Bay of Pigs: Avoidable mistake that galvanised Cuba

Henry Raymont was the first journalist to report the invasion of Cuba at what would quickly become the infamous Bay of Pigs. Fifty years later, he still regrets not being able to complete his coverage of what would become one of the most embarrassing debacles in the history of US foreign policy - and which remains a proud rallying cry for Cuba's communist regime even after 50 years.
Raymont would be arrested in Havana shortly after the start of the invasion - a CIA-sponsored attempt by Cuban exiles to topple the Cuban government on April 17, 1961.
"I didn't even want to go to Havana!" he says with a smile, in an interview with dpa.
This "German Jew," by his own definition, was born in 1927 in the then-German city of Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). But when the Nazis took power, he fled with his family to Buenos Aires, where Raymont grew up and eventually started his career as a journalist, before settling in the United States to work for United Press International, one of the leading wire services of its day.
Raymont slams the table at his Washington home - "boom, boom, boom!" - to simulate the forceful knock on the door of his Havana apartment in the early hours of April 17, 1961. That moment was a turning point in his life.
After a fire in El Encanto department store and the bombing of air bases on previous days, Cuba was rife with rumours of an imminent invasion. But Rayont says he did not believe it would happen.
"I had these contacts in Washington. ... Everyone had told me one thing: there will be a war of nerves, but it will be words. There will be no invasion," he recalls. "So I never believed there could be a US-sponsored invasion."
Raymont was cautious, but he finally reported the landing of an invasion force - only after receiving confirmation in a note written on letterhead of the Argentinian embassy in Havana: "I always say that I was the first one to report (on the invasion), but that I was the last one to believe it was true."
He was dictating over the telephone when the banging started on his door. Raymont was arrested Cuban state security forces and thrown in a cell. Over the next few days, he was interrogated and threatened with execution by Ramiro Valdes, who today is Cuba's vice president.
"Valdes told me, 'Raymont, you know we are at war, and we are accusing you of espionage. You know what that means, don't you?'" he recalls.
The cell kept "filling up rapidly," he says, with people of all sorts who told him about the latest events on the island.
"The irony was: here I was, sitting on the biggest story of my life, and I could not file it," Raymont says, laughing.
"In subsequent meetings with Fidel (Castro), we used to laugh about that, because, you know, I said, 'We could have reported on your victory without the suspicion of a bias, of a vested interest. The great moment of your victory was stained by Cuban propaganda.'"
Raymont spent a week in jail under threat of execution - his mother in Buenos Aires was weeping after hearing false news of his death, before he called to tell her of his release - and several days more at the Brazilian embassy in Havana.
Finally able to leave Cuba, he returned to the United States, where he was received by then-president John F Kennedy himself, to whom Raymont spoke bluntly about the galvanising affect of the invasion on ordinary Cubans and the Castro regime.
By 1961, Fidel Castro "no longer had 98 per cent support, but he had 76 per cent support," Raymont says. "The moment people found out that there was an invasion, he again had 98 per cent support."
Raymont remains furious about what he calls the "idiotic" policy pursued by the United States. In his presidential meeting, he describes Kennedy as a "totally defeated human being."
"The only thing I could tell him was, 'Mr President, ... Fidel knew exactly where to place himself, and you fell into the trap.'" Fifty years later, Raymont still highlights the historical significance of that moment.
"Bay of Pigs meant something critical for the Kennedy Administration, for Kennedy's personal self-image and his image in world politics: it was a defeat," he says. It was, according to Raymont, a terrible and avoidable mistake due to "total ignorance of the people of Cuba."