From the print edition of The New American
MIAMI, Florida — When the young men of Assault Brigade 2506 landed at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, many realized that something was not right. Their bravery was astounding. But in their wildest dreams, they could not have imagined the depths of the betrayal that had been engineered in Washington, D.C., by well-placed globalist power brokers. The betrayal had global repercussions that are still being felt today.
First, the establishment — Deep State operatives from the globalist-minded Council on Foreign Relations in key roles at the U.S. State Department and the New York Times — installed a mass-murdering communist dictatorship in their country. Then that same establishment stabbed in the back the brave freedom fighters sent to liberate Cuba. It was an incredible victory for tyranny and a brutal blow to liberty. And it remains a shameful episode in American history that has been largely overlooked — until now.
The plan to invade Cuba, as originally formulated, was brilliant. And it had a very real chance of successfully overthrowing the barbaric regime installed in Cuba by globalist American officials and communist butchers in Moscow. But enough pressure was brought to bear by CFR members and their allies in strategic positions that it was possible to sabotage the entire mission, handing communism an unprecedented morale boost while demoralizing anti-communist forces everywhere.
Preparing the Invasion
In March of 1960, after doing everything possible to bring Castro to power, as this article will show, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to begin planning for regime change in Cuba. The CIA began recruiting anti-communist Cubans in America for the purpose. These men were trained in several places, but mostly in the hills of Guatemala.
One of the writers of this article, Frank de Varona, who fled Cuba after communists stole his family’s cattle ranch, joined what would be later called Assault Brigade 2506 on April 1, 1961. He and about 100 other CIA recruits joined the Brigade just weeks before the assault. The goal: Liberate his homeland. Upon arrival in Guatemala, he met his older brother, Jorge de Varona, and many of his cousins and classmates from Cuba.
The bulk of the soldiers, sailors, and pilots of Assault Brigade 2506 were trained for more than nine months in Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, and even the United States. The trainers were mostly members of the U.S. Armed Forces and CIA personnel. The American military instructors were astounded at the passion and fervor displayed by the “brigadistas,” as they came to be called, and by how quickly they learned military tactics.
The men who joined the effort to liberate Cuba represented a true cross-section of Cuban society: all races and classes, all sorts of professional backgrounds, and all different regions of the nation were among the courageous patriots. Their average age was 23. One boy was just 15; he had to lie about his age to join. Some had been wealthy before communist slavery descended on their homeland; others had been humble working-class people. Most were members of Cuba’s sizable middle class. But all were united for the cause of freedom.
Invading at the Bay of Pigs
The invasion of Cuba began 57 years ago, on April 17, 1961. It took place on the southern coast of the island at the Bay of Pigs near the Zapata swamps. The brave young men who participated in the effort were under the impression that the goal was to destroy the Castro regime that had enslaved their island. But in Washington, D.C., and New York City, globalists and subversives in high places had other plans.
Before the actual invasion started, the Brigade Air Force, made up of B-26s, C-46s, and C-54s, dropped supplies to support the anti-communist guerrillas that were already fighting the regime from Cuba’s Escambray Mountains. The Brigade Navy conducted numerous infiltration operations, sending clandestine teams to deliver weapons and supplies to the underground forces battling Castro’s Soviet- and U.S.-armed military.
Several weeks prior to the invasion, a number of Brigade 2506 infiltration teams were sent to different cities of Cuba to work with the underground anti-communist rebels. Some of these brave soldiers were killed and wounded in the operations. Most of the rest ended up captured and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. A few were able to escape, entering Latin American embassies to obtain political asylum.
The actual invasion of the Bay of Pigs began early in the morning on Monday, April 17, 1961. Assault Brigade 2506’s infantry, numbering some 1,474 soldiers, including paratroopers, made it to shore, and many pilots participated. They engaged the tens of thousands of enemy soldiers in combat during three days of furious battle at Playa Larga, Playa Girón, San Blas, and other combat zones.
Enemy T-33 jets, B-26s, and Sea Fury planes sank two of Brigade 2506’s World War II-era Liberty-class transport ships, which had been designed to haul cargo to Europe in WWII. De Varona, one of the writers of this article, was aboard the Houston as it sank. He swam to shore, but more than two dozen of his brothers-in-arms were killed by enemy planes, drowning, or sharks that fateful morning. Both the Houston and the Rio Escondido, which were carrying military supplies, food, gas and oil for the airplanes, ammunition, and communication equipment, went down that day. The other ships were driven away under heavy fire.
On the fourth day, the outgunned, out-manned, desperately tired survivors of the Fifth Battalion’s sunken Houston fought off communist militia soldiers who arrived in two boats. A couple of CIA officials and some pilots from the Alabama National Guard participated in the battle, too. Grayston Lynch, a CIA officer who was the first to land at the Bay of Pigs, wrote in his book Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs, published in 2000, how the Brigade soldiers “fought like tigers.”
Several C-46s dropped 177 paratroopers from the First Battalion in different places of the Bay of Pigs area. With the exception of the survivors of the sinking of the Houston, the rest of the battalions landed at Playa Larga and Playa Girón. For three days, the abandoned Brigade soldiers at the beaches fought bravely against the overwhelming number of enemy soldiers, estimated in the tens of thousands, and aided by Soviet tanks and planes.
The freedom fighters were outnumbered about 20 to 1, yet they dealt devastating losses to Castro’s forces. Estimates suggest the Brigade inflicted approximately 6,000 casualties on the enemy, despite the handicaps. But after the third day of heavy fighting, the Brigade ran out of ammunition, and no more would be forthcoming. The soldiers retreated into the swamps, where some “brigadistas” continued to fight for several more days until they were all killed or captured.
By the time the Brigade ran out of ammunition, they had lost 104 soldiers and pilots. More than 100 were wounded. And the remaining 1,200 soldiers, out of ammo and practically delirious from the lack of sleep, were captured by Castro’s forces.
Trials, Jail, Terror in Havana
After a year of imprisonment in the Castillo del Príncipe in Havana under the most inhumane conditions imaginable, Brigade soldiers were sentenced in April 1962 to 30 years of hard labor. The other alternative offered by the communist regime: Ransom money, ranging from $25,000 to $500,000 for each prisoner. Their shameful “trial” was in violation of the Geneva Convention, since prisoners of war cannot be subjected to a trial.
While in prison, the brigadistas were relentlessly beaten and tortured. To survive, they drank water with dead rats in it. They suffered from hepatitis, dysentery, and all types of skin diseases, owing to the lack of even the most basic hygiene. One untreated brigadista died of hepatitis. Others lost their minds and never recovered. The prisoners of war were denied medical and dental treatment, in violation of the Geneva Convention.
After the illegal “trial,” 211 Brigade prisoners of war, each of whom had a ransom value of $100,000, and the three leaders of the Brigade, worth $500,000 each, were placed in isolation for seven months in the worst prison in Cuba, located on the infamous Isle of Pines. De Varona, as well as his brother Jorge, suffered immensely alongside the men who were sent to the infamous prison of the Presidio Modelo on the Isle of Pines. Their health never fully recovered.
The more than 200 high-value prisoners were packed into a small room, which had a capacity for 40 people. They were denied soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, and medicine for seven full months. They shared one toilet and two showers. The minuscule, disgusting “food” rations available to the prisoners were often poisoned to make the victims even more sick. It was as close as possible to hell on Earth.
The prisoners were housed like sardines in a can, sleeping on the bare floor. They were often beaten by communist prison guards. The intolerable conditions and abuses perpetrated against the 214 members of the Brigade, as well as the other 5,000 political prisoners on the Isle of Pines, led to a hunger strike that lasted three days. The strike was finally called off when the prison guards cut off the water, and several prisoners, near death, fainted.
After 20 months of inhumane conditions in prison, the United States, under the direction of President John F. Kennedy, ransomed the prisoners by paying $53 million in medicines, food, and cash to the regime. President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy welcomed them on December 29, 1962 at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The president promised to return the flag of Brigade 2506 presented to him to a free Havana. But that never happened. And it turns out that Kennedy’s own minions at the highest levels of government were responsible for betraying the brigadistas in the first place.
What Went Wrong
The official narrative pushed by the establishment surrounding the catastrophe at the Bay of Pigs generally offers a number of excuses for the failure. For instance, a common refrain holds that the plan was flawed from the start. Media outlets often claim that the invasion failed because of the dictatorship’s alleged public support — a ludicrous idea. And finally, there is the demonstrable lie that Brigade fighters, who mostly lacked formal military experience beyond their training, surrendered quickly to communist forces.
The reality is that the Brigade was betrayed by globalist insiders in the Kennedy administration who appear to have wanted them to fail. There were two key elements of the plan that were sabotaged before the invasion that made all the difference. Like a household stool, which needs all of its legs to stand, the original plan developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA required all of its legs to stand. When two of the legs were cut off a few days before the invasion, obviously, the rest of the stool collapsed as well.
The first problem was a last-minute decision to change the landing site. The original spot selected by the military and CIA planners was in the southern Cuban city of Trinidad — a site with many advantages. For one, it was next to the Escambray Mountains, where anti-communist rebels were already on the ground fighting the Castro regime. The original site also had docks, which were crucial to allow the obsolete Brigade ships to unload gasoline, oil, communications gear, and other critical supplies. Another key benefit of Trinidad was the presence of an airfield for Brigade planes. It had a defensible beachhead and a couple of roads that led to the city of Havana. The local population, numbering about 26,000, was dissatisfied with the regime and was expected to join and help the Brigade. There were also grocery stores with food and hospitals staffed by doctors for the wounded.
Instead, globalist officials in Washington, D.C., decided to change the landing site to the swampy, sparsely inhabited villages of Playa Girón and Playa Larga at the Bay of Pigs — landing spots with no real infrastructure, no docks, no local anti-communist forces to assist, and numerous other disadvantages. Making matters worse were the treacherous reefs at the Bay of Pigs that made the landing even more difficult. And finally, there were no good options for retreat, and no good ways to advance forward. In short, it was perhaps the worst imaginable spot to land. Indeed, changing the landing from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs is widely viewed as one of the primary reasons for the Brigade’s defeat. President Kennedy told Allen Dulles that he did not approve landing at Trinidad because he didn’t want to interfere with civilian life there.
Possibly even more important to ensuring the invasion’s defeat was the inexcusable order canceling the overwhelming majority of the air sorties by Brigade pilots, intended to neutralize Castro’s air forces, his tanks, and more. When Brigade Air Force Chief Reid Doster heard about the decision from D.C., he was quoted as saying: “What?! Are they nuts?! There goes the whole f***ing war!” The sentiment was widespread among the men. Reports about radio traffic say that U.S. Navy radios were bombarded with calls from the embattled brigadistas imploring them to allow the planes to come. Globalists in D.C. refused.
The original plan was supposed to include five bombing raids using the entire fleet of the Brigade Air Force. The fleet was made up of 16 B-26 bombers, which were supposed to be used to destroy Castro’s Air Force, his heavy Stalin tanks, his trucks, heavy artillery, oil refineries, and other military targets that were crucial to the regime’s ability to defend the island. For the operation to succeed, the original plan needed to be followed completely — especially considering that the communist regime had more than 200,000 soldiers and militiamen armed by the Soviet Union, as well as a significant Air Force. Instead, most of the Brigade’s air sorties were ordered grounded, and the number of planes was cut by 50 percent, ensuring that Castro could muster plenty of planes, tanks, and more to defeat the freedom fighters.
A number of invasion participants have highlighted the significance of the betrayal, and the disaster represented by quashing the air strikes. CIA officer Gray Lynch, one of two American CIA operatives who went ashore with the Brigade, highlighted the significance of it. Among other key points, Lynch argues that the operation could have succeeded in toppling the Castro regime and liberating Cuba — if not for the decision to cancel more than three-fourths of the planned pre-invasion air sorties intended to take Castro’s air forces out of the game.
Even Donald Trump, who became the first presidential candidate ever to be endorsed by the Bay of Pigs Veterans, had long appeared to recognize the betrayal. “I really admire toughness and courage, and I will tell you that the people of this brigade really have that,” Trump told the Brigade veterans at the Bay of Pigs Museum in Miami in 1999. “You were let down by our country.” And indeed, they were.
Marine Colonel Jack Hawkins, a decorated veteran of World War II and Korea who helped train the Brigade, also viewed the tragedy as a betrayal. “They fought magnificently and were not defeated,” he said. “They were abandoned on the beach without the supplies and support promised by their sponsor, the government of the United States.”
Globalist Players Behind the Betrayal
A number of top officials in the Kennedy administration were to blame for the disaster. And virtually all of them had one thing in common: membership in, or strong ties to, the Council on Foreign Relations, which this magazine has exposed on numerous occasions. The organization, which openly pursues global governance and has historically dominated the Cabinets of presidents from both parties, also had members in the media who played an important role in sabotaging the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Among the key CFR members within the administration were U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, White House Director of National Security McGeorge “Mac” Bundy, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson. Along with other senior officials, all of these CFR members urged President Kennedy to cancel the Brigade’s airstrikes following the initial sorties. While the second-in-command of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff pleaded to allow the airstrikes to go forward, Kennedy took the advice of the CFR crowd and ordered them canceled. Kennedy’s decision to cancel the remaining air strikes, lobbied for by Rusk, was made after the Brigade was already en route. The decision was later justified by claiming that allowing the strikes to proceed would have been perceived as too much U.S. “involvement” and might have been bad for world opinion.
At that point, CIA Director Allen Dulles, another CFR operative who served as a leader there and played a key role in sabotaging the invasion, should have called off the whole plan, knowing it could never succeed without air power. Instead, he allowed it to proceed, ensuring its failure — and a powerful victory for communism. On the day of the invasion, Dulles had left for Puerto Rico. Brigade members widely view the decision to proceed without the airstrikes and doom the Brigade to death or capture as an act of criminal negligence, at best.
The globalist pedigree of the Brigade saboteurs is well established. Consider, for example, Secretary of State Rusk, one of the key players. His background, like so many of those responsible for the orchestrated failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and even Castro’s rise to power, is dominated by links to the globalist establishment. Among other examples, Rusk served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation starting in 1950, eventually going on to become president of the globalist operation that the Congressional Reece Committee investigation of tax-exempt foundations had exposed as subversive less than a decade earlier. He was also deeply involved with the CFR.
Outside of government, CFR members and fellow travelers in the establishment media were doing their part to ensure a Castro victory. Prior to the invasion, for example, the New York Times, widely viewed as the megaphone for the CFR and a publication that helped market Castro and his revolution to Americans, wrote articles describing how anti-Castro forces were being trained in Guatemala by U.S. military personnel and CIA operatives, thus alerting Castro that the invasion was imminent. “Castro doesn’t need spies in the United States; all he needs to do is read the New York Times,” a frustrated President Kennedy reportedly told White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger.
Bringing Castro to Power
Many of the same people and organizations responsible for betraying the Bay of Pigs Brigade were also involved in bringing Castro to power. And once again, CFR members were the star players. It began during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Back then, in 1957, before becoming a mass-murdering dictator, Castro was in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountain range fighting a guerrilla war against the Cuban government.
Here, the New York Times played a key role, with Times reporter and CFR member Herbert Matthews interviewing the guerrilla leader and portraying him as a heroic freedom fighter struggling against an oppressive regime. The paper even celebrated Castro as the “George Washington” of Cuba while relentlessly demonizing Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. Aside from Matthews, Times Board Chairman Arthur Sulzberger and publisher Orvil Dryfoos were also members of the CFR.
Of course, plenty of people knew better than to dub Castro a freedom fighter. The U.S. ambassador to Cuba at the time, Arthur Gardner, reported to higher-ups in Washington, D.C., that “Fidel Castro talked and acted like a communist, and should not be supported by the United States.” In response, Ambassador Gardner was pressured to resign his position on June 16, 1957. He was prevented from briefing his successor, with CFR member and Times propagandist Matthews being brought in for that purpose. But Gardner’s replacement, U.S. Ambassador Earl Smith, noticed the same thing, and dutifully warned Washington as well.
But despite those warnings, the U.S. government acted to ensure the removal of Batista — and thereby, the success of Castro. On June 13, 1958, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who actually helped found the CFR decades earlier, directed Ambassador Smith to give a message to Batista: “Request his government to disengage from combat activities men who were trained by the U.S. Military Assistance Program (MAP) and not to use weapons, ships, and aircraft supplied by MAP.”
Some 75 percent of Cuban aviators and virtually all of the mechanics, along with the elite of the Cuban army and navy, had been trained by MAP. The outrageous order by Dulles was opposed even by top U.S. military officials such as Admiral Arleigh Burke, who warned that the Cuban government was fighting “elements allied with communism” and that the State Department should not tell a sovereign nation what to do. In the end, the protests fell on deaf ears. It was a devastating blow to a key U.S. ally and a bulwark against communist expansion in the Western Hemisphere.
All the while, Castro was allowed to get all the arms from America and the Soviet Union that he needed to overthrow the increasingly embattled government. In fact, just those actions alone so demoralized and weakened the Cuban military that they have been widely blamed for ensuring that Castro and his “freedom fighters” could seize power in Havana.
It got even worse from there, however. According to the book Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI (1991), on December 17, 1958, U.S. Ambassador Smith was given another order by the State Department. This time, he was instructed to tell Batista that the U.S. government thought he should step down and flee to Spain. “It is my unpleasant duty to inform the President of the Republic that the United States will no longer support the present government of Cuba,” Smith was quoted as saying.
Understanding the implications of the betrayal, President Batista realized there was nothing more he could do. So on December 31, 1958, he fled from Cuba. Instead of allowing Castro to take the reins of power, the hyper-interventionist U.S. government could have simply asked that Batista allow the democratic opposition, headed by Carlos Marquez Sterling of the Ortodoxo Party, to take power in an election, thereby ensuring a peaceful transition. But the U.S. government, seemingly determined to see Castro in power, refused to do that. Without this betrayal of an anti-communist U.S. ally, the Bay of Pigs invasion would never have even been contemplated.
Lest there be any doubt that the U.S. government — really the CFR operatives within its upper ranks — brought Castro to power, Ambassador Smith wrote a full book about what he observed entitled The Fourth Floor: An Account of the Castro Communist Revolution. He also testified in the U.S. Senate, saying that Castro was in power because of the actions of U.S. authorities. And he wrote a letter to the New York Times several years after publishing his book, stating clearly that the top levels of the State Department were the cause of Castro’s rise.
“Castro could not have seized power in Cuba without the aid of the United States. American government agencies and the United States press played a major role in bringing Castro to power,” Smith wrote, citing his own Senate testimony. “As the United States ambassador to Cuba during the Castro communist revolution of 1957-1959, I had first-hand knowledge of the facts which brought about the rise of Fidel Castro…. The State Department constantly intervened — positively, negatively, and by innuendo — to bring about the downfall of President Fulgencio Batista, thereby making it possible for Fidel Castro to take over the government of Cuba.”
The whole operation that resulted in the enslavement of millions of people was very similar to what happened in China years earlier. There, CFR member and Secretary of State George Marshall and the CFR-controlled media painted mass-murdering butcher Mao Tse-tung as an “agrarian reformer” and nationalist U.S. ally Chiang Kai-shek as a tyrant. The exact same process was used, too. First, propaganda to paint the anti-communist government as evil and the communists as oppressed freedom fighters: then, a U.S. government-enforced arms embargo against the anti-communist U.S. ally, combined with endless weapons and behind-the-scenes machinations aimed at helping communist terrorists rise to power. The parallels between Cuba and China are numerous and extraordinary.
The Great Lie
Supposedly, all of this was some monumental mistake — a miscalculation of epic proportions. The establishment’s narrative would have Americans believe that the U.S. government officials and journalists responsible for bringing Castro to power — almost all of them CFR members or toadies — were simply naive. But that cannot possibly be true. In fact, there should have been no question that Castro was a communist. His own actions proved it. And this was hardly a secret.
For one, at least three U.S. ambassadors, including Smith and before him Gardner, had sent clear warnings to their superiors in Washington. Being in Havana, they would be expected to know. But they were hardly alone. In mid-1958, former Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden warned about Castro, too. “Rebel chief Fidel Castro is a pawn in the Kremlin’s international intrigue,” he warned. U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Robert Hill sent similar warnings to Washington, to no avail.
Instead of proclaiming the truth and ceasing all aid to Castro and ending all efforts to remove Batista, Secretary of State Dulles and other CFR members in the Eisenhower administration persisted in supporting Castro. Despite warnings, they also refused to remove pro-communist operatives in the U.S. government such as top State Department official William Wieland and his supervisor, Assistant Secretary of State Rubottom, a key supporter of the arms embargo and communist coup against Batista’s anti-communist government.
They could not claim ignorance. Consider what happened at the 1948 Organization of American States (OAS) meeting in Bogotá, Colombia. On April 9 of that year, communists burst onto the scene to disrupt the meeting in bloody fashion. A 21-year-old Fidel Castro took part in the horror show, seizing a radio station and shouting, “This is a Communist revolution.” Castro and other communists murdered hundreds of innocent people while setting fires and wreaking havoc. He was arrested and charged with murder. But instead of repenting, he boasted, “I did a good work today; I killed a priest.” Colombian authorities deported him.
Beyond the myriad ambassadors sounding the alarm, outside of government, astute analysts were warning about Castro, too. Robert Welch, for instance, who went on to found The John Birch Society, warned about Castro in his magazine American Opinion months before the tyrant-in-waiting succeeded in enslaving Cuba. “Now the evidence from Castro’s whole past that he is a Communist agent carrying out Communist orders and plans is overwhelming,” wrote Welch in September of 1958. In his 1963 book The Politician about Eisenhower, Welch pointed to the March 14, 1958, decision to block weapons shipments to Batista as the beginning of the end for a free Cuba.
Author James Perloff, who has been a leader in exposing the CFR, highlighted this betrayal in his 1988 book The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline. “Perhaps the greatest shame of the Eisenhower administration was allowing Fidel Castro to transform Cuba into the Soviets’ first outpost in the Western Hemisphere,” he wrote. “Despite reasonable evidence, some of the president’s apologists long contended that Castro had not been a communist when he originally took power.”
However, after coming to power, the Cuban dictator gave a speech on December 2, 1961 refuting this claim. “I have always been a Marxist Leninist since the days I was a student at the University of Havana,” he said. Indeed, the evidence of that was clear and overwhelming to anybody willing to look at it.
As if to confirm people’s worst suspicions, after the administration removed both Gardner and Smith from their ambassadorships to Cuba, Eisenhower appointed the pro-Castro Philip Bonsal to that role, a move that was praised by the New York Times. His actions, which speak louder than words, exposed his real agenda. U.S. citizen William Morgan had fought with Castro in the revolution. But when he realized Castro was a communist, he turned against the tyrant and began plotting his removal. Ambassador Bonsal immediately told the Cuban regime, resulting in Morgan being shot dead by firing squad on March 11, 1961.
Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs
The betrayal at the Bay of Pigs by the CFR-dominated Kennedy administration emboldened the international communist conspiracy — and not just in Cuba. In particular, it gave free rein to Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev, who promptly built the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and then put intercontinental ballistic missiles in Cuba in October 1962 aimed at America. During the October Missile Crisis, Kennedy made a pact with Khrushchev to never invade Cuba and dismantled the U.S. ICBMs in Turkey and Italy, as the price for the Soviets to withdraw the missiles from Cuba. Subsequent U.S. presidents have abided by the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact despite the communists rarely obeying agreements.
The betrayal of Cuban freedom fighters to save the tyrannical and oppressive Castro dictatorship also emboldened Castro and his reign of terror. A direct result of that was the mass exodus of Cuban immigrants to the United States, and especially to South Florida. More than 800,000 Cuban-Americans now live in Greater Miami. While they have helped turn Greater Miami into a prosperous international city, the countless tragedies — families separated, horrifying deaths at sea, being driven out of one’s homeland by terror — are a ghastly reminder of the evil unleashed by globalist insiders on their fellow human beings. Castro’s regime would later go on to fund terrorism and revolution across the hemisphere and beyond, even aiding and abetting domestic communist terror groups in the United States such as Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground.
After the Brigade prisoners returned, more than 200 joined the U.S. Armed Forces. Many of them went on to obtain high ranks, including a major general of the National Guard, six colonels, 19 lieutenant colonels, 29 captains, and 64 lieutenants. More than a few fought bravely in the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic and during the Vietnam War, where some died and more were wounded in combat. Other Brigade members joined the CIA and worked throughout Latin America. Two Brigade members working for the CIA even assisted the Bolivian army in capturing and executing the Castro regime’s executioner, Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Other Brigade members became successful entrepreneurs, elected and appointed leaders, professionals in a variety of fields, and highly skilled workers. Several were elected to the House of Representatives and Senate of the Florida Legislature. One is still serving as a Metro-Dade Commissioner. One served as a member of the Miami-Dade County School Board. Another one became a writer, associate superintendent, and interim deputy superintendent of schools in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
The Globalist Game Goes On
To this day, the globalist CFR and its members continue to play a key role in propping up the murderous regime in Cuba and aiding its allies worldwide. In 2013, The New American online highlighted the fact that Castro apologist Julia Sweig, who actually thanks convicted terrorists in her book and was close to the late tyrant Castro in Havana for decades, was running the CFR’s Latin American Studies program and serving as the Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America Studies. Some prominent analysts, including a former U.S. military intelligence official whose career was spent tracking Cuban spies, said Sweig was an “agent of influence” for Castro. The implications are enormous.
As this magazine has documented for decades, the CFR is essentially the American headquarters of an international globalist movement seeking to erode national sovereignty and individual liberty worldwide. Basically, they support what many describe in public as a “New World Order,” which top globalists such as former President George H.W. Bush have described as a world in which the vision of the UN’s founders can be implemented by the UN’s military power. Billionaire George Soros said the murderous communist regime enslaving China should “own” this New World Order. If the CFR and its allies at the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg group, and other organizations in the “Deep State Behind the Deep State” eventually succeed, the fate of Cuba and China will be the fate of all humanity.
It is clear that the U.S. government under President Eisenhower was responsible for facilitating the rise to power of the communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. It is clear that the U.S. government under President Kennedy was later responsible for undermining and betraying Brigade 2506. This ensured that they would fail, while consolidating the Castro regime’s power over Cuba for generations. This sad chapter in the history of America and Cuba needs to be explained to Americans and Cubans alike. Not only is it right and just that people should have the truth, it would also help expose the real agenda of the subversive globalists seeking to impose the New World Order on humanity.
Candidate Donald Trump, shown above with Frank de Varona, was endorsed by the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. And Trump warmly thanked Brigade members, promising to reverse Obama’s shameful unilateral concessions to the Cuban regime. So far, he has taken some positive steps to end U.S. support for and recognition of the gang of terrorists and murderers still enslaving Cuba to this day. But more needs to be done to undo the enormous damage unleashed by America’s previous presidents — and Obama in particular. Exposing the true history of Cuba’s enslavement, the betrayal of the Brigade, and the role of the CFR would go a long way toward waking up the American people.
Frank de Varona invaded Cuba with the Brigade at age 17 and spent almost two years in a Cuban prison. He now lives in Miami and recently became director of press and information for the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association.
Photo: AP Images
