Top-secret plan to invade Cuba declassified
Top-secret plan to invade Cuba declassified
By WILLIAM E. BURROWS -
WEBurrows@aol.com
09/27/2014 3:00 PM
| Updated: 09/27/2014 7:00 PM
Captured Cuban exiles are lined up by Castro’s soldiers at the Bay of Pigs.GETTY IMAGES
The most popular analogy used to describe Fidel Castro’s turning Cuba into communism’s only bastion in the Western Hemisphere in 1959 was “cancer.” And the fear, to carry the analogy further, was that it would metastasize elsewhere in Latin America.
The CIA, therefore, decided that invasive surgery was needed and launched the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Lacking air cover, all 1,400 anti-Castro paramilitaries were killed or captured as they waded ashore. That was taken to mean that the Castro regime posed a potential military as well as a political threat to the area. It was decided that the best way to excise the malignancy was to cut it out.
A recently declassified top-secret memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, dated March 13, 1962 and titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba,” suggested an invasion. The document made the reason for the invasion explicit: “U.S. military intervention will result from a period of heightened U.S.-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances.
“World opinion, and the United Nations forum, should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.”
The memorandum goes on to list possible staged provocations (as Cold War jargon had it) that would justify attacking and conquering Cuba: “A series of well-coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantánamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.”
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article2263338.html#storylink=cpy
