturbed by the arrival of those very people to roll her eyes to the sky and turn up her nose and stomp off to the calm of the small bar. Nothing worse than foreigners being happy in their own land, is there?

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