Florida without sunshine is like a cup of bad coffee or scrambled eggs without salt or pepper, but we were stuck down there in the cold and the drizzle. To break the monotony my companion and I took a sleek little commuter train from Fort Lauderdale to Miami, with two amusements in mind — a seafood restaurant on the Miami River (Garcia’s: five stars!) and The Bay of Pigs Museum.
I think it could be easily argued that Florida itself has served as a laboratory where the agenda and tactics of our current administration were tested — from the cowardly war on woke, to epic grifting. It’s a state full of people who moved there because of the weather, a reason for relocation I find bewildering. I asked one old guy — he was my age! — if he missed his friends back in Boston, and he laughed and said he liked to think of them pulling their hats down to cover their ears while they shoveled their sidewalks. You would rather wear shorts than see your friends? I countered. Ab-so-fucking-lutely he replied.
Along with the sundowners you’ve got your Cubans. There are so many things that make Florida unappealing, it would be unfair and inaccurate to pin the woeful current state of affairs on Miami’s Cuban exile population, but once the Cubans left their expropriated fincas behind and repatriated to Miami, Florida suddenly had a reliable reactionary voting bloc that no ambitious politician could ignore.
Just as the crucifixion of Jesus became the foundational story of Christianity, the unifying tragedy of Miami’s Cuban community is the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Talk about the cult of failure! The invasion was not only a nearly instantaneous debacle but in hindsight the plan and its execution inevitably raises the question: what were they thinking? The invaders were committed, passionate, but not all of them were really all that well trained, despite the weeks marching around the secret Guatemalan training site. They had funding, but not enough — some of the men in the pictures displayed at the Bay of Pigs Museum appear to be wearing football helmets — probably taken out of their rec room closet back home. The landing site chosen for the flotilla of counter-revolutionaries was a spiky, swampy mess, making movement difficult, turning the men into targets. What’s more, the element of surprise seemed not to exist — Cuban troops seemed to be waiting for the invaders. The scanty air support from the US was quickly dispatched, and the second wave of air power never arrived — a sore point to this day among Miami’s Cubans.
The invasion was a failure, and it made the invaders appear foolish — did those 1500 or so men really think that the Cuban people would greet them with open arms, and that they would actually depose Castro, repossess their property or their patrons’ properties, and return Cuba to its former place in America’s back pocket? Who told them that? How did they come to believe it? Were they blinded by their own zealotry, or sold a bill of goods by a bunch of rich, older Cubans who figured what the hell, it’s worth a shot. Surely, their mission cohered with the overall thrust of American policy toward Cuba — again, the White House might have figured it was worth a shot.
So now we have a Museum of Betrayal. A Museum of Poor Planning. A Museum of Get Me the Fuck out of Here! Rather than politely move past the failure of the doomed mission, the folly has been memorialized, you might even say fetishized, and it’s given its own home of Calle Ocho. Statues, stickers, patches, all manner of keepsakes and tchotchkes are everywhere, and anyone strolling down this main drag of Miami’s Little Havana, can pick one up, either out of true respect for the men who put their lives at risk, and the men who died, or just out of touristic I was here impulse, like buying a little Satchmo figurine while visiting on Bourbon Street. But for the Cuban community, the memorialization of the Bay of Pigs is deadly serious, and now they are doubling down with a new, larger, sleeker home for the museum planned for the future. For now, however, the collection of photos, weapons, and other keepsakes of catastrophe is housed in a building about the size of a cannabis dispensary. The Museum opened in 1978, on April 17, which was the day the invasion was launched in 1961, though to call it an invasion is something of a reach. It was more like 1400 men running into a brick wall. Turning Hegel’s quip about history around, the Museum’s purpose really is to turn farce into tragedy.
On the day we went to the museum, a new looking Cadillac SUV stood in the museum’s parking area, and on its back window was a sticker that said Proud Daughter of a Brave Assault Veteran, and above that a smaller sticker, this one the classy color of a Veuve Cliquot label, that showed the slate blue sillouette of a soldier charging forward, holding a bayonetted rifle. The museum shares its parking area with a high-end optician — the museum is somewhat dwarfed next to the king-sized emporium selling Ray-Bans and frames designed by Tom Ford. Across the street is an evidently famous bakery where, like many famous bakeries, there is a line waiting to come in and order. Calle Ocho is full of vigor, full of business, and there are tour groups being led around by guides wearing headsets, stepping around the chickens that are everywhere — they seemed to have figured out foot and automotive traffic patterns. We saw scores of live chickens going about their business, and no dead ones.
None of the tour groups seems to hit the Bay of Pigs Museum, at least not while we were there. We had the place to ourselves. We were greeted by a young Cuban-American — narrow face, wavy hair, big earnest eyes — who let us know there was no admission charge, but of course we can make a donation. He was friendly, professional, accommodating, and let us know he was on hand if we have any questions.
In the first room a wall was taken up with a picture of the Palacio Presidencial, before it became the Palacio de la Revolucion. The photo seemed misted over in gold, and superimposed over the image of the grand palacio are a couple dozen possible facts about Cuba as things stood in 1959. For example: the per capita income was $520 dollars per year, somehow making Cuba the third most prosperous country in Latin America. Television set ownership? One per every seventeen inhabitants, making Cuba in 1959 number one in TV set ownership in Latin America. Weekly magazines: 126. Head of cattle: 6 million. In other words, in Cuba in 1959, things were somewhere between quite good and excellent.
However, if you wanted to understand how such a prosperous and healthy population with plenty of opportunities to read magazines and watch TV decided risk their lives in order to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, the famously brutal Cuban president, who had plenty of pull with the US State Department, the CIA, and the Mafia you might have to go to another museum. What is enshrined here is the undying spirit of resentment and martyrdom, a celebration of the 1400 guys who had so much smoke blown up their asses that they truly believed that Cuba was ripe for recapture, and that they were the ones who could pull it off. They were the 2056 Brigade and in Miami they are heroes.
In the room next to the mural depicting the good life under Batista is a copy of the covert action plan presented to President Eisenhower and inherited by JFK — which turned out to be an unlucky inheritance, something like being bequeathed a sick dog. The cover says: A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime. At the bottom of the document’s cover page it’s noted that this copy was donated by Col. Johnny Lopez de la Cruz #2653. De la Cruz remained active in the post-invasion world of interviews and appearances. A handsome, healthy looking guy with great posture and beautiful white hair, he remained an able spokesman for the men in his doomed brigade. Speaking of the Museum, he said, “This place, I think it has soul. No matter how many times I come in here I feel something, which is just seeing a photograph of my friends. It hits you really hard…I became a second in command in a company. Maybe because my Boy Scout experience. I had the rank of Eagle Scout in Cuba. We spent the two years in prison. There was a group of us that were still gung-ho. We wanted to go back to Cuba and fight. We thought the United States would not allow Cuba to become a communist country so close to the coast of the United States…I have a picture with President Kennedy. I guess he felt bad because of the fiasco of the invasion — he offered all the officers of the invasion to become officers in the armed forces of the United States. I became an infantry officer. Later on, I transferred to the logistics. I loved logistics. I spent 26 years. I feel very proud of being a colonel. I earned it.”
Under glass in the same room is a scrap of parachute fabric, a flag the would-be liberators brought with them, and photographs of some of the men in training. The museum’s collection relies heavily on photographs, not only of the brigade but of the US advisors, both military and CIA, taken at the training camp. There are nicely done drawings of the various uniforms, and a somewhat bleached out group photograph of what looks to be about sixty paratroopers taken on the eve of the invasion. Hard to believe, but the name of the place in Guatemala where they were training was Happy Valley.
Plenty of guns on display. None of them, by current standards of lethality, very impressive. The rifles look as if they were for hunting squirrels; even the machine guns look somehow tepid, perhaps to shoot a shit ton of squirrels.
In another display case is for me the most arresting artifact in the museum, the transmitter with cables and headphones, alongside of a stack of nostalgia-inducing Scotch reel to reel audiotapes. There’s a brief guide to the dots and dashes of the secret code, and next to that a typed document in which the mission of the invasion was stated: “Infiltrate Oriente Province, organize, direct, and control operations designed to harass, interdict, and isolate Castro security elements, and ultimately gain control of the operational area.”
This does not strike me as a sure path to victory. Harass?
Further on in the museum there is a wall of photographs with all but a camera-shy few brigadiers represented. There are photos of the prisons in which the men were held, and a very nice display honoring the influential New York lawyer James Donavan. A committee of the imprisoned invaders families were connected to Donavan by Robert Kennedy — the Kennedys might have felt they owed the exiles something. Donavan was able to negotiate the release of all but nine of the imprisoned men, swapping their freedom for 58 million dollars’ worth of medicine, surgical and dental equipment, and food.
On our way out, the young man who greeted us was chilly, barely looking up from his keyboard when we said goodbye and thanked him. He may have registered our lack of financial contribution or he may have overheard my companion use the word gusano, Spanish for worm, and the insulting name the pro-Castro people gave to the people who fled the island after the revolution.
The Cuban Bay of Pigs was sort of ours, but a domestic Bay of Pigs took place on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC, when a contingent or people more or less equal to the 2056 Brigade was arrested while storming the capital. That the January 6-ers thought they could “stop the steal” and prevent the election of Joe Biden from being certified seems to me at a comparable level of passionate goofiness as the exiled Cubans believing that they were going to harass Castro out of power. Both the January 6-ers and the 2056-ers wanted to turn back history, and all of them won a permanent place in hundreds of thousands of hearts by failing to do so. They are the brave martyrs, and if you’re looking for a way to live with Trump’s mass pardons of the January 6-ers it would be this: by mitigating their martyrdom, DJT probably guaranteed that the 6-ers won’t even have their own museum. Maybe that was part of the President’s plan all along — we know he doesn’t like to share.