Category: History Cuban History by Richard R. Tryon
The celebration of the 40th anniversary of the 'Bay of Pigs' battle in Cuban history is an evidence of the next major public relations effort by Fidel Castro to show the world that communism is perfect- at least in Cuba! By assembling such luminaries as a member or two named Kennedy and Arthur Schleisinger, noted author and historian, who wrote the notorious 'white paper' aimed at justifying the action by Pres. J.F. Kennedy to destroy the hopes of thousands of Cubans, Castro, once again, is working his public relations magic. Of course, the media will pick up and print all that comes out of this gathering, but it will be hard to glean the truth without considering the story found here. Thanks to words attributed to former Ambassador William D. Pawley, the author's knowledge of what happened, how, and why is greatly expanded. This chapter will be the first in an on-going effort to display more of the contributions of William D. Pawley, a true American patriot. His words also appear in the section under history dealing with communism.

The inspiration for this is twofold. One, the current news story in your paper from the A.P. about the 40th anniversary of the “Bay of Pigs” attack on Cuba; and the second, is my quest to publish the work of a former U.S. Ambassador named William D. Pawley. He died in 1978 after serving four U.S. presidents as an advisor and as a member of the State Department.

The inspiration for this beginning was the routine reporting of the celebration in Castro's Cuba of the 40th anniversary of the great victory of communism over capitalism at the Bay of Pigs, where American financed mercenaries were defeated by the gallant leadership of Fidel Castro and his minions.

Those that came for the celebration include Arthur Schleisinger, noted Harvard based historian, who wrote the white paper to give President J.F. Kennedy the logic to support his actions to cause the invasion to fail. That later Kennedy's are attending this event to be publicized by the cooperative media, only shows that this family has never stopped believing that liberals can 'save us from ourselves', if we just let good men like Fidel Castro rule with the needed iron-fist to insure that we do not stray from his definition of the correct path. Here is the response to the paper that starts this book.

The A.P. story in the Daily Camera, date lined “Bay of Pigs, Cuba” of Mar. 22, 2001 including a picture of one of the Kennedy family and Arthur Schleisinger, a special advisor to Pres. Kennedy at the time, made me realize that the secret lid on the real story behind the scenes is long overdue to be told to the U.S. public and the world at large. That story has been trapped in part by the governments ability to classify information for long periods of time; and by the fact that one of the most knowledgeable persons on the subject died before he could get his story published.

The perfidy of the” Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba in 1961 has been kept as a secret ever since by a U.S. government that had its State Dept. on Latin American affairs tilted to help destroy the much maligned Fulgensio Batista. This was done in order to support a so-called ‘patriot’ of the people named Fidel Castro.

William D. Pawley, was an Ambassador to Ecuador and then Brazil during the late 1940’s when he attended the OAS meeting in Bogotá, Columbia in March of 1948.. He played an important role in turning back an attack that was billed on the local radio as a revolution to free Columbia. The radio speaker, one of ten hired revolutionaries that came in through Venezuela, was a young Cuban law student named Fidel Castro! Pawley’s call for help at the meeting that Castro was sent to disrupt, helped bring arms and men back to the scene in time to stop the imported revolt, but not before many buildings had been burned to the ground. That 1948 debacle is mentioned in most encyclopedias as a minor riot of unknown origin. It showed Pawley that Castro was a communist several years before he began his quest for power in Cuba that culminated in his sweeping to power in 1959.

But, if you want to read how the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of 1961 started out as a plan to land at Trinity Beach, some 60 miles further East, and was carefully reworked to fail by direct intervention of the State Dept. and the White House, you can find the full story at in the history section.

If you want to let a commentary continue....

The full story of the Pawley role in encouraging efforts to free Cuba, his boyhood homeland from the yoke of Castro’s communist tyranny, you can just review two short parts of his words that are attributable to him, not published by him. He died in 1978 and his words were never officially released by his survivors although he spent two years before he died preparing them. In obtaining a copy of this manuscript, it is compelling to reveal that his words cast an entirely different perspective on how and why the plan to free Cuba happened and how it was forced to fail because of American betrayal to those men that gave their lives to free their homeland.

The plan was put forth in the last several years of the Eisenhower administration, but was delayed from execution until the early days of the Kennedy term. The plans were well laid. The training was well done with a minimum of cost and the campaign was ready to go when State Dept. encouraged delays managed to give it the chance to get Eisenhower out of the way until the Kennedy team could arrive with a plan to spend money to buy peace in Central America for just $10 billion!

Here is a quote from Pawley’s manuscript attributable to him:

“On the eve of the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy directed his close adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., to draft a “White Paper” on our relations with Cuba. Spruille Braden, a former ambassador to Cuba, later characterized it as “One of the most indefensible documents I have ever seen issued by a presumably responsible official, adding: “The best that can be said for it is that it displays such ignorance and lack of understanding as to explain in considerable measure the tragic bungling of the catastrophe in Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs).”

The White Paper advocated what it called the “authentic and autonomous revolution of the Americas,” meaning that the Castro program of expropriation and socialism was free of the Soviet taint. It repeated the myth that Castro was a “traitor to the (Communist) revolution,” ignoring that his movement had been Moscow-inspired from the first. Likewise out of ignorance, the authors heaped praise on David Salvador, a notorious Communist labor leader.

As Braden pointed out: “to speak, as the White Paper does, of the ‘rapacity of the (Batista) leadership’ and damn such splendid characters as Saladrigas and hundreds of others like him, is calumny, cheap demagoguery and a despicable act, unworthy of a responsible government and foreign office.”

Even the U.S. Information Agency found this Schlesinger document “too racy and liberal.” the Harvard professor, however, was armed with White House authority. Schlesinger said that when he brought his manuscript to Kennedy, the latter was “generous in his comment, but wanted to eliminate one observation because it might be offensive to Castro.”

In their conferences with the new Commander-in-Chief, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA discovered that at every possible point on the conduct of the plan to free Cuba from the Castro regime, Kennedy whittled down the invasion operation and narrowed its prospects for success. In a desperate effort to salvage the plan, Allen Dulles told the President on March 11th:

“Don’t forget that we have a disposal problem. If we have to take these men out of Guatemala, we will have to transfer them to the United States (if the invasion plan is scrapped - WDP), and we can’t have them wandering around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.”

The point evidently made a big impression. In his last-minute decision to go ahead with the invasion Kennedy told Schlesinger that he had pared down the project to such an extent that “the cost, both military and political, of failure was now reduced to a tolerable level ... if we have to get rid of these 2,500 men it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States, especially if that is where they want to go.”

These words make a mockery of the 40th anniversary event staged in Cuba to help the perpetrators gain positive notoriety for their perfidy!


To show a bit more of the reliability of the words attributed to Ambassador William D. Pawley, here are those relating to his first encounter with Fidel Castro:

“On January 2, 1948, The CIA reported from Bogotá that a “vigorous anti-imperialist campaign had been prepared for the Pan-American Conference by the Communist Party and will be launched shortly before the conference convenes in March.” On January 23, the CIA reported that the Communist leader in charge of these disruptive proceedings had urged that “this should be known as a Communist activity.”

On January 29, the CIA filed a far more significant dispatch which stated that arms were being stockpiled for an insurrection with the aid and complicity of the Soviet diplomatic mission. It added that Dr. Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the national leader of the Liberal Party of Colombia, was receiving Soviet funds, which he believed came from his Colombian supporters.”

A bit further on he explains what happened in Bogotá.

“Returning to our house, I was listening to the car radio just in time, after a confused bubble, to hear a voice say in Spanish:
“This is Fidel Castro of Cuba. The President has been killed. All the military establishments in Colombia are in our hands. The Navy has surrendered to us. The revolution has succeeded!”

The name Fidel Castro meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. Probably it stuck in my mind because this was the first intimation I had that we were in the midst of an insurrection, and that we might all find ourselves trapped inside a Communist-held enclave.”

One day the full manuscript may be shown here to support the truth about how communists, with help from agents inside the U.S. government, along with ‘fellow-travelers ’ and intellectuals duped by the notions of communist rhetoric, managed to nearly take over the whole world before the monstrous lies of the Soviet Union lead to its collapse of its own dead weight and a failure to measure up to the challenge of President Ronald Reagan.

If you would like to encourage the freeing of access to the full story of what Ambassador Pawley did to help the U.S. fight the communists in China, Cuba, India, France, and elsewhere including the White House and the State Department, then respond to this article so we can gain the means to tell the “rest of the story”, to quote Paul Harvey.

More is to come from this story and your words to the author will be welcomed.