Bay of Pigs anniversary reminds Cubans of US threat�|�Reuters.com

Bay of Pigs anniversary reminds Cubans of US threat�|�Reuters.com

Bay of Pigs anniversary reminds Cubans of US threat
Wed Apr 19, 2006 11:13 AM ET

By Anthony Boadle

PLAYA GIRON, Cuba (Reuters) - Forty-five years after it defeated a CIA-trained invasion force at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba still sees the United States as the biggest threat to its socialist society.

"The empire threatens Cuba permanently. The threat is still there today," Cuban Vice President Jose Ramon Fernandez, told Reuters by telephone as Cuba celebrated on Wednesday its defeat of the now infamous attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.

Cuba's closest Latin American ally, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, this week accused the United States of threatening his country and Cuba with the deployment of four U.S. warships in the Caribbean.

Wreckage of downed B-26 bombers and a captured M-41 tank exhibited at a museum recall the failed landing on this beach in the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's south coast.

At dawn on April 17, 1961, as the B-26s strafed coastal villages, 1,500 Cuban exiles organized and armed by the CIA came ashore in launches from U.S. merchant ships. Two days before, the B-26s had bombed Cuba's three main air bases.

"At first we thought it was thunder and lightning when the attack began," said retired sugar mill worker Ramon Medina, 62, who joined up as a militia fighter. "We could not believe they would land in such an inhospitable place," he said.

The invaders never got beyond the mosquito-infested swamps surrounding the Bay of Pigs, as Castro's fledgling revolutionary government scrambled to defend itself.

After three days of fighting, the invaders were defeated, 108 had been killed and 1,197 captured, their hopes of sparking an uprising against Castro dashed.

The disastrous attempt to overthrow Castro was the CIA's biggest fiasco and a diplomatic embarrassment for President John F. Kennedy.

A year later, the prisoners were returned to the United States after Washington paid out $53 million in food and medicines in exchange for their release.

The invasion served to strengthen Castro, who declared his government to be Socialist on the eve of the imminent attack.

It also pushed Cuba into a strategic relationship with the Soviet Union, leading to the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

DEFEAT LIKE IRAQ

"It was a real defeat for the United States, like Iraq is a defeat today, and President Kennedy had to accept that," said Fernandez, a U.S.-trained infantry officer whom Castro put in charge of the defense forces at the Bay of Pigs.

Fernandez said the current threat is the Bush administration's plan to hasten a transition to multi-party democracy and "capitalist exploitation" in Cuba.

Moves to undermine Castro by tightening economic sanctions are backed by anti-Castro exiles in Miami who were calling for "Cuba next" in 2003 when U.S. troops invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein.

Bush administration officials are concerned by the growing alliance between Castro and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, a populist who has turned his oil-exporting country against U.S. policies in Latin America.

For Cuban authorities, another anniversary of the Battle of the Bay of Pigs serves to keep the island's 11 million people alert to the threat of a U.S. invasion.

Castro's critics say the siege mentality serves as tool for political control, distracting Cubans from the hardships of a bankrupt economy.

Dissident Vladimiro Roca, a former MiG pilot, said Cubans are tired of being permanently at war with the United States, but the "war propaganda" allows the government to maintain tough laws such as the death penalty to deter protest.

For Castro's supporters, the Bay of Pigs is a shrine to a revolutionary feat.

"This was the first defeat of U.S. imperialism in Latin America," said Alejandro Figueroa, 61, who cycled 129 miles

from Havana to Playa Giron with his children.

At the museum, he proudly showed them uniforms, badges and bits of parachutes used by the "mercenary" invaders.

"The children must be educated ideologically," he said.

(Additional reporting by Esteban Israel in Havana)