After the attack on Cuban airports and the historic burial of the victims, yesterday it was exactly 61 years of the invasion to the island by Playa Girón, center-south of the country, financed by the United States.
It was Operation Pluto, approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on March 17, 1960 with the close participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces of the northern power, with the purpose of overthrowing the revolutionary process led by Fidel Castro.
For this reason, an army of exiles was recruited, trained and equipped in Guatemala, among them former figureheads of the dictator Fulgencio Batista (1952-1958), including those responsible for crimes against the Cuban people.
The invasion was programmed by means of an air-sea landing to conquer a beachhead in the southern Bay of Pigs and install a government previously appointed by Washington there.
That act of war was accompanied by others of internal subversion, armed infiltrations, sabotage and criminal actions.
In the early hours of April 17, Operation Pluto, inherited by President John F. Kennedy, took shape. Brigade 2506, made up of 1,500 troops and had departed from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, aboard five US ships.
The combats were bloody and the bombings by the B-26s deployed against the island were criminal, which reported more than 150 dead and hundreds of wounded people, according to witnesses and protagonists of the clashes with the enemy.
Less than 70 hours had elapsed since the invasion when the self-propelled gun in which Fidel Castro was traveling arrived before the last redoubt of attackers in Playa Girón on April 19.
The Cuban forces took some 1,200 prisoners, most of them Cuban exiles, and on April 24, 1961, President Kennedy acknowledged his government's involvement in the events.
This would be the first great military defeat of US imperialism in Latin America and since then Washington designed new strategies to end the young Revolution triumphant 90 miles from its shores.In fact, on November 30, 1961, the US president approved Operation Mongoose, the largest subversive plan orchestrated against Cuba, responsible for some 5,000 acts of sabotage and terrorist acts on the island in less than 10 months.
Some members of that assault brigade 2506 are still alive, they participated in other aggressive actions against their country of origin, they supported President Donald Trump (2017-2021) in his economic war of suffocation on the Island and 61 years later, they are still waiting without success the fall of the revolutionary government.