This was a fascinating book and it is one that I will be reading again and again. The Bay of Pigs incident is something I was not very familiar with and this book taught me so much about the subject. I highly recommend this book and I will be sharing it with everyone.
Thank you for the opportunity to read it early.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Globe Pequot, Stackpole Books for this advance copy of a book on the history on an incident that is little discussed in America, but one that lead to the loss of many lives and a possible nuclear war, but has had lasting effect on relations between the country of Cuba, the United States and international relations.

"[V]ictory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan." President John F. Kennedy said this to a reporter while discussing America's role in the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba. Kennedy might have heard this from Ted Sorenson who "ghostwrote" Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage. Courage was not something lacking for those Cubans who had given up much, including in some cases their lives, returning to the country they had left, to free it from Fidel Castro. Nor was their a lack of courage in the Cuban troops, many more than the Central Intelligence Agency had thought, who fought them. Courage and common sense were lacking in the halls of power where this invasion of Cuba was planned, poorly. Fear and ego and incompetence was in plentitude, and one knows that always leads to trouble, and unfortunately the death of many people. This failure nearly lead to a hot war, nuclear hot, with the Soviet Union, lots of strange relations between CIA and criminal people, and a diplomatic blind spot in dealing with the country of Cuba today. Besieged Beachhead: The Cold War Battle for Cuba at the Bay of Pigs is written by J. J. Valdés and looks at this action from the sky to the marsh where so many died, from Washington DC to Havana, and the soldiers who found themselves a part of it.

The book begins with a brief history of Cuba, and goes into the personal when the author discusses that his father was one who supported Fidel Castro at first, but stopped when Castro turned to communism. Valdés also goes into how though the battle lasted only three days, there is still a lot of confusion of what and when things happened, based on stories, press reporting and memories, many memoirs trying to omit things in order to make their decisions seem better. From there we find ourselves on the freighters leased by the CIA to bring the invaders to the southern coast of Cuba, and how wrong much of the intelligence was. There were many, many blunders and gaffes, either through hubris, incompetence, counterintelligence, or just greed, sharing stories that people in power wanted to hear, ignoring what did not work. The plan was presented to a new President, from the previous administration, one that Kennedy, did not want to deal with. And here also is where things start to get out of control.

Valdés has written an incredible account one that looks at the Bay of Pigs from all views, and one that does not assign blame. As stated earlier there are many things that don't seem to work, an incident in a newspaper on day one, might show up in a report has happening on day three. This is common in most histories, and especially in ones that America would like to pretend never happened. Valdés does a great job of covering all the fronts, the powerful, to the peasants who were caught in between, the exiles, and those the stayed to make the revolution a reality. Valdés is a very good writer, and one can tell this not just a labor of love, but a mission to try and get these stories told, before more is forgotten. I had thought I was familiar with the situation, turns out I was very wrong, and learned quite a lot.

A fascinating book about something that is maybe mentioned but glossed over. One that led to a failure in relations that lasts till this day, and one that nearly ended the world. Readers of history will learn quite a bit, as will those who have an interest in the Americas. A very well written book that educates as well as asks a lot of questions that still are unanswered.

“Am destroying all equipment and communications. Tanks are in sight. I have nothing left to fight with. I'm taking to woods. I cannot wait for you.” -The last transmission from Pepe San Román, Commander of Brigade 2506, the ground force in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

I have always been more familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis than I was with its opening volley, the Bay of Pigs Invasion. This happened before I was born, but not so long before that it didn’t create ripples in my young life.

My grandparents had a nuclear bunker in their yard in the woods in rural Indiana. I used to think that was so weird, albeit an epic hide-and-seek spot, until I aged and understood how close that bunker came to being used stateside in the 1960s. The nuclear standoff between the USSR and the USA during the Cuban Missile Crisis came to be after a real head-scratcher of a plan that was authorized at the beginning of JFK’s presidency.

This book, Besieged Beachhead: The Cold War Battle for Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, concentrates on the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), and it does so in a way that presents multiple sides. In doing so, it allows the reader to draw their conclusions on where the blame for this debacle of an invasion lies.

Fidel Castro came into power in Cuba after the overthrow of Batista in the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The CIA started covert planning to overthrow Castro within a year, and part of that planning involved estimating force levels available to Castro to repel an invasion. The truth in numbers was just shy of 50,000 strong in 1960, which was double what the CIA believed they had. Remember, there were no drones or detailed satellite images to examine back then, but it’s still a pretty major league discrepancy.

Kennedy started his presidency with a game plan already on the table, which strikes me as the worst first day at work I have heard of. “Hello American people, I am here to be the new President and lead us to brighter days!” “Oh, hey, Eisenhower already signed off on masterminding an invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro. We have to finish that before we can move onto the whole brighter days thing.”

On April 12, 1961, Kennedy spoke at a press conference saying that there was no way in hell the United States would have any involvement in Cuba; then he must have whispered, “Physically,” to himself because only an hour later the final meeting was held on Operation Zapata. This was the plan by the United States to support the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs by planning it and financing it, but not physically sending in the American military to fight it.

So, who DID fight it? That is where this book comes in. Cuban exiles fought for their country, in many cases, leaving a secure life behind in the United States to go back to where they had fled from to stand up for their people left behind. The Cuban population they believed would rise and stand with them did not materialize, and when things went south, they were cut loose by the United States leadership to meet their fate.

The information on the invasion that is contained in this book is broken down by spans of hours, in a battle that only lasted three days, and because of that, the information is plentiful and thick. For anyone who wasn’t well versed in this battle before, it can almost be a little overwhelming. There is a representation of both sides of the conflict that could only come from exhaustive research for a very long period.

Amid the nearly catastrophic standoff between the United States and the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the story of the men who fought at the Bay of Pigs was greatly overshadowed. Much of this information wasn’t declassified until later, so anyone who lived through this probably came away with the same disbelief I had reading about it now. This is a real WTF event in a long line of them in history.

It has also caused me to analyze what I thought I knew about JFK, because this showed a side of him I found to be inexperienced, and possess questionable decision-making skills. I called my own personal Oracle to ask what their opinion of Kennedy is after actually living through these events (Hi Dad!!). and he said this:

“Between the Bay of Pigs invasion, which we didn’t know unclassified information about until much later, the Cuban Missile Crisis that had us all doing nuclear blast drills in school, and the fact that the majority of the guys I graduated high school with were shipped off to Vietnam, I am not a JFK guy.”

I enjoyed this book, and if you have any interest in learning about this invasion in detail, this is a great source of information. Thanks NetGalley and Stackpole Books for the great read in return for an unbiased review.