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Friendly Peasants. Months may pass before the full story of the disaster in the swamp is known. The CIA and the Pentagon, which sponsored and embarked the exile army, obviously were under instructions to keep their lips zippered tight. But from the exile command, which sat helplessly by while 1,300 of its countrymen were ground up by Castro's military machine, came a tragic account of miscalculation, compounded by political bickering, distrust and gross ineptitude.
The greatest of all the failures was the failure of intelligence. Advisers to the invasion army professed to believe that the Cuban peasantry and militia were so fed up with Castro's Communism that there would be mass defections. But the area chosen for the invasion was one in which Castro spends many weekends fishing, resting and talking with the peasants; he has a grand, job-producing scheme under way to drain the swamp and turn it into a tourist attraction. The peasants remained loyal to Castro and added their weight to the militia, which fought well enough for an outfit that was supposed to turn and run. The U.S. planners, despite counsel that June—when the sugar harvest is in and unemployment is high—would be a better month to count on unrest, decided to invade sooner, on the ground that it would be harder once some 200 Cubans returned from MIG training in Communist Czechoslovakia.
Saddest of all, there was virtually no coordination between the invaders on the beach and the thousands of underground fighters presumed to exist inside Cuba. And for that, the Revolutionary Council blames the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. Said one revolutionary chief on D-day-plus-two: "We offered the complete underground system in Cuba for the purposes of coordination. We were capable of bringing about great defections in the military inside Cuba, even contacts to bring off a general strike. Why, 48 hours after the invasion started, has this not been done? Why hasn't anyone called us and made contact?"
Seeds of Disaster. The dragon seeds of last week's disaster were sown as far back as mid-1960. By then the Eisenhower Administration had overcome its original benefit-of-the-doubt attitude toward Castro, concluded that Cuba was being turned into a Communist base for subversion of Latin America, and started looking for ways to bring Castro down. Direct intervention was ruled out, barred by a natural distaste for it, by a fear of raising the old cries of Yankee imperialism, and by specific U.S. pledges under the treaty of the Organization of American States. Refugees from Castro were turning up in Florida by the hundreds, and many were eager to fight to restore the independence of their country. A U.S. decision was made to train and support an anti-Castro organization of Cubans who were not tainted with the earlier and hated regime of Dictator Fulgencio Batista, who is now in exile in Lisbon.
The CIA picked the Revolutionary Democratic