Castro marks Bay of Pigs victory

[DoYouEverWonder]

20 April 2006

Cuban President Fidel Castro has marked the 45th anniversary of the failed US-backed invasion of the island, known as the Bay of Pigs.

Havana's Karl Marx theatre was packed with hundreds of veterans who defended Cuba in the operation in 1961.

On 17 April that year, about 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles invaded the bay on the southern coast of Cuba.

Mr Castro's army vastly outnumbered the exiles and President John F Kennedy decided not to provide air support.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4925262.stm


45 friggin' years and Poppy Bush is still screwing everyone. 45 friggin' years and guys like Luis Posada and Alverez Santiago are still trying to figure out how to get rid of Castro. 45 friggin' years and Castro is still going and laughing at all of them.

[stevekatz]

1. he'll be gone

sooner or later, doesn't really matter anymore

[Bridget Burke]

8. In a hundred years, we'll all be gone.

But Castro will be remembered more than you or I.

[BlackHeart]

2. Do you really think Poppy

is the one that deserves most of the blame for this fiasco?

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. Poppy has been behind all of this from the beginning

Bay of Pigs, Kennedy Assassination, Chile, Iran-Contra, GW1, the 2000 Selection, GW2...

I'm sure I left some stuff out, but I hold Poppy personally responsible for stealing not just our country but our lives. I remember the hope and promise we had in the early 60's. Kennedy was going to lead us and the rest of the world to do great things and we did. But Poppy and his friends killed Kennedy and killed a lot of other people and here we are 45 years later and Poppy's still alive and his son his jonesing to start Armageddon.

Poppy and his evil spawn love death and destruction. So yes, Poppy deserves a large portion of the blame but there's plenty of blame to go around.

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. Fidel should invite Peter Falk as guest of honor!

In a film he starred in, called the TheIn-Laws, in which he played a mad CIA agent, he managed to invsigle his hapless brother-in-law, a respectable, very buttoned-down and nerdy dentist to help him break into the Pentagon.

As his brother-in-law was admiring a group photo on the wall, commemorating the Bay of Pigs fiasco (presumably before it took place), including John Kennedy and Falk, himself, he asked him in awestruck tones, "Gee, were you in the Bay of Pigs operation?"

"Was I in it?" replied Falk. It was my idea!" One of the funniest films I've ever seen, though only marginally funnier than the CIA's response when he tried to join them in real life, after telling his inteviewer that he and his girl-friend had helped Tito's partisan victors to build a railway in Yugoslavia, after the war (WWII).

[Blue_Tires]

15. lol...my dad mentions that scene often as well

[Vogon_Glory]

5. An Even Stranger thing Happened...

I heard something even stranger today while channel-surfing on the AM band here in Austin. I heard What's-his-name from EIB calling for an end of the embargo with Cuba. I was tempted to pull over and run a reality check--see if the sky turned green, tell myself that there weren't any pixies in the (real) shrubbery, and that I really, truly DIDN'T see pigs flying or fish roosting in the trees--but it was him all right. (He'd been union-bashing earlier).

Of course, What's-his-name blamed the embargo as being a "legacy" from JFK.

Funny, I always thought of That One as being like a broken digital clock than a stopped analog time-piece. Stopped wind-up clocks can be right twice a day.
However, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for EIB's long-overdue enlightenment.

[Judi Lynn]

6. He probably sees it as the opportunity to get his Cuban cigars at

a much better price.

I never would have expected to hear what you've revealed. Damned odd.

It's really NOT a legacy from J.F.K., as the Cuban government was changed in 1959, during Eisenhower's Presidency, and Eisenhower started squeezing Fidel Castro out after the man had attempted to seek a friendly relationship with the U.S.

The first embargo was in place BEFORE Kennedy was elected, and Eisenhower had already started training people in one of the Central American countries for the invasion before Kennedy was elected, as well.

That EIB creep should spend a little less time gobbling hillbilly heroin, and a little more time reading.

[DoYouEverWonder]

7. That's where Poppy Bush got his start

when Kennedy took office, the preparations for Bay of Pigs were well under way. Kennedy didn't go along with Bush's plan and the whole thing went to hell in a hand cart. Very similar to what Bush did to Clinton with Waco. What the Cubans don't understand is that Poppy has been using them and pulling their puds for decades. Castro is like bin Forgotten, the Bush's have no interest in getting rid of them. They need their boogieman.

[Judi Lynn]

9. You've got that right. They've really been used, and they seem to believe

it means they are beloved by the U.S. government, real "special" people. Dear to the collective right-wing heart.

I'd love to be around when the finally recognize how little affection there really is for them at the personal level. They have made themselves useful for truly ridiculous, violent jobs most people would never find interesting. They are simple tools, nothing more.

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. George Bush has been screwing them since the Bay of Pigs

You would think they would buy a clue?

They've got access to all the C-4 in the world and they still couldn't kill him.

[brentspeak]

10. Maybe Fidel can celebrate by releasing all his political prisoners

You know, all the ones his stooges insist are really just exile and CIA-sponsored "traitors"?

[Vogon_Glory]

11. Good Idea

Good Idea. Lest the pro-Fidel apologists get upset with such a magnanimous notion, I'd point out that Mr. Beard has outlasted scores of plots from abroad and probably more than a few that we haven't heard of from within Cuba.

I may not approve of Cuba's political or Marxist-socialist policies, but I suspect that those policies will last for as long as Fidel Castro is alive and healthy. I doubt that the people in prison have the political wherewithal to force him out even if they were let free to walk the streets of Havana.

[Mika]

14. Who knows.

But it is funny that the Bush policy apologists get upset when BushCo's paid minions in Cuba get caught doing their illegal dirty work and some people point out that their activities are illegal, and just as illegal in the US.

Bush policy apologists have no regard for law, both US law and the laws of foreign countries (not to mention the support of being renegades of international law).

[killbotfactory]

13. Maybe we could strike a deal

And pledge to not support, or even actually prosecute, anti-Castro terror-- er... I mean "militants" like Luis Posada Carriles, instead of giving them a presidential pardon, like Bush I did to his fellow terrorist Orlando Bosch in exchange for more political freedom in Cuba.

Declassified CIA and FBI records posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University identify Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, who is apparently in Florida seeking asylum, as a former CIA agent and as one of the "engineer(s)" of the 1976 terrorist bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 that killed 73 passengers.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB157/

In 1992, under the first Bush administration, Orlando Bosch received an administrative pardon<31> and he now lives in Miami. When questioned about the 1976 bombing carried out by the terrorist organization that he founded, Bosch declared, "you have to fight violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people."

Keeping things in perspective: Cuba and the question of international terrorism:
http://ciponline.org/cuba/cubaandterrorism/keepingthingsinperspective.htm