Cuban museum honors Bay of Pigs

Since the 1961 U.S. invasion, Cubans still fear another attack.

PLAYA GIRON, Cuba (AP) — Only purple crabs and an occasional scuba diver crawl the golden sand and sparkling surf that CIA-backed Cuban exiles stormed 47 years ago in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

But if the Americans ever came back, store clerk Marisol Cardoso would be ready. The 34-year-old wasn’t even born at the time of the April 17, 1961, attack. But she’s a trained sharpshooter with Cuba’s civilian militia, which was credited for making the Bay of Pigs “The Yankee Imperialists’ Only Defeat in the Americas,” as billboards here still herald.

“We are expecting it every day,” Cardoso said. “With the United States so close, as threatened as we feel, we have to expect it all the time.”

A new, American-sponsored invasion to overthrow the communist government may seem ludicrous to outsiders. Fidel Castro resigned early this year in ailing health. His brother Raul became president and opened access to cell phones, computers and tourist hotels, all previously banned for most Cubans.

But the Cold War lives in Cuba. Nowhere is that more apparent than Playa Giron, where the ramshackle Bay of Pigs Museum stands in remembrance with Cuban mortars, a Sea Fury fighter plane and Soviet-made tanks displayed out front.

“It ended for the United States, but not for us. They took all that animosity they had for the Soviet Union and directed it here,” said Barbara Sierra, director of the museum that stands just off the beach.

About 1,500 Cuban exiles invaded the Bay of Pigs, hoping to topple Fidel Castro, whose revolution just two years earlier ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista. But President Kennedy, who approved the attack, failed to provide air cover and by April 20, Washington had suffered a humiliating defeat.

In 65 hours of combat, six Cuban civilians and 156 soldiers were killed, as were about 200 invaders. Cuba took 1,197 prisoners, eventually ransoming them for $53 million in American food and medical supplies.

Poorly lit, with low ceilings and cracks in the front-door glass, the Bay of Pigs Museum is two shabby rooms of newspaper clippings, grainy black-and-white photographs and charts tracking troop movements.

There are pictures of Castro directing the battle in rarely seen, unusually unflattering black-rimmed glasses. In one especially gut-wrenching shot, militia member Eduardo Garcia Delgado wrote “Fidel” on a wall in his own blood before dying. He is slumped face down, his hand still resting against the “L” he scrawled.

Weapons captured during the fighting abound.

The museum had about 59,000 visitors last year. Americans used to come in droves, but their numbers have plummeted since Washington tightened restrictions on U.S. educational travel to Cuba in 2004. Schoolchildren from all over the island visit on field trips.

“For us it’s transcendental,” Sierra said. “All Cubans carry a little bit of Giron with us.”

Sierra said 8,000 civilian militia members fought for hours before military reinforcements arrived. Today, the island’s Territorial Troop Militia has more than 1 million men and women volunteers under orders to drop everything and grab a gun if a foreign army ever invades.

There’s a modest Bay of Pigs museum in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood that displays the history of the invasion through the eyes of America’s Cuban exile community. Miami Dade County officials are studying a plan to build a $65 million, state-of-the-art downtown museum on the failed incursion and the Cuban-American experience, including a library, 300-seat theater and restaurant.