Two assignments

Book Reviews

Jones, Howard (2008) The Bay of Pigs, Oxford University Press (Oxford), xviii + 237 pp. $15.95 pbk.

The swift and decisive defeat of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored Cuban exile Brigade 2506 at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 has long exemplified how very smart and highly trained government officials, with vast resources at their disposal, at times adopt shockingly ill-designed and miserably implemented policies that generate disastrous results, sharply contrary to their own interests. No US decision maker, and no US agency, ever looks good in scholarly accounts of the Bay of Pigs debacle.

© 2012 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2012 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 31, No. 4 535

Book Reviews

Howard Jones re-tells this well-known story. He writes with admirably clarity, informing the reader who may be encountering this fiasco for the first time as well as enlightening scholars with nuggets of insights. Jones does not hesitate to render judgment on events, processes, decisions or decision-makers. He does so firmly yet also fairly, with a much more nuanced combination of sharp critique and mitigating context than is typical for publications about this event. The lessons he draws are apt and judicious, yet he also notes that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations disregarded nearly all of them as they persevered in pursuing failed policies toward Cuba.

Jones organises the book as a good narrative. He gives the background (Chapter 1), spends considerable time on plans and the many changes they undergo (Chapters 2 and 3), the political process that rendered an ill-conceived policy hopelessly doomed to fail (Chapter 4), the battle itself at the Bay of Pigs displaying a superb eye as a riveting military historian (Chapters 5 and 6), and concludes with the immediate and medium-term aftermaths (Chapter 7 and epilogue).

With the benefit of four decades of prior scholarship and open US archives, Jones provides a comprehensive and well-documented account of these topics regarding US policy. He synthesises and confirms the story and delves carefully but forthrightly into matters where the evidence still remains murky or where testimonies and recollections are contradictory.

Jones’s most effective interpretative endeavour links, more persuasively than previous scholars, the Bay of Pigs to the numerous, hapless, politically obtuse and morally repro- bate attempts to murder Fidel Castro. He suggests that the CIA leadership proceeded as it did because it expected to arrange for Fidel Castro’s assassination before the invasion brigade’s landing, thereby facilitating the overthrow of the headless regime. He shows several plausible connections between two unsuccessful policies that aimed towards the same end.

Regrettably, the Cuba side of the story was not incorporated well. Consider two issues. First, what did Fidel Castro know and when did he know it? Jones tells us, ‘Not that the invasion was a surprise; [. . .] Castro was well aware of its imminence if not its location [. . .] he could read the newspapers’ (p. 102). Yet, on that same page, Jones says rightly that Castro ‘had not yet managed to organise his defence units by the time of the attack’ (p. 124). Jones should have drawn a different inference, which declassified Cuban documents confirm. Up to just days before the invasion, Castro thought there would be multiple infiltration parties but no invasion; thus he had dispersed Cuban forces to protect many points across the country. And, because Cuban troops had been scattered, it took a while to deploy them at the Bay of Pigs. So, yes, the invasion was a surprise.

Second, Jones echoes the received wisdom that the Cuban domestic opposition was hopeless (pp. 20, 59, 142, 144). But, if that were true, why does Jones write, ‘Castro had clamped down on dissidents days before the invasion, putting a hundred thousand in prison’ (p. 110). That’s a lot of for a country with some 6 million people (in fact, the number of arrests in the weekend between the bombing of Cuban airfields and the landing of the brigade was probably closer to 20,000, which is still a lot). These num- bers meant not that a popular uprising would co-occur with the Brigade’s landing – the conventional wisdom is right on that point – but that there was an alternative for Cuba’s history in which the domestic opposition could have been more significant. Neither the exiles nor the Kennedy administration understood that; the impact of their dual failure devastated the domestic opposition.

The Bay of Pigs invasion failed for many reasons, but I find this combination of ineptitudes the most persuasive: ‘Logistics posed a potential nightmare. The dispersal of

© 2012 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2012 Society for Latin American Studies 536 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 31, No. 4

Book Reviews

trucks [. . .] ensur[ed] confusion over transportation. The planes lacked sufficient fuel. [. . .] The Cuban brigade had no bridging capabilities for transferring the equipment from the ships to the beach, no floodlights for the night-time operations, no supply distribution plan, and no maintenance materials other than hand tools’ (p. 54). The invaders landed in a swamp, far from mountains to which they could retreat as guerrillas, and in the end had no air cover. No wonder Brigade 2506 failed.

Jorge I. Domínguez Harvard University

© 2012 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2012 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 31, No. 4 537

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