n March 1961, President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, Attorney General began the black legend as “case officers” of the CIA, so named by the American researcher Joseph J. Tetro in his text The Secret History of the CIA, when both approved the mercenary invasion against Cuba and embarked in the next two years on the task of directly controlling covert operations against the island.

Already installed in the White House on January 20, 1961, Kennedy approved his own invasion plan which would be through Playa Giron and Playa Larga and included the prior airstrikes on the airports of Santiago de Cuba, Ciudad Libertad and San Antonio de los Baños to annihilate the small Revolutionary Air Force.

He also made it a condition to the military and the CIA that he would not authorize the U.S. armed forces to participate in the conflict under any circumstances, which was a bucket of cold water to the enthusiastic organizers of the invasion who saw all the previous action as a pretext for direct invasion.

Nevertheless, under these profound contradictions in strategy, Operation Pluto was consolidated and led to the well-known disaster of Playa Girón, which affected the prestige of the United States and especially that of its young president, who appeared very far from the image of the strong and intelligent leader of the Western world announced by Washington’s official propaganda.

After Girón, the Kennedys turned to an unhealthy resentment of the Agency and revenge against Cuba and organized Operation Mongoose to overthrow the Revolution by means of a gigantic covert war campaign, which did not deviate much from the matrix of the defeated invasion.

Allan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and his team, held responsible by the Kennedys for the disaster, were ousted and left with a huge load of hatred towards the president, they considered little less then a traitor for not sending the Marines to support the invaders, and they made common cause with the Cuban extreme right and waited for their moment of revenge which was not long in coming.

The obsession of John and his brother Robert to put an end to the Cuban government was also very much conditioned by the political strategy of the new president as set out in his inaugural speech on January 20, 1961, in which he recognized the poverty and exploitation prevailing in Latin America as the main cause of the insurrectionary processes and announced his program of the Alliance for Progress, which established economic aid as a kind of “soft power”, according to today’s terminology, to avoid social revolution in the region.

By then it was essential to eliminate the dangerous example of the Cuban Revolution at any cost, without stopping at plans to assassinate its maximum leader Fidel Castro, in addition to implementing the economic, commercial and financial blockade, promoting terrorist campaigns, espionage actions and the invasion of mercenaries and the U.S. Army itself if necessary.

According to investigators, the president proposed to his brother Robert the position of CIA director, which was rejected by the latter, although he was put in charge of the supervision and direction of Operation Mongoose and it is known that he used to spend long days at the Agency’s headquarters supervising the actions of the spies on the ground and with whom he sometimes dispatched directly.

The White House could not blame anyone for its failures in the execution of Operation Mongoose, when on the island the Cuban security forces defeated the actions and plans one after another. But the final blow to those attempts by the Kennedys occurred in October 1962, the deadline set for the coordinated actions of the entire counterrevolution throughout the country.

In that month, the Americans verified with their airplanes that Soviet medium-range nuclear rockets had been installed in the western region to protect the country from direct aggression, in accordance with an agreement signed between Cuba and the USSR.

The so-called Caribbean Crisis began, in which the entire U.S. strategy to liquidate the Cuban Revolution collapsed and the president had to resist great pressure from the military that demanded a full-scale attack against Cuba, which would lead to a nuclear war on a planetary scale against the Soviets.

Later, a more pragmatic White House policy came to replace the Kennedys’ practice of direct involvement in aggressive plans against the island.

The same day that President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, the French journalist Jean Daniel, sent by the president, met with Fidel Castro in Varadero, in what could have been the beginning of a process of a certain normalization of relations between the two nations.

Many in the U.S. today disagree with the official version of a lone assassin and relate the crime to a conspiracy of the Cuban ultra-right, the Mafia and the CIA, who since the days of Playa Girón had not forgiven Kennedy for his decision not to intervene directly in the conflict and rejected any understanding and negotiations with Havana.

source and translation Red en Defensa de la Humanidad – Cuba