“Dammit!” thought Erneido Oliva as he saw the explosion and flames. But Gloria’s old man opened the hatch and somehow clambered out, with his clothes on fire. He looked around, saw his commander, saluted, and started rushing up for further orders. “José collapsed midway to me,” recalls Oliva. “He was horribly wounded. His face and half his body were a mass of blood—but José
wanted to keep fighting
! That’s the real untold story about the Bay of Pigs!” Oliva stresses. “The heroism of our men, the fanaticism and professionalism these—mostly civilian volunteers with less than a month’s training—displayed in combat. I was a professional military man, they mostly weren’t. And I’ll tell you, my men’s heroism left me speechless—does to this day.”
Now, with squadrons of Stalin and T-34 tanks closing in, Oliva had one tank left, manned by little Jorge Alvarez. He quickly knocked out two of Castro’s Stalins. But he couldn’t stem the flood. More Stalins and T-34s kept coming. So Alvarez—outgunned, outnumbered, and out of ammo—had no choice. He gunned his tank to a horrendous clattering whine and charged.
Alvarez rammed his tank into the attacking Stalin tank. The Red driver was stunned, frantic. He couldn’t get a half-second to aim his gun. So Alvarez rammed him again, again, and again, finally splitting the Stalin’s barrel and forcing its surrender. These things went on for three days.
The Brigada’s spent ammo inevitably forced a retreat. “Can’t continue . . .” Lynch’s radio crackled—it was San Roman again. “Thousands of Communists closing in. Have nothing left to fight them. No ammo. No food. No water. Nothing to treat the wounded men. No nothing... destroying my equipment. . . . ” The radio went dead.
“Tears flooded my eyes,” writes Grayston Lynch. “For the first time in my thirty-seven years I was ashamed of my country.” These weren’t the tears of Bill Clinton at a photo-op, either. Lynch had landed on Omaha Beach. He had helped throw back Hitler’s panzers at the Battle of the Bulge. He had fought off human wave attacks by Chi-Coms at Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. And almost to a man, the
American officers involved in the invasion admit to breaking down under the emotional ordeal, watching helplessly as the Cubans they’d trained and befriended were abandoned and then overwhelmed by Castro’s forces.
When the smoke cleared, more than a hundred Brigadistas lay dead and hundreds more were wounded, their very mortars and machine gun barrels melted from their furious rates of fire. For three days, 1,400 Brigadistas—without naval artillery and air support—had squared off against 51,000 of Castro’s troops, Castro’s entire air force, and squadrons of Soviet tanks. According to defecting Castroites, the Red forces took casualties of twenty to one against Brigada 2506.
The battle was over, but the heroism and horrors weren’t. Paratroop commander Alejandro del Valle, his ammo expired and Red troops combing the long-doomed beachhead, jumped on a rickety sailboat with twenty-two other Brigadistas and shoved off. The first day at sea, their fury made them forget their wounds, their thirst, and the scorching sun. They spent it raging and cursing their betrayal.
By the eighth day, five of the men had died from their wounds or from thirst and exposure. They received a burial at sea from their comrades. By the tenth day, three more had perished. By the time a freighter picked them up, on the eighteenth day, ten had died, including del Valle. Dehydrated, starved, horribly sunburned, and probably delirious, he had leaped overboard with a knife to battle a huge shark that had followed them for a day. He thought the raw flesh might feed his slowly starving men. The shark escaped and del Valle was hauled aboard, where he lay down in a hollow-eyed daze and said nothing as night closed in. Next morning, his comrades found him dead.
The same day that Alejandro del Valle tried to escape, a hundred of his captured comrades were jammed into a tractor-trailer for transport to prison in Havana. “
No mas!
” yelled the desperate men from inside the truck. They were struck with gun butts, jabbed with bayonets, spit on, and jammed in tighter. “Men are dying in here! They’re being crushed!”
“Good!” snarled the Castro commander. “That’ll save us the bullets to shoot you.” And he emptied the magazine of a Czech machine gun just over their heads (the only shots this gallant commandante fired the entire battle).
More bayonets jabbed and fifty more captives were shoved in. It took twenty Castro soldiers huffing and puffing to finally jam the doors shut and muffle the screams. It was an eight-hour drive to Havana in the scorching tropical sun. We hear horror stories of prisoners hauled off in cattle cars. Well, these men dreamed of a cattle car. This was a rolling oven. Soon the yelling stopped and the gasping started. No vents in this trailer; only the bullet holes let little wisps of air into the sweltering death chamber.
The Brigadistas beat vainly on the walls. With their last reserves of strength, they rocked back and forth, trying to tip the truck over on the bumpy roads. Sweat and excrement sloshed at their boots. The stronger captives lifted their weaker or wounded comrades toward those bullet holes for a precious gasp.
Finally the only effort in the chamber was gasping. “Could Dante’s inferno be worse?” asked a survivor years later. Eight agonizing hours later, the trailer’s doors finally opened in front of the prison camp. When all had stumbled out, ten remained on the filthy floor. They were dead.
The commander who ordered this atrocity was Osmany Cienfuegos. He was recently Cuba’s minister of tourism.
On a lighter note, Brigadista Fernando Marquet recalls his capture: “Couple days after the battle, the Communists had us all tightly bound and crammed into an old sugar mill in the area. One morning I’m lying there all trussed up and I hear a babble of strange voices—a strange language, actually. Turned out it was French. Then the doors to the mill open up and who walks in but Che Guevara himself, wearing his famous
boina
[beret] and at just the right angle, too.” The battle had been over for days, so it was time for the gallant Che to finally show up. “Che was surrounded by these French journalists, it looked like. And as you might imagine, these visiting French journalists were fawning
all over
Che, especially as a couple were women.
“I can imagine how Che had been laying it on ’em, too: detailing his gallant fight against all these old, rich, white millionaires, sugar mill owners—Yankee lackeys all—who’d come back trying to reclaim their ill-gotten plantations, yachts, factories, and fortunes by landing at the Bay of Pigs.
“Well, I was closest to the door so I was one of the first prisoners the French reporters saw. But I’m part black and I was eighteen years old at the time. . . . Those French reporters sure looked confused—and Che noticed this quickly. ‘
Hay Caramba!
’ you could hear him thinking. ‘Here I’ve been telling these reporters about those old millionaire whites we’d fought—and the first thing they run into is an eighteen-year-old black kid!’
“So Che immediately walked up to me. First he asks me what I’m doing there, as if someone my age and background shouldn’t be there. ‘I don’t like Communism,’ I told him promptly. Then he starts into my father and uncle being rich Batistiano crooks and such because my uncle was a congressman and my father worked for Cuban customs before the revolution. ‘They are
not
crooks and we are
not
rich!’ I told him.
“ ‘And how have we been treating you, young man!’ he asks suddenly with a quick smile and one eye on the French reporters.
“ ‘Well, Che,’ I answered, ‘These damn ropes are pretty tight.’ I grimaced. ‘Think they’re cutting off the circulation in my hands and legs.’
“ ‘Over here—and pronto!’ Che quickly commanded some guards. ‘Now please loosen this man’s binds!’
“Che probably didn’t take his reporter guests to meet the Communists’ biggest trophy: the captured Brigada’s very commander, the very man who trained and led all those supposed white millionaire invaders, the very man who gave the Castro Communist forces such a ferocious and embarrassing stomping, who, when captured, snarled at the Castro general José Fernandez (who was born in Spain), ‘The only reason you captured us, Fernandez, is because we ran out of ammo!’ That’s General Erneido Oliva—who is black too!”
The gallant Che also visited another group of prisoners, mainly wounded ones, including one named Enrique Ruiz Williams. No French reporters accompanied the gallant Che this time. He walked in, looked around, and snorted, “We’re gonna shoot every last one of you.” Then he turned on his heel and walked back out.
Two days after the battle, Castro had the tables finally turned on him. He was displaying some of his Bay of Pigs prisoners in front of his TV cameras, much like one might display a trophy buck. He was interrogating, wisecracking, and baiting them as though he were a Communist talk-show host.
The prisoners were thoroughly interrogated beforehand (the KGB had been coaching Castro’s secret police for almost two years by now) to see who’d crack, who’d play along. Only these would get to go in front of the cameras. The goal was to get the Bay of Pigs prisoners to admit they were mercenaries in the pay of the U.S. government.
One of the prisoners was a black Cuban (later a U.S. citizen and Army officer) named Tomas Cruz. He and Felipe Rivero, Waldo Castroverde, Carlos de Varona, and many others gave every impression of having broken down. They said they’d be willing to go on camera and denounce the United States.
The Stalinist stage was set at Havana’s sports arena and the cameras rolled. Castro’s eunuch vice president, Carlos R. Rodriguez, was the opening act. He put the microphone to Felipe Rivero. “Nobody paid us to do a damn thing!” Rivero suddenly blurted. A rumble went through the crowd.
“We came here to fight Communism!” Rivero continued. “Men from every class and race in Cuba volunteered to come here and fight you!”
Rodriguez’s lips trembled. The cameras didn’t know where to focus.
“And another thing!” Felipe Rivero shouted. “We outfought you!”
Rodriguez’s voice trembled as he started with the usual Commie mumbo-jumbo about “the masses” and “the people.”
“Okay, fine!” Carlos de Varona jumped in. “You say you have the people with you? Then hold an election! That’ll really tell us, won’t it?”
Complete pandemonium. Even the diehard Commies in the crowd couldn’t restrain themselves. Che Guevara himself had to snicker. A rumble of laughter, a rustle of claps, and hoots erupted from all corners. This was on Cuban national TV, remember. And Cuba—that impoverished, squalid little Third World country—had more TVs per capita than Canada or Germany.
Rodriguez was frantic. Finally the Maximum Leader himself pranced onto the stage. Only he could straighten things out. He had it all figured out, with an ace up his sleeve. So he approached the black parachutist prisoner Tomas Cruz. “We opened the beaches for you blacks,” he sneered. “So what on earth are you doing with these Yankee mercenaries?”
Cruz didn’t flinch. He looked Castro straight in the eye. “I didn’t come here to swim. I came here to fight Communism! I came here with my brothers of every race to free my homeland from you and your Russian friends!”
After this, Castro decided to hold his show trials behind closed doors. During their “trial,” Cruz, Rivero, Castroverde, de Varona, and their comrades figured they were signing their own death warrants. Yet they faced down the most murderous psychopath this hemisphere has ever spawned. They mowed down his troops. They blew up his tanks. And then they spat in his eye.
A year later, Rivero was ransomed by a guilt-stricken JFK. But Castro almost had the last laugh. In 1967, Felipe Rivero found himself in a U.S. federal prison. His crime? Trying to overthrow Castro! Laugh or cry? You decide.
Rivero and the captured Brigadistas spent eighteen months in Castro’s dungeons, where none of them broke under torture. When they were ransomed back to the United States, they gathered at Miami’s Orange Bowl on December 29, 1962. Jackie Kennedy, with little John-John at her side, addressed the men.
“My son is still too young to realize what has happened here,” Jackie said in flawless Spanish. “But I will make it my business to tell him the story of your courage as he grows up. It is my hope that he’ll grow into a man at least half as brave as the members of Brigade 2506.”
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But these men’s bravery would not be just forgotten by liberals other than Jackie Kennedy. It would be deliberately trashed and slandered, just as it was betrayed by Jackie Kennedy’s husband.
During a campaign speech in 1960, John Kennedy said: “The Republicans have allowed a Communist dictatorship to flourish eight jet minutes from our borders. We must support anti-Castro fighters. So far, these freedom fighters have received no help from our government.”
10
Two weeks before this, Kennedy had been briefed by the CIA (on Ike’s orders) about Cuban invasion plans (what would later be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion). So Kennedy knew the Republican administration was helping the Cuban freedom fighters. But since the plans were secret, Kennedy knew Nixon couldn’t rebut him. Four months later, 1,500 of those very Cuban freedom fighters whom “we must support” were abandoned by JFK.
“It was Nixon’s gung-ho spirit that initiated the idea of invading Cuba,” writes Gus Russo.
11
Nixon became, in his own words, “the strongest and most persistent advocate for setting up and supporting action to end Castro’s regime.” The U.S “should move vigorously to eradicate this cancer on our hemisphere and to prevent further Soviet penetration,” he wrote later in
Reader’s Digest
.
12
According to Howard Hunt, Richard Nixon was the Cuba project’s “action officer” within the White House. National Security aide Colonel Philip Corso said, “Nixon was the hard-liner. He wanted to get rid of Castro. He wanted to hit him hard. He was a rough customer.”
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