Anniversary of Playa Giron victory
Description:
On April 15, 1961, aircraft bearing Cuban identification marks and American pilots bombed three airports in Cuba. As it turned out, it was artillery training. On April 16, at a mourning ceremony for the seven Cubans who died, Castro made a fiery speech calling the socialist revolution he and his comrades had committed.
This event was followed on April 16 by the landing of a counter-revolutionary pro-American landing in Playa Giron with the aim of overthrowing the government of Fidel Castro. (Playa Giron) is a settlement in the Bay of Cochinos on the southern shore of the island of Cuba.
On April 17, 1961, the Americans landed the main forces of a specially formed "brigade 2506" (4 infantry, tank and airborne battalions, a division of heavy artillery and special forces - only 1,500 people). The brigade was staffed by mercenaries, mostly Cuban émigré counter-revolutionaries, recruited, trained and equipped by the US CIA.
Simultaneously, the landing began in the area of Playa-Larga (33 km north-west P.-H.). The invasion was carried out under cover of US ships and aircraft. The plans of the interventionists were thwarted by the decisive actions of the people’s militia fighters, units of the Insurgent Army and cadets of the Matanzas People’s Militia School, led by F. Castro. Of the 1,350 invaders who landed on the shores of the Cochinos Bay, 1,173 were captured and the rest destroyed.
On April 19 (in just 72 hours) the counter-revolutionaries were completely defeated. Long negotiations over the fate of the prisoners, who were initially wanted to be exchanged for heavy construction equipment, eventually resulted in the delivery of food and medicine to Cuba in the amount of 53 million dollars. The United States has suffered serious political damage, being completely isolated in the international arena, and Cuba has finally chosen the socialist path of development, which it continues to follow. The Battle of Playa Giron prevented the history of our country from turning back to its former times and saved the revolution.
The battles that culminated in the victory of the revolutionaries went down in history as the Bay of Pigs and were the greatest failure of American imperialism in the fight against the Cuban revolution.
At a ceremony in 2001, Fidel Castro declared that “after the victory of the Revolution in 1959, no event has been more vivid in the fate of the Cuban people than the Battle of Playa Giron.”