"We knew what we were fighting for--our sovereignty and the conquests of our revolution," said Fernández. "They were fighting to recover their lost properties."

Alberto Fernández was standing next to one of the Sea Fury planes used by the Cuban forces in the three-day battle repelling invaders at the Bay of Pigs--known in Cuba as Playa Girón, the beach where the main force of mercenary troops surrendered. The plane is in front of the Playa Girón museum, located at the scene of the battle.

The former pilot was one of the participants at a March 22–24 United States-Cuba conference hosted in Havana on "Girón: 40 Years After." The exchange was one of the events being held to mark the 40th anniversary of Cuba's victory, in which an invasion force of 1,500 Cuban counterrevolutionaries--trained, armed, financed, and deployed by the U.S. government--was crushed in less than 72 hours by Cuba's revolutionary militias, police, and Rebel Army.

Alberto Fernández's observation on why revolutionary Cuba prevailed over Washington was reiterated by other Cuban participants during the course of the three-day event, which concluded with a tour of the Bay of Pigs area.  
 
Not a U.S. fiasco but a Cuban victory
Speaking at the end of the first day of the conference, Jorge Hernández, head of the University of Havana's Center for the Study of the United States, noted that the U.S.-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs is often attributed to CIA "blunders" and "vacillations" of the Kennedy administration.

It was not a battle lost by Washington, he insisted, but "a victory won by the Cuban people--organized and armed through their revolutionary militias and their revolutionary leadership."

José Ramón Fernández, vice president of Cuba's Council of Ministers and chair of the conference organizing committee, spoke to the press prior to the conference about the main lessons of the battle at the Bay of Pigs. "What decided the victory and the defeat is that the militia forces and patriotic troops participating were strongly aware of what they were defending," said Fernández, who led the main column of the Cuban revolutionary forces in that battle.

"They knew they were defending the gains of the revolution, its factories, its sugar mills, its literacy campaign and education, its public health, social justice, the elimination of racial discrimination and the dignity of knowing they were the representatives and defenders of a sovereign people."

In contrast, Fernández emphasized, "The invaders were at a great disadvantage: they weren't coming to defend any achievements, they weren't coming to defend their country, they were coming to try to regain their privileges, riches, and positions, and men are not prepared to give up their lives for those causes."

"The main factor in any armed conflict," he added, "more important than all its weaponry, is the human element and the reasons that impel people to fight."

At the end of the conference, speaking to participants during the visit to the Bay of Pigs, Fernández explained that "Playa Girón was an inevitable battle." He noted that "it was the culmination of a stage of the U.S. efforts to destroy the Cuban Revolution."

A year and a half of sabotage, assassination attempts, and other acts of escalating aggression by Washington against the Cuban Revolution and its leadership had begun soon after millions of Cubans overthrew a U.S.-backed dictatorship in January 1959 and embarked on a deep-going social revolution. Cuba's victory at Playa Girón was a bone in the throat for U.S. imperialism, however, and Washington immediately launched a new stage of aggression that culminated 18 months later in the October 1962 "missile" crisis and U.S. naval blockade of Cuba. To this day, Fernández noted, Washington's hostility continues.

During the conference revolutionary Cuban combatants exchanged experiences and views about these events with some former Kennedy administration advisors, CIA officials, and members of Brigade 2506, Washington's Cuban-American invasion force. Professors and researchers from both countries also participated.

The gathering, organized as an academic event, was sponsored by the University of Havana through its Center for the Study of the United States as well as three other Cuban research centers. The U.S. delegation was organized by researchers Peter Kornbluh and Thomas Blanton of George Washington University's National Security Archive, which has worked since 1985 to declassify and publish government documents, including on the U.S.-Cuba conflict.

The Cuban delegation of several dozen participants included a number of revolutionary combatants who took part in the Bay of Pigs battle. Among them, besides Fernández, were Enrique Carreras, one of Cuba's ace pilots during the battle; Efigenio Ameijeiras and Samuel Rodiles, then commander and deputy commander respectively of the Revolutionary National Police; Angel Jiménez, in charge of the Militia Leadership School at that time; Pedro Miret, artillery chief of one of the columns; and Ramiro Valdés.

Cuban commander-in-chief, President Fidel Castro, took part in almost the entire conference and commented that this was the first time in 40 years all the leading Cuban officers involved in Playa Girón had themselves met together.  
 
U.S. delegation
The more than 50 U.S. participants included former Kennedy advisors Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Goodwin; ex-CIA officials Robert Reynolds and Samuel Halpern; and five former members of Brigade 2506, as well as two members of the Kennedy family. A dozen U.S. academics also attended, such as James Blight of Brown University, Philip Brenner of American University, Max Azicri of the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, and Jorge Domínguez of Harvard University.

The conference included panels on four topics: the U.S. government's actions leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion, how revolutionary Cuba responded, how the battle unfolded, and its aftermath and lessons. While sessions were not open to the media, the organizers held several press conferences to report on highlights.

Schlesinger, expressing the view of some in the U.S. delegation, sought to downplay Kennedy's responsibility for the April 1961 invasion of Cuba by saying that Kennedy had inherited Republican president Dwight Eisenhower's plans for such a military operation. "Kennedy was trapped and decided to let it go ahead," he asserted. If Kennedy had demobilized the mercenary brigade, Schlesinger added, he would have faced a "disposal problem" with its former members.

The Cuban hosts set a tone of civil exchange among the U.S. and Cuban participants in order to "discuss the viewpoints of each side in a respectful manner, with the aim of analyzing and clarifying the facts," as Fernández explained in opening the conference. He noted that members of Brigade 2506 during the conference would not be called mercenaries to avoid offending those brigade members taking part in the event. Some of the Cuban combatants admitted, with a wry touch, that they had a hard time finding another term to describe the U.S.-financed invasion force.

One exchange took place between Enrique Carreras and a former Brigade 2506 member, Mario Cabello. In the April 1961 battle, Carreras sank two U.S. transport ships off the Bay of Pigs, the Houston and Río Escondido. Fidel Castro, commander-in-chief of the Cuban forces, had ordered the ships be sunk to cut off supplies to the mercenaries and to prevent them from escaping.

Cabello, who had been aboard the Houston, told Carreras it was a good thing he hit the ship below the waterline, because the U.S. vessel, smoldering from an earlier hit, was loaded with fuel and probably would have exploded if it had not begun to sink and fill with water. Castro remarked, "See, Carreras saved your life!" Carreras, now a division general, shook with laughter.

At one conference session José Ramón Fernández explained that he had ordered his soldiers not to fire on the two U.S. Navy destroyers off the coast in order to avoid a direct confrontation with Washington's armed forces. He had decided to hold fire before receiving such orders from Fidel Castro. Castro remarked that it was a good thing Fernández made that decision. Instead, the Cuban forces fired on the landing boats and cut off the invaders' means of escape, while the U.S. warships withdrew and virtually the entire invading force was captured.

The meeting drew on several declassified documents related to the Bay of Pigs that were recently released by both the U.S. and Cuban governments. These documents do not reveal anything that alters previous understanding of the events, but rather, as Fernández noted, confirm that the revolutionary government has told the truth from the beginning, unlike Washington.  
 
Decisiveness of Cuban leadership
The several hundred pages released by the Cuban government include documents that are particularly interesting. One is a collective transcript of all the directives given by Castro to officers in the field--by telephone, in writing, and in person--from the early hours of April 17 through the defeat of the invading force two days later. They capture the Cuban leadership's decisiveness, timing, courage, and concern for the ranks, factors that helped ensure a rapid and overwhelming victory over the counterrevolutionary troops.

Another declassified document is a September 1961 report by Fernández to the central command detailing the operations by the Cuban armed forces against the invaders hour by hour. As part of its balance sheet, the report cites the weaknesses and errors of the Cuban forces, including his own. At the conference, Fernández noted that the commission reviewing the documents for declassification had proposed blacking out those sections of his report before releasing it. "I had my reservations about blacking them out, but I accepted the decision. However, it was the commander-in-chief, Fidel, who overruled the recommendation. He insisted that the entire report be declassified."

Subsequent Militant coverage will report further on these Cuban documents.

One of the declassified U.S. government papers circulated at the conference is a report written by former White House advisor Richard Goodwin to President John F. Kennedy on an August 1961 conversation between himself and Ernesto Che Guevara, a central leader of the Cuban Revolution. The meeting had been requested by Che at the time of an Organization of American States conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay. While the fact and content of Goodwin's account have long been known, and the memo itself was declassified in 1993, it had never before been publicly released.

Goodwin reports, "Guevara began by saying that I must understand the Cuban revolution. They intend to build a socialist state, and the revolution they have begun is irreversible. They are also now out of the U.S. sphere of influence, and that too is irreversible."

At the end of the report, Goodwin says that Guevara "went on to say that he wanted to thank us very much for the invasion--that it had been a great political victory for them--enabled them to consolidate--and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal."

At the conclusion of the conference at Playa Girón, Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba's National Assembly, made a similar point. The most important lesson of the battle at Playa Girón, Alarcón said, was that Washington must learn that "the Cuban people will never renounce their struggle to defend their sovereignty and independence."

"The Cuban people were fighting in defense of socialism," Alarcón said, and that their victory marked a turning point in the Cuban Revolution.

This fact was apparent among working people interviewed by the Militant in the Bay of Pigs area. At the Australia sugar mill near the town of Jagüey Grande--where in April 1961 Fernández established his column's command post--rail worker Lázaro Morales, 60, commented that the brutal U.S.-directed assault, as well as the Cuban leadership's response, had a lasting impact on his own life.

At the time he was a 19-year-old student. "Do you know what it is like to wake up to a bombing attack?" he remarked.

The revolutionary leadership called for a military mobilization without stopping production or the literacy campaign. As local sugarcane cutters joined their militia units to go to the battle front to fight the invaders, Morales and other youth took their places in the canefields--a proud and unforgettable moment, he said.

"At Girón I learned who we were and what we were defending--the literacy campaign, the land reform, the right to have enough to eat. And if they ever try to attack us again, we are even stronger today."
 
 
Related articles:
'Cuban revolution is the achievement of millions'
Defense at Miami trial exposes anti-Cuba lies
Build Cuba-U.S. youth exchange
Conference event presents books on Playa Girón
Cuban groups invite U.S. youth to Havana for summer exchange
October Crisis and the U.S. class struggle
 
 
 
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