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Besieged Beachhead: The Cold War Battle for Cuba at the Bay of Pigs
"Besieged Beachhead is a timely and thoughtful revisit to a painful moment in Cold War history." ― Cold War Book Reviews
"A very compelling read." ― Toby Harnden, award-winning journalist and author of First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11
On New Year's Day 1959, Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement overthrew the ruling regime in Cuba, bringing the Cold War to the United States' doorstep and setting the island nation and its superpower neighbor on a collision course. The battle came in April 1961 on the southern coast of Cuba at the Bahía de los Cochinos--the Bay of Pigs. In a minute-by-minute chronicle that is as even-handed as it is dramatic, J. J. Valdés gets to the heart of this Cold War debacle, from the beaches of Cuba to the corridors of power in Washington and Havana.
Long entangled in Cuba's economy and politics, the United States watched Castro's revolution carefully and grew wary as Castro drew closer to the Soviet Union. Within a few months, the CIA, with President Dwight Eisenhower's approval, was recruiting and training Cuban exiles for a paramilitary force to topple Castro. By early 1961, when John F. Kennedy became president after campaigning on a hard line on Cuba, the CIA plan had taken on a life of its own, and policymakers believed the window for action was closing. Kennedy gave the go-ahead, but not before making changes that limited the U.S.'s involvement and weakened the invasion.
Early on April 17, 1961, 1,400 men of Brigade 2506--Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala--began landing at the Bay of Pigs, just over 100 miles southeast of Havana. Nearly everything went wrong. Engines failed. Coral reefs snarled landing craft. Castro's planes destroyed ships carrying vital ammunition and medical supplies. The weather turned poor. The parachute drops were widely dispersed. Khrushchev rattled the nuclear saber, spooking Kennedy from ordering assistance he was reluctant to provide anyway. Over the course of three days, the Brigade clawed inland, gaining a few toeholds, but the exiles--outnumbered and undersupported --were no match for the 20,000 men Castro, who assumed personal command of the defense, massed near the beachhead, armed with a staggering quantity of Soviet weaponry. By April 19, the invasion had failed, its 1,200 survivors taken prisoner. What had been intended as a Cold War masterstroke ended in embarrassment. The Bay of Pigs disaster would deeply influence the Cuban Missile Crisis eighteen months later and shape U.S.-Cuba relations up until the present.
Decades in the making, Besieged Beachhead draws from English and Spanish sources in the United States and Cuba to tell this story as it has never been told before, shedding light on events that have been shrouded in secrecy, myth, and propaganda for six decades.
"A very compelling read." ― Toby Harnden, award-winning journalist and author of First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11
On New Year's Day 1959, Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement overthrew the ruling regime in Cuba, bringing the Cold War to the United States' doorstep and setting the island nation and its superpower neighbor on a collision course. The battle came in April 1961 on the southern coast of Cuba at the Bahía de los Cochinos--the Bay of Pigs. In a minute-by-minute chronicle that is as even-handed as it is dramatic, J. J. Valdés gets to the heart of this Cold War debacle, from the beaches of Cuba to the corridors of power in Washington and Havana.
Long entangled in Cuba's economy and politics, the United States watched Castro's revolution carefully and grew wary as Castro drew closer to the Soviet Union. Within a few months, the CIA, with President Dwight Eisenhower's approval, was recruiting and training Cuban exiles for a paramilitary force to topple Castro. By early 1961, when John F. Kennedy became president after campaigning on a hard line on Cuba, the CIA plan had taken on a life of its own, and policymakers believed the window for action was closing. Kennedy gave the go-ahead, but not before making changes that limited the U.S.'s involvement and weakened the invasion.
Early on April 17, 1961, 1,400 men of Brigade 2506--Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala--began landing at the Bay of Pigs, just over 100 miles southeast of Havana. Nearly everything went wrong. Engines failed. Coral reefs snarled landing craft. Castro's planes destroyed ships carrying vital ammunition and medical supplies. The weather turned poor. The parachute drops were widely dispersed. Khrushchev rattled the nuclear saber, spooking Kennedy from ordering assistance he was reluctant to provide anyway. Over the course of three days, the Brigade clawed inland, gaining a few toeholds, but the exiles--outnumbered and undersupported --were no match for the 20,000 men Castro, who assumed personal command of the defense, massed near the beachhead, armed with a staggering quantity of Soviet weaponry. By April 19, the invasion had failed, its 1,200 survivors taken prisoner. What had been intended as a Cold War masterstroke ended in embarrassment. The Bay of Pigs disaster would deeply influence the Cuban Missile Crisis eighteen months later and shape U.S.-Cuba relations up until the present.
Decades in the making, Besieged Beachhead draws from English and Spanish sources in the United States and Cuba to tell this story as it has never been told before, shedding light on events that have been shrouded in secrecy, myth, and propaganda for six decades.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published November 5, 2024
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About the author
J.J. Valdés
1 book2 followersJ. J. Valdés is a writer with over thirty years of experience in historical research for government agencies including the Department of Defense. Born in Cuba, he came to the United States with his family in the 1960s and later attended Boston University and the University of Massachusetts. He is a member of the Conference on Latin American History and the Southern Historical Association.
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September 26, 2024
“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 forces 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 declassified 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.
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 declassified 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.
September 28, 2024
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.
"[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.
January 25, 2025
J.J. Valdés' "Besieged Beachhead: The Cold War Battle for Cuba at the Bay of Pigs" offers a compelling and timely revisit to a pivotal moment in Cold War history. Released in late 2024, this meticulously researched book provides an hour-by-hour chronicle of the ill-fated 1961 CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba, presenting an even-handed account of the events that unfolded on the southern coast of Cuba at the Bahía de Cochino. Valdés begins by setting the stage with a brief history of Cuba, skillfully weaving in personal elements as he discusses his father's support for Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement. This personal touch adds depth to the narrative, providing readers with a unique perspective on the complex political landscape of Cuba in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The author's approach to the subject matter is both comprehensive and accessible. Each chapter, running approximately four hours in narrative time, meticulously details the events that occurred within those periods. This structure allows readers to experience the tension and urgency of the invasion as it unfolded, from the initial landings to the massive morale failure of the exile forces. One of the book's strengths lies in its balanced presentation of the conflict. Valdés doesn't shy away from examining the strategic miscalculations and intelligence failures that doomed the operation from the start. At the same time, he gives due credit to the bravery and determination of the Cuban exiles who risked everything in their attempt to overthrow Castro's regime. “Besieged Beachhead" is more than just a military history; it's a thoughtful exploration of the broader geopolitical implications of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Valdés deftly analyzes how this failed operation impacted U.S.-Cuba relations for decades to come and influenced subsequent Cold War strategies. For history enthusiasts and scholars alike, this book is a valuable addition to the literature on Cold War conflicts. Valdés' engaging writing style and thorough research make "Besieged Beachhead" a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of this critical juncture in 20th-century history.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews