A Cuban exile remembers

[Michael Hogan]

This morning I met a lady who, along with her family, fled Cuba in 1960 and settled in Miami. Her father was actively involved in procuring weapons for the Bay of Pigs invasion. She was a teenager at the time. She remembers the family garage being full to the brim with weapons and ammunition. She accompanied her father several times to the Florida Keys to deliver the ordnance. She remembers meeting her father's contact person on several occasions; she knew him only as Pepe.

Once she accompanied her father on a recon trip to Cuba by boat. Her gave her a .45 to carry, just in case. Another one of her memories was of a colleague of her father's named Tony coming to the house and telling a passionate story of how he had received a personal apology from Dean Rusk.

When her father died, she found many BOP artifacts among his belongings, including transcripts of radio transmissions that occurred during the invasion. She seemed very familiar with Radio Swan. Interestingly, her father never blamed President Kennedy for failure to provide military support, keeping the dead President's picture in the family living room until the day he died. However, her father was always quite bitter about RFK's role. In fact, according to her he forever blamed the Attorney General for the mission's failure.