Roughly 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles, organized as Brigade 2506, landed on Cuba's southern coast at the Bay of Pigs, intending to spark an uprising against Fidel Castro's government. Lacking promised American air support, the invasion collapsed within 72 hours, humiliating the Kennedy administration and pushing Castro further into the Soviet orbit.
The plan had been drawn up under Eisenhower and inherited by John F. Kennedy just months into his presidency. Exiles who had fled Castro's revolution were trained in Guatemala, equipped with American weapons, and told they would spark a popular uprising the moment they landed. Kennedy, wary of overt American involvement, scaled back planned air strikes at the last minute, a decision that would prove fatal to the operation.
The landing at the swampy Bay of Pigs, known locally as Playa Girón, went wrong almost immediately. Coral reefs tore up landing craft, supply ships were sunk by Castro's tiny air force, and the promised uprising never materialized because most Cubans had not been told an invasion was coming. Castro personally directed the counterattack, and within three days his forces had killed or captured nearly the entire brigade.
The fiasco was a profound embarrassment for Kennedy, who publicly took responsibility while privately fuming at CIA planners. It also confirmed to Castro that the United States sought his overthrow, accelerating his turn toward Moscow, a shift that would culminate the following year in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Soviet nuclear missiles appeared just 90 miles from Florida.