By Tim Weiner . New York Times Service. Published Friday,
March 23, 2001. Miami Herald.
HAVANA -- President Fidel Castro of Cuba walked into a hotel conference room
Thursday morning and sat down across the table from men who had spent years
plotting to subvert his government or to kill him for the United States.
They were veterans of the Bay of Pigs, the doomed invasion of Cuba by
anti-Castro forces backed by the White House, and of Operation Mongoose, the
Central Intelligence Agency's project to assassinate Castro.
'A PERFECT FAILURE'
Almost exactly four decades after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, the
two sides pored over a trove of secret documents about the invasion -- including
the first secret records that Castro has ever declassified -- and discussed that
rare thing in history: "a perfect failure,'' as the historian Theodore
Draper once wrote.
"This is the first serious attempt by this country to expose things the
way they were,'' said Roberto de Armas, a Cuban foreign ministry official. "We're
open to reality -- open to history.''
The meeting Thursday opened a three-day conference organized by American
historians, scholars and open-government advocates who have helped to force
access to secret archives of American, Cuban, British and other governments.
They brought together five veterans of Brigade 2506, the Bay of Pigs
guerrilla force, along with two ex-CIA officers (including Sam Halpern, who
helped run Operation Mongoose) and two former Kennedy White House officials. The
participants analyzed the records with senior Cuban officials.
It is the first time that Cuban exiles who fought Castro's forces at the Bay
of Pigs have returned to Cuba to meet the commanders they tried to kill -- and
who tried to kill them.
In 1961, "we disembarked as Cubans, as men who loved our country,''
said Alfredo Duran, a former president of the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association,
who was expelled by the group for his decision to return to Cuba. He came back,
he said, to learn, to share his thoughts, to make sure that "never again
will Cubans take arms against Cubans.''
CASTRO TRANSCRIPTS
In the Cuban documents, which cover thousands of pages and whose public
release began Thursday, are transcriptions of Castro's walkie-talkie and
telephone conversations as he directed the counterattack at the Bay of Pigs. The
CIA's brigade of 1,400 Cuban exiles was crushed by Castro's forces; 114
attackers died and 1,189 were captured.
The Castro transcripts reveal a young, almost giddy commander, peppering his
orders with curses and jokes:
"You're missing the party,'' he tells his brother, Raúl, now
commander of the Cuban army, who was far from the battle.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 