Bay of Pigs

When Fidel Castro overthrew the pro-American dictator who had ruled over Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959, he immediately pushed for Cubans to have more control of their own country. While before American companies had owned half of Cuba’s sugar plantations as well as most of its other industries, Castro nationalized many of these sectors and took them away from American corporations. In response, Eisenhower decided to approve a secret CIA plan to train a group of 1,400 Cuban exiles, who were living in Florida, to invade Cuba. This would become known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The plan for the invasion wasn’t carried out until the start of Kennedy’s presidency. Kennedy had his doubts about the plan, and was adamant on keeping American involvement a secret. However the CIA was able to convince him that this operation would be “both clandestine and successful,” neither of which was proven to be true.
The precursor to the actual landing of the Cuban exiles was a bombing of a Cuban airfield a couple days before. Intended to destroy the Cuban air force, the bombing accomplished little due to the fact that Castro was made aware of the plan and had moved the planes. The old World War II B-26 bombers used to carry out this segment of the plan were flown by Cubans and were painted to look like planes from the Cuban air force in order to conceal the role of the US. However, photos of the attacking planes were taken, which revealed that they were in fact American planes. Alarmed by this and not wanting to cause further uproar, Kennedy canceled the second bombing which was part of the original plan.
In order to train the Cuban exiles, the CIA had established bases in Guatemala. While the mission was supposed to be kept secret, knowledge about it became widespread among the Cuban population in Miami where the recruiting happened. This meant Castro was aware of the plan as early as October of 1960, well before it was carried out in April of 1961. The destination of the landing was decided to be in a remote area of Cuba’s southern coast, called the Bay of Pigs. This was so that US involvement was less likely to be discovered and so there would be less Cuban resistance.
When the landing occurred, news immediately broke out because a radio station which had not been spotted earlier began broadcasting news of the attack. Everything went terribly wrong from the start. Ships hit previously undetected coral reefs and sank. Paratroopers, who were to interfere with transportation, dropped into the incorrect area. Cuban planes, which had not been destroyed by the bombing, shot invaders, sank ships, and took out the exiles’ air support. Bad weather damaged equipment and ammunition. The invaders’ supporting B-26 bombers arrived an hour late and were swiftly shot down. After under a day of fighting, the invaders surrendered after being pinned down at the beach by 20,000 Cuban soldiers. Around 100 of the Cuban exiles had been killed with around 1,200 of them being captured.
In the aftermath of this military fiasco, the US government unofficially backed up attempts to negotiate the return of the captured soldiers. An agreement was eventually made with Castro, which was 53 million dollars worth of baby food and medicine in return for the prisoners.  In order to achieve redemption for the failure, Kennedy continued to pursue plans to remove Castro from power, resulting in Operation Mongoose, a plan to sabotage and destabilize Castro’s government and economy.

https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/The-Bay-of-Pigs.aspx

https://www.britannica.com/event/Bay-of-Pigs-invasion

http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/bay-of-pigs-invasion