Miami: A Young but Turbulent History
“El exilo”
On New Years Day in 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, setting the stage for thousands of middle and upper class Cubans to flee their homeland for Miami. They arrived in Miami thinking it would be a temporary stay. After all, they had the backing of the United States, who had vowed to combat communism throughout the world.
In 1961, the CIA trained almost 1,500 Cuban exiles for a planned invasion of Cuba. President John F. Kennedy promised them full air support. Not only was the Bay of Pigs invasion supposed to take Castro by surprise, the U.S. government’s involvement was supposed to remain a secret.
But the plan failed miserably. Castro’s army was fully prepared and once word of the invasion reached Moscow, the Soviets responded by threatening the United States with warfare unless they backed off immediately. The Air Force was called off, leaving the exiles, known as the Brigade 2506, at the mercy of Castro’s army. Almost 200 exiles were killed and almost 1,200 captured.
Less than a year later, Kennedy got the prisoners released by giving Castro $50 million in medical and baby supplies. Then, against the advice of his advisors, he flew down to Miami to visit with 30,000 Cubans in the Orange Bowl, where he accepted the brigade flag for safekeeping and promised that it would fly over a free Havana soon.
But Kennedy was killed less than a year later and the Cuban exiles never forgave him for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Some conspiracy theorists speculate that Cuban exiles from Miami were behind the assassination, along with the CIA and the mafia. In 1976, Bay of Pigs veterans hired a lawyer to get the brigade flag back from storage in a museum basement. Today, the flag is on permanent display at the Bay of Pigs Museum in Miami.
The Bay of Pigs is responsible for turning hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles into republicans, creating a powerful voting bloc that permanently changed politics in a city that had been democratic since its birth. It also fueled the creation of several anti-Castro militant groups in Miami.
One of the first groups called itself Alpha 66 and claims to have conducted hundreds of military operations against the Cuban government throughout the 1960s. Other Cuba exile groups emerged that began a series of bombings against local business and people whom they believed were sympathetic to the Castro regime.
One Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch, was convicted in 1968 for firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in the Port of Miami because it was trading with Cuba. Bosch, who served four years for that incident, spent another eleven years in a Venezuelan jail for his alleged role in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, which killed 73. In 1983, the Miami City Commission, which by then had become majority Cuban, proclaimed an “Orlando Bosch Day” in his honor. Bosch, who was reportedly trained by the CIA, was pardoned by Republican President George Bush in the early 1990s.
Another exile, Luis Posada Carriles, also served time in a Venezuelan jail for the 1976 Cuban airliner incident. Posada, who escaped from jail in 1985, continued his terrorist activities, including bombing a Cuban hotel in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist, he admitted to the New York Times that same year. In 2005, he snuck into the United States seeking asylum, hoping George W. Bush would pardon him as his father pardoned Bosch more than a decade earlier.
But Bush, who was fighting his “war on terror” abroad, found it difficult to justify granting Posada asylum. As of this writing, Posada’s case was still being reviewed by the U.S. Government. And there has been no word from the Miami City Commission on whether they plan to proclaim an official Luis Posada Day.
In 1972, three Cuban exiles from Miami were among the five arrested for breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC, an incident that lead to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.
Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzalez and Bernard Barker all had CIA ties. Barker, despite his Anglo surname, was a former member of the secret police of Fulgencio Batista, the fascist dictator whom Castro replaced. A fourth burglar, Frank Sturgis, was an Italian-American who lived in Miami and helped organize the Bay of Pigs invasion. Sturgis is believed to have recruited the Cubans for the operation.
Nixon, who owned a home in Miami’s Key Biscayne, had watched his presidential administration come full circle in Miami. The lifelong politician had won his presidential nomination on Miami Beach during the 1968 Republican National Convention – as Miami’s first inner city riot broke out seven miles across the bay.