| "The
Battle Of Their Lives" For three days, the CIA-sponsored exile commander opposed the Cuban militia leader his former teacher. |
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Girón,
Cuba è For three cruel days they sweated and died in a steaming
Cuban
 swamp, one side to save
its revolution, the other side to change it. For the victors, it
was the triumph of Playa Girón. For de losers, it was betrayal
and heartbreak at the Bay of Pigs.But for the two men who commanded opposing troops, it is still the battle of their lives. José Ramón Fernández Alvarez was 34, a career officer jailed for plotting against the government of Fulgencio Batista and released by the Cuban revolution. Victory would make him worthy in his own eyes and justify Fidel Castro°s trust. Erneido A. Oliva was 27, an exile, but also a professional. He had been captain of cadets at the Cuban Military Academy where he studied artillery under Fernández. Much of what he knew about war he learned from the man he would face at the Bay of Pigs. Neither man knew the other was there when the fighting started. Neither has spoken for publication about the other è until now. The Herald interviewed Fernández for two hours in Havana and spoke with Oliva by telephone from his home in Washington, D.C. ¿Girón was a tough battle,î Fernández said. ¿It made us stronger, both militarily and politically. It showed that a nation willing to fight can never be occupied.î Fernández, a tall and courtly man, today is Cuba°s minister of education and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee. He remembers Oliva as ¿smart, energetic, strong-willed, a young man with some talent, black, and I think, with a great complex because of the color of his skin.î Oliva, equally tall, and intense anti-Communist, is a U.S. national Guard colonel in Washington and a former 82nd Airborne division captain who says, ¿I never had any complexes in my life.î ¿The United States had two opportunities to get rid of Castro: the Bay of Pigs and the October (1962 Cuban Missile) Crisis,î said Oliva. ¿I would do it over again. The only thing I would do differently is to have a propaganda machine, a lobbying group è the battles are won in Washington.î SIDES ILL-TRAINED 
In
three days of fighting è April 17 è 19, 1961 è Oliva°s battalion
of green CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles challenged Fernández°s
equally green, but expanding force of Cuban militiamen. At stake
was a narrow strand of mangrove, bunch grass, coral head and sand
bounded by the Bay of Pigs, the Ciénaga de Zapata swamp,
the town of Girón and Playa Larga, 30 miles away.Cuba said the fighting killed 155 of its citizens. The United States listed 114 exiles and four American pilots dead. Cuba took at least 1,180 prisoners; the exact number has never been established. Some were shot as war criminals, some were kept in jail and the rest were ransomed 19 months later for $53 million in food and medicine. The Cubans built a war museum at Girón to celebrate their triumph. The exiles lit a flaming torch in Little Havana to honor their dead. Publicly each side view the other with contempt. The exiles believe the invasion failed because the Kennedy administration canceled air support a day into the invasion and abandoned them to their fate. The Cuban believe they would have won anyway. When Fidel Castro called him just after midnight on April 17, Fernández Alvarez was probably the only former Batista officer in Cuba°s revolutionary army. Castro told him of the invasion and ordered him to Matanzas to pick up 600 militia officers. Then he was to get to Girón as fast as possible. ¿I think it was an opportunity to fight for something in which I believed, but never before really had the opportunity to fight for,î Fernández said. ¿There was satisfaction in knowing I had Fidel°s trust.î Castro pushed Fernández constantly and stayed right behind him throughout the invasion, sending help, directing operations and anticipating the enemy°s moves, historian say. Whenever underlings asked for a vital decision, Castro made the right call. The first priority was to get Fernández across the swamp to establish a strongpoint at Palpite on the road to Playa Larga. Fernández and his militiamen marched into the hamlet that afternoon. ¿When we took Palpite, Fidel told me: ´We°ve won the war,°î Fernández said. ¿We had a beachhead in enemy territory.î ORDERS TO DIG IN Oliva, second-in-command of the entire expedition, was on a transport off the Cuban coast. His order were to bring his men ashore, dig in at Playa Larga, hang on and wait for the U.S. assistance. At dawn he moved forward with the Second Battalion, accompanied by a single tank and two .50-caliber machine guns mounted on armored trucks. Sparring began at 2:00 p.m., mostly close-quarters, small-arms work. ¿There were several killed and wounded,î Oliva said. ¿At that moment, the planes came. It was one of the few times I was able to make radio contact with a B-26. They told me there were hundreds of militiamen advancing toward our position. I ordered them to attack the area.î The roof fell in on Fernández°s militia. But neither he nor Oliva knew that the sortie was to be exiles° last coordinated air strike. For political reasons, the Kennedy Administration was to leave them without help, marooned in hostile territory. Oliva was doomed already, but didn°t know it. Fernández, meanwhile, could feel some encouragement from reinforcements, which arrived with a four-cannon anti-aircraft battery. He now had Oliva outgunned and outmanned, but ¿some of the tanks didn°t even shoot,î Fernández said, because the gunners didn°t know how. It was during the lull when Oliva, eavesdropping on enemy radio, learned who was opposing him. ¿The radio said troops from Matanzas had arrived,î Oliva said. ¿What came to mind was that when I left Cuba, Fidel Castro had ordered me to join the cadet school that Fernández directed.î At 8:00 p.m., Fernández opened a four-hour artillery barrage è 2,000 rounds, about one shot every seven seconds. Oliva: ¿They were terribly inaccurate. They were either way long or way short. I had nothing to respond with, because artillery is the only thing that can answer artillery. There°s nothing you can do except sit it out.î Fernández: ¿The assault was very difficult because there was only one road to the Rotonda (a traffic circle), which is the entrance to Playa Larga. The enemy was well entrenched at the Rotonda and we were unable to take it.î ALL NIGHT ATTACK Oliva: ¿When the smoke cleared, I passed the word, man-to-man, that the infantry attack was imminent.î It lasted all night. Although it was unsuccessful, Fernández exhausted Oliva°s ability to resist. At dawn, Oliva pulled back to join the rest of the invading force a Girón. Fernández tried but failed to cut him off. Oliva dug in about half a mile outside Girón and waited. That night there were only ¿a few skirmishes.î What should have been the final battle began around 2 p.m. on April 19. It lasted until 4:30 p.m. when, suddenly, the militiamen withdrew. We were already overrun,î Oliva said. ¿I was stunned.î What had happened was that Fernández and his artillerymen were confronting two American destroyers about 1.5 miles off the beach at Girón. ¿My men wanted to shoot the ships. They were within our range. Then the destroyers suddenly turned around and disappeared over the horizon. ¿I think it was a wise decision on my part è and by the ships, too,î Fernández said. ¿Up to then, we had no gone beyond what was prudent. No one knows what would have happened if firing broke out between ships and shore.î The decision that delayed Fernández°s victory at Girón may have saved two countries from war. It almost certainly saved the exiles from annihilation. When Fernández entered Girón at sunset, the invaders had dispersed. Eventually almost all were cornered in the swamps. Fernández finally met Oliva (two weeks later) on the beach at Girón. ¿You only caught me because I ran out of bullets, Oliva said. Fernández smiled. Click here if you desire to read a related Granma's article (Spanish) |
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ON DECEMBER
29, 1962, THE PRISONERS OF WAR WERE WARMLY WELCOMED BY PRESIDENT
KENNEDY AND THE FIRST LADY, JACQUELINE, AT THE ORANGE BOWL OF
MIAMI. THE PRESIDENT SAID: |
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Above: President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Manuel Artime Bueza and
the Second-in-Command of the Assault Brigade "2506",
Erneido A. Oliva. Oliva, addressing the thousands in the stadium
said: |
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Above: Erneido A. Oliva presents the Brigade flag to
President John F. Kennedy. |
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Above: Fifteen hundred members of the Assault Brigade "2506"
marching to their assigned positions in front of the presidential
platform at Miami's Orange Bowl. |
