Failed landing operation of Cuba in 1961
The Bay of Pigs Invasion (, sometimes called or after the Playa Girón) was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in April 1961 by the United States of America and the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF), consisting of Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution, clandestinely and directly financed by the U.S. government. The operation took place at the height of the Cold War, and its failure influenced relations between Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
In 1952, the American-allied dictator General Fulgencio Batista led a coup against President Carlos Prío and forced Prío into exile in Miami, Florida. Prío's exile inspired Castro's 26th of July Movement against Batista. The movement succeeded in overthrowing Batista during the Cuban Revolution in January 1959. Castro nationalized American businesses, including banks, oil refineries, and sugar and coffee plantations. 
By early 1960, President Eisenhower had begun contemplating ways to remove Castro, in the hopes that he might be replaced by a Cuban government-in-exile, though none existed at the time. In accordance with this goal, Eisenhower eventually approved Richard Bissell's plan which included training the paramilitary force that would later be used in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Alongside covert operations, the U.S. also began its embargo of the island. This led Castro to reach out to its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, after which the US severed diplomatic relations.
Cuban exiles who had moved to the U.S. following Castro's takeover had formed the counter-revolutionary military unit Brigade 2506, which was the armed wing of the DRF. The CIA funded the brigade, which also included approximately 60 members of the Alabama Air National Guard, and trained the unit in Guatemala.
Over 1,400 paramilitaries, divided into five infantry battalions and one paratrooper battalion, assembled and launched from Guatemala and Nicaragua by boat on 17 April 1961. Two days earlier, eight CIA-supplied B-26 bombers had attacked Cuban airfields and then returned to the U.S. On the night of 17 April, the main invasion force landed on the beach at Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs, where it overwhelmed a local revolutionary militia. Initially, José Ramón Fernández led the Cuban Revolutionary Army counter-offensive; later, Castro took personal control. 
As the invasion force lost the strategic initiative, the international community found out about the invasion, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy decided to withhold further air support. The plan, devised during Eisenhower's presidency, had required the involvement of U.S. air and naval forces. Without further air support, the invasion was being conducted with fewer forces than the CIA had deemed necessary. The invading force was defeated within three days by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (Spanish: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias – FAR) and surrendered on 20 April. Most of the surrendered counter-revolutionary troops were publicly interrogated and put into Cuban prisons with further prosecution.
The invasion was a U.S. foreign policy failure. The Cuban government's victory solidified Castro's role as a national hero and widened the political division between the two formerly allied countries, as well as emboldened other Latin American groups to undermine U.S. influence in the region. As stated in a memoir from Chester Bowles: "The humiliating failure of the invasion shattered the myth of a New Frontier run by a new breed of incisive, fault-free supermen. However costly, it may have been a necessary lesson." It also pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Background.
United States interventions in Cuba.
Since 1492, Cuba had been part of the Spanish Empire. In the late 19th century, Cuban nationalist revolutionaries rebelled against Spanish rule, resulting in three liberation wars: the Ten Years' War (1868–1878), the Little War (1879–1880) and the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898). In 1898, the United States government proclaimed war on the Spanish Empire, resulting in the Spanish–American War. The U.S. subsequently invaded the island and forced the Spanish Army out. A special operations attempt to land a group of at least 375 Cuban soldiers on the island succeeded in the Battle of Tayacoba.
On 20 May 1902, a new independent government proclaimed the foundation of the Republic of Cuba, with U.S. Military Governor Leonard Wood handing over control to President Tomás Estrada Palma, a Cuban-born U.S. citizen. Subsequently, large numbers of U.S. settlers and businessmen arrived in Cuba, and by 1905, 60% of rural properties were owned by non-Cuban-born North American citizens. Between 1906 and 1909, 5,000 U.S. Marines were stationed across the island, and returned in 1912, 1917 and 1921 to intervene in internal affairs, sometimes at the behest of the Cuban government.
Constitution of 1940.
In 1940, Cuba adopted a new constitution which drew on many of the ideas of the Cuban Revolution of 1933. The "Encyclopedia of U.S.-Latina American Relations" purports that the 1940 constitution was one of the most progressive constitutions in Latin America, because it legally mandated social security, a minimum wage, health insurance, workers compensation, vacation time, the women's right to vote, and the right to free expression.
In 1940, the Cuban general and politician Fulgencio Batista was elected under the provisions of the new constitution. After his term ended in 1944, he was not legally allowed to run for a consecutive term, so he stepped down and moved to Florida. Batista returned to Cuba in 1948 to run for a presidential term starting in 1952.
CIA interventions.
The CIA was founded in 1947 by the National Security Act. The agency was "a product of the Cold War", having been designed to counter the espionage activities of the Soviet Union's own national security agency, the KGB. As the perceived threat of international communism grew larger, the CIA expanded its activities to undertake covert economic, political, and military activities that would advance causes favorable to U.S. interests, often resulting in brutal dictatorships that favored U.S. interests. CIA Director Allen Dulles was responsible for overseeing covert operations across the world, and although widely considered an ineffectual administrator, he was popular among his employees, whom he had protected from the accusations of McCarthyism.
Cuban Revolution.
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Until Castro, the US was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that the American ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president.
 — Earl E. T. Smith, former American Ambassador to Cuba, during 1960 testimony to the US Senate
In March 1952 Fulgencio Batista seized power on the island, proclaimed himself president, and deposed the discredited president Carlos Prío Socarrás of the Partido Auténtico. Batista canceled the planned presidential elections and described his new system as "disciplined democracy."
Although Batista gained some popular support, many Cubans saw it as the establishment of a one-man dictatorship. Many opponents of the Batista regime took to armed rebellion in an attempt to oust the government, sparking the Cuban Revolution. One of these groups was the National Revolutionary Movement ("Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario"), a militant organization containing largely middle-class members that had been founded by the Professor of Philosophy Rafael García Bárcena. Another was the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, which had been founded by the Federation of University Students President José Antonio Echevarría.
However, the best known of these anti-Batista groups was the "26th of July Movement" (MR-26-7), founded by Fidel Castro. With Castro as the MR-26-7's head, the organization was based upon a clandestine cell system, with each cell containing ten members, none of whom knew the whereabouts or activities of the other cells.
Between December 1956 and 1959, Castro led a guerrilla army against the forces of Batista from his base camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Batista's repression of revolutionaries had earned him widespread unpopularity, and by 1958 his armies were in retreat. On 31 December 1958, Batista resigned and fled into exile, taking with him an amassed fortune of more than $300 million.
Provisional government.
After the success of the revolution a popular uproar across Cuba demanded that those figures who had been complicit in the widespread torture and killing of civilians be brought to justice. Although he remained a moderating force and tried to prevent the mass reprisal killings of Batistanos advocated by many Cubans, Castro helped to set up trials of many figures involved in the old regime across the country, resulting in hundreds of executions. Critics, in particular from the U.S. press, argued that many of these did not meet the standards of a fair trial, and condemned Cuba's new government as being more interested in vengeance than justice.
Castro retaliated strongly against such accusations, proclaiming that "revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction." In a show of support for this "revolutionary justice," he organized the first Havana trial to take place before a mass audience of 17,000 at the Sports Palace stadium. When a group of 19 pilots accused of bombing a village was found not guilty, Castro ordered a retrial, in which they were found guilty and each sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In early January 1959, Fidel Castro appointed various economists such as Felipe Pazos, Rufo López-Fresquet, Ernesto Bentacourt, Faustino Pérez, and Manuel Ray Rivero. By June 1959, these appointed economists would begin to express disillusionment with Castro's proposed economic policies. On 16 February 1959, Castro took on the role of Prime Minister. The presidency fell to Castro's chosen candidate, the lawyer Manuel Urrutia Lleó, while members of the MR-26-7 took control of most positions in the cabinet.
In early 1959, the Cuban government began agrarian reforms which redistributed the ownership of Cuba's land. Expropriated lands would be put into state ownership, and the newly formed Instituto de la Reforma Agraria (INRA) was to oversee the expropriations and be headed by Fidel Castro. In Camagüey Province there was growing opposition to the Cuban government due to the resistance of conservative farmers to the agrarian reforms and distaste for Raúl Castro and Che Guevara's promotion of communist ideals in the local government and military. The anti-communist opposition within the Cuban government assumed that Fidel Castro was unaware of growing communist influence because of Fidel Castro's frequent public disavowals of communism.
In April 1959, Fidel Castro announced that elections were to be postponed in order to allow for the provisional government to focus on domestic reforms. Castro announced this electoral delay with the slogan: "revolution first, elections later". These postponed elections would later be outright canceled in May 1960.
On 17 July 1959, Conrado Bécquer, the sugar workers' leader, demanded Cuban President Urrutia's resignation. Castro himself resigned as Prime Minister of Cuba in protest, but later that day appeared on television to deliver a lengthy denouncement of Urrutia, claiming that Urrutia had "complicated" the government, and that his "fevered anti-communism" was having a detrimental effect. Castro's sentiments received widespread support as organized crowds surrounded the presidential palace demanding Urrutia's resignation, which was duly received. On July 23, Castro resumed his position as premier and appointed loyalist Osvaldo Dorticós as the new president.
Diplomatic decline.
The U.S. initially recognized Castro's government after the Cuban Revolution ousted Batista, but the relationship quickly soured as Castro repeatedly condemned the U.S. in his speeches for its misdeeds in Cuba over the previous 60 years. Many U.S. officials began to view Castro as a threat to national security as he legalized the Communist Party, nationalized property owned by U.S. citizens totaling $1.5 billion, and strengthened ties with the Soviet Union.
In recently declassified documents, the feelings of the CIA toward Fidel Castro have become more clear. The CIA had written a comprehensive study of the background between the United States and Cuba, beginning with Castro's regime. This study was top secret and around 400 pages in length. At the very beginning of Castro, the CIA needed to decipher the alleged pro-communist beliefs. They had inside men working to make a clear decision on the belief of the new Cuban official. According to Volume III of the "Official History of the Bay of Pigs", the top-secret CIA document, two agents were placed in the ranks of the communist party of Cuba ("Partido Socialista Popular"). In 1958, both agents were either captured or snuck their way into the ranks of Fidel Castro's forces. They explained the so-called 'anti-American' sentiment of the regime.
In 1959, Fidel Castro planned on visiting America. The invitation was extended by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The already tense relations between Cuba and the US become increasingly futile. According to the written document