John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kenndy greet members of the Cuban Invasion Brigade, who served during the Bay of Pigs mission, during a ceremony at the Orange Bowl in December 1962. (Wikimedia Commons/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
Just beneath an editorial titled “Mr. Kennedy’s Opportunity,” heralding and welcoming the election of JFK as the country’s 35th president in November of 1960, The Nation published a brief article citing evidence provided by Stanford professor Ronald Hilton that the US was training Cuban exiles in the forests of Guatemala. The article, as well as another editorial in January of 1961, were almost entirely ignored by the mainstream press. File this one, with our March 11 entry on the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, under “Hate to Say We Told You So.”
Cuban history is full of filibustering expeditions from the United States which have failed. Even though we may arm the anti-Castro groups to the teeth, we have no guarantee that they will succeed militarily. If they fail, the United States will lose face in an almost irreparable way.
Richard KreitnerTwitterRichard Kreitner is a contributing writer and the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union. His writings are at www.richardkreitner.com.
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