The broadcasts from Cuba came booming in over Florida radios, nearly blotting out local U.S. stations. By flipping a dial on their TV sets, residents of Key West could see as well as hear the spectacle. In an Orwellian marathon lasting five nights running last week. Fidel Castro paraded 200, then 400, finally almost 1,000 captured rebels into Havana's Sports Palace and subjected them to a favorite pastime of the new Cuba, the televised inquisition.
To the Wall! As the studio audience chanted "to the wall," the announcer asked viewers to telephone immediately if they recognized any criminals among the men. One woman rushed forward to identify Prisoner RamÓn Calviño as a Batista torturer (he was, with 15 murders on his record, acknowledged the exiles), asked to be on the firing squad that executes him. A few brave men defied their inquisitors. Carlos Varona, 21, the son of Exile Leader Antonio Varona, and a paratrooper in the rebel army, coolly asked his jeering captors: "If you have so many people on your side, why don't you hold elections?"
But others, either through fear, bitterness or possibly because they were rehearsed, were full of information about their training, equipment, plans and the extent of U.S. involvement in the mis adventure.
One Roman Catholic priest, well known both for his courage (he was captured with the paratroopers) and for his bitter opposition to Castro, appeared as a blubbering stool pigeon. "I am completely sorry for what has happened, and I ask the Cuban people to accept my sorrow," he said. "The Americans forced me to do it." Said an invasion survivor, watching the performance on TV in Miami: "I know that man like a brother. He might have been drugged."
On the final night's telecast, Castro himself, decked out in beret, cigar and low-slung .45, strode onstage for the finale. As the chorus of "to the wall" reached a crescendo, he harangued the prisoners for 3½ hours, crying "If the people of Cuba want a Communist regime, who has the right to deny it to them?" Then he grandly announced that he would "try to persuade" the government to spare their lives—all except those identified with Batista. The prisoners, by now dizzy from denunciation, clapped and cheered.
Scenes from the Beach. Perhaps unintentionally, the Cuban press gave eloquent testimony that the rebels, so docile in captivity, had fought a ferocious battle. Splashed across the pages of the government's mouthpiece RevoluciÓn were dozens of photographs from the Bay of Pigs. A youthful invader, too small for his oversized camouflage fatigues, lay dead in some weeds; another lay on his stomach among rocks; a third was on his back, knees sticking up, cut down where he sat behind his machine gun. And then there were the militia losses: a body burned black by a flamethrower; two more militiamen draped across each other beside a fallen tree.