{"id":24384,"date":"2021-07-20T11:38:50","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T11:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jazairhope.org\/?p=24384"},"modified":"2021-07-20T17:03:12","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T17:03:12","slug":"24384","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jazairhope.org\/en\/24384\/","title":{"rendered":"From Bay of Pigs to War of Sands"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year marks the 60th anniversary of one of the greatest disasters in the history of American intelligence, the Bay of Pigs. A poorly designed operation to oust the Soviet-aligned Cuban leader Fidel Castro, it was an early fiasco for the new U.S. President John F. Kennedy \u2014 but one he learned a great deal from, as later events would show. It also helped lead to Castro\u2019s first deployment of Cuban troops abroad, in North Africa in 1963.<\/p>\n

I had the good fortune to have as my advisor in college at Brown University the former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, Lyman Kirkpatrick, who authored the agency\u2019s post-mortem on the Bay of Pigs failure. It was\u00a0so devastating that all copies were recalled<\/a>. It showed that the American planners of the April 1961 invasion by a few hundred Cuban anti-communists had just assumed that if the invaders got into trouble on the beach fighting the much larger Cuban army, then JFK would send in the Marines and Navy to defeat Castro, turning a covert operation into a war. Kennedy had no intention of doing so, and at the moment of crisis on the beach, he refused to send in U.S. forces.<\/p>\n

The Bay of Pigs fiasco directly led to the Soviet decision to send nuclear armed missiles to Cuba a year later, precipitating the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. This time, Kennedy was a masterful crisis manager, keeping the generals in the Pentagon from going to war and finding a way for Moscow to back down and withdraw the missiles. Castro was furious at the Soviets for backing off but Kennedy gave them a promise that the United States would not invade the island, a promise that has held ever since. This was despite a series of Cuban military interventions in support of pro-Soviet regimes in places like Angola and Ethiopia later in the Cold War, which encountered little direct resistance from U.S. forces.<\/p>\n

The first deployment of Cuban troops was in Algeria in October 1963. In the 1950s, Kennedy had been the first U.S. senator to\u00a0call for the United States to cease support<\/a>\u00a0for the French colonial war in Algeria.\u00a0He welcomed French President Charles de Gaulle\u2019s decision to give Algeria independence in 1961, and\u00a0hosted\u00a0Algerian President Mohamed Ahmed Ben Bella<\/a>\u00a0for a state visit on October 15, 1962 on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis.<\/p>\n

A year later, Algeria was in an undeclared border war with its neighbor Morocco, an ally of the United States.\u00a0Moroccan King Hassan II felt threatened by the Algerian revolutionary leadership and its attempt to exploit the poorly demarcated border that had been imposed by the French when they controlled both countries.<\/p>\n

As tensions grew in September 1963, Ben Bella had asked Castro for help.\u00a0Castro was eager to assist another revolutionary government against a pro-Western monarchy<\/strong><\/em>. Cuba sent a contingent of special forces along with tanks and heavy weapons by sea in two ships to Oran. The Cuban troops trained Algerian troops to use the equipment and\u00a0Gamal Abdel Nasser\u2019s Egypt sent military advisors. The Soviet Union also backed Algeria.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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