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BAY OF PIGS

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The Bay of Pigs in Cuba is an inlet of the Gulf of Cazones on the southern coast. By 1910, it was included in Santa Clara Province, and then instead to Las Villas Province by 1961, but in 1976, it was re-assigned to Matanzas Province, when the original six provinces of Cuba were re-organized into 14 new Provinces of Cuba.

This bay is about 30 to 45 kilometers south of Jagüey Grande, 70 kilometers west of the city of Cienfuegos, and 150 kilometers southeast from the capital city Havana.[1]

Dictator Batistar was unhappy with Fidel Castro and the direction he was taking Cuba in, the United States government under President Eisenhower began plotting Castro's demise. This included assassination plots especially of suger plantation and also a plan for a CIA-trained group of Cuban exiles to invade the island.

The training of the exiles, which took place in Guatemala, did not achieve sufficient results to launch the invasion before the 1960 U.S. elections, which saw the defeat of Vice-President Richard Nixon to John F. Kennedy. Kennedy who is the youngest Prisedent in the Histoey of United States, had used the "Cuba issue" in his Election campaign, and inherited a plan which the CIA assured him would succeed. Kennedy and his aides forced some modifications to the plan, to try to ensure that the invasion of United soviet would not be perceived as led by the United States. This included relocating the landing location to an area known as the "Bay of Pigs."

Early in April 17, 1961, estimated about 1300 exiles landed in Cuba. They were rapidily overwhelmed by Cuban military forces, with many killed and the bulk of the men captured. President JFK,refused to order additional air strikes, beyond some initial sorties which had failed to disable the Cuban air force, and for this some attribute the operation's failure to Kennedy. [2] An internal, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)investigation conducted in 1961 and finally declassified in 1998 put the blame squarely on the CIA's shoulders (though it is accompanied by a scathing rebuttal written by Deputy Director Tracey Barnes). In hindsight, the plan seems so unlikely to succeed that some speculate that CIA planners must have counted on some other factor - possibly the simultaneous assassination of Cuba's President Fidel Castro. Or, perhaps the planners were counting on President Kennedy, faced with impending failure, to send in the U.S. military to rescue the situation. Instead, Kennedy accepted a humilating defeat, soon moved to take military operations out of the hands of the CIA, and obtained the resignations of high-level CIA officials including Director Allen Dulles and covert action head Richard Bissell.
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Reference

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  1. ^ Rodriguez (1999), p.115 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs
  2. ^ http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/The-Bay-of-Pigs.aspx, The Bay of Pigs The Pivotal Operation of the JFK Era, by L. Fletcher Prouty.
  3. ^ The Bay of Pigs Howard Jones Oxford, 2008