CUBAN EXILES RECALL FOULUPS, TRAGEDIES OF ISLAND INVASIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740036-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 36
• Publication Date: April 17, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740036-4
:IFAis;.?? WASHINGTON fIMES
17-April 1986
Cuban exiles recall foulups
tragedies of island invasion
J1Z-By Dan Sewell
tHE ASSUCIATE0.PRE99_,
MIAMI - In the 25 years since their futile attempt to
overthrow Fidel Castro, many of Miami's Cuban exiles
have learned to laugh at some of the absurdities of the
Bay of Pigs invasion.
Alfredo Duran remembers panicked Cuban soldiers
surrendering in droves, so that within the first few hours
the invaders were outnumbered by their own prisoners.
Manuel "'Ibny" de Varona recalls that at the time he
was supposed to be declaring a new Cuban government,
he was being held incommunicado by the U.S. military
at an abandoned air base north of here.
Raul Masvidal talks of how his invasion craft ran out
of fuel halfway to Cuba.
Rosa Noriega, whose husband was to join an internal
uprising in Havana, notes that the coming invaders had
sent letters to Cuba and called by telephone to notify
friends and relatives of the CIA-directed, supposedly
secret invasion. -
But many are also still bitter, frustrated at the last-
minute decisions in Washington they believed robbed
them of their objective.
"I can only think of the Bay of Pigs as a tragedy;" says
Mr. Varona, a one-time Cuban vice president, now 77,
who recalls meeting with a "very upset" President John
F. Kennedy as the invasion was collapsing.
"It was a chance to end the tyrannical communist rule
of Castro in my country, but it resulted in his expansion
of it - to Nicaragua, to Angola, to the M-19 guerrillas in
Colombia. And this could have been avoided, but for the
serious mistake of President Kennedy in the final hour."
The sudden appearance of exile paramilitary groups
training in the Everglades swamps in 1980, when the
exodus of 125,000 Cubans in the Mariel boatlift seemed
to indicate widening dissent in Cuba, ended just as sud-
denly in a few months. Mr. Castro has been in power 27
years.
The 25th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs will be
marked here this week in a solemn ceremony by the
Brigade 2506 organization of veterans. They will gather
at a monument in this city's Little Havana area. There
also will be more-private remembrances among the
650,000 Cubans of Miami's metropolitan area.
Sweet Cuban coffee-with-milk will be poured; so will
Bacardi rum and Hatuey beer, products of their old
homeland now made in their new one.
Many stories will be told. Here are some of them.
THE INVADER
Alfredo Duran, the teen=age son of a wealthy Cuban
landowner and son-in-law of a former political leader,
heard in February 1961 that exiles were training in Gua-
temala for an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.
He volunteered.
"They put us on a plane with blacked-out windows, but
we knew we were going to Guatemala:' he recalls.
In Guatemala, he spent days marching up and down
mountains, carrying heavy equipment in heavy rains,
training for fighting in the mountains of Cuba.
But Mr. Kennedy, having inherited a plan from the
Eisenhower administration, was already making
changes. Instead of the original plan, which was to take
the port city of Trinidad while dropping invaders into the
mountains to help anti-Castro guerrillas already there,
he decided to try to mask the invasion as an internal
insurrection.
On the morning of April 17, the 1,400 Cuban exile
invaders heading to the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, still
believed they would have full U.S. aerial support. They
didn't.
"But the bizarre thing is, at the beginning, the Cuban
militia were surrendering," Mr. Duran says. "They
thought this was like the invasion of Europe. They didn't
think they had a chance.
"We probably had 2,000 prisoners. We put the officers
in an empty swimming pool and the others, we just took
their arms away and let them wander around.
"By the third day, we were out of ammunition. But the
Cuban soldiers made a very slow advance. They thought
it was a trap."
Most of the invaders waited on the beach at Giron. Mr.
Duran and others fled into a swamp of jagged rocks and
little drinking water. He was caught 21 days later.
He was hauled by truck to Havana, where 1,189 Cu-
bans were held 22 months until the United States ran-
somed them for $53 million in food and medicine.
Unlike many Miami Cubans, who tend to be Repub-
licans and supporters of President Reagan, Mr. Duran,
at one time Florida's Democratic Party chairman,
doesn't hold Mr. Kennedy's decisions against the party.
He says Mr. Kennedy was simply too new on the job, too
much under pressure from older liberals.
THE DETAINEE
It seemed everyone in Havana knew an invasion was
coming. Rosa Noriega's quiet husband, Rudy, was in the
loosely organized underground. When the invasion be-
gan, he was to meet others, go to a hidden arms cache,
and begin fighting.
She was 18, with a 6-month-old son. She had refused
to go along with the meetings, the rhetoric, the reading
of Marxism-dominated newspapers at the Cuban Elec-
tric Co. where she was a secretary.
The morning of April 17, uniformed militiamen
walked into her office, pointed rifles at her and said she
was under arrest. She and some 80 others in the com-
pany of 7,000 people were led away. Across the island,
tens of thousands were being taken. Some, perhaps hun-
dreds, were shot.
At home, her husband learned that a neighbor, Sori
Marin, had been executed.
Mrs. Noriega was taken to an old Spanish fortress that
had been converted to a prison. She and dozens of other
women were packed into the same cell, with a few cots
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740036-4
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0605740036-4
and a toilet.
A loudspeaker warned that the prisoners would die
before any invaders reached them.
On the 16th day, at 3 a.m., her name was called. She
was interrogated again, then told she could go home.
"Up until then, we had never thought of leaving Cuba,"
she says. "We thought the invasion would end commu-
nism. When the invasion failed, we lived. in terror. We
didn't know when they would arrest us."
The Noriegasleft Cuba that August.
THE DRIFTER:
Raul Masvidal is a millionaire banker today. On April
17, 1961, he was the youngest member of a 40-man intel-
ligence unit which was to follow the invasion through
Cuban towns, helping set up local civilian support.
His was one of the last ships to leave Porto Cabezas,
Nicaragua. But the old Navy cargo ship ran out of fuel
and had to get help from a passing Texaco tanker.
By the time his ship got near Cuba, the invasion had
started. The ship -was told to remain some 25 miles off-
shore, near a U.S. flotilla.
They could see Castro planes flying over the invasion
craft in the bay; then smoke rising. On the ship's radio,
they overheard U.S. Navy pilots asking for permission to
fire on the Cubans, and orders crackling back that no
U.S. pilots were to get involved.
By the third day, failure was obvious, but Mr. Mas-
vidal's ship remained at sea for 15 days.
Finally they were taken back to Nicaragua. They were
told to hand over their weapons,.45-caliber revolvers and
M-3 automatics.
They refused.
"We didn't know if the CIA was our friend or our
enemy," Mr. Masvidal explains. "They finally brought in
somebody from Miami we trusted to guarantee we would
be taken home.
"A lot of thoughts went through my mind. Here we
have come such a long way, all that training, all that going
down the drain. Some of my closest friends were miss-
ing. All because Kennedy chickened out."
THE POLITICIAN:
Tony de Varona and four other Cuban exile leaders
waited in a stark building in Opa-Locka for the flight that
would take them to Cuba, where they would declare a
new government, ask for recognition from Western
countries, then seek friendly intervention to finish off
Mr. Castro.
They waited for hours. It seemed they had become
prisoners.
On April 18, they were instead flown to Washington.
Pentagon officials traced the action on a large wall map.
There were briefings. Then, a private meeting with the
president.
"He seemed-very nervous, very upset;' Mr. de Varona
recalls. "He said the brigade- was being routed, that
prisoners were being taken. He said he had suspended
aerial support.
"He explained that this operation was not his plan.
"Then he said: `I am the only one responsible. It is the
largest responsibility I have had."'
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0605740036-4