US backed regimes in South America everywhere have a nasty habit of gross human rights abuses. Cuba, Nicaragua, Egypt, Iran, Panama, etc.

Blowback podcast season 2 is about Cuba. They go into the Bay of Pigs invasion in detail and all the backdrop, why the locals were pro-revolutionaries, etc. Highly recommended!

https://blowback.show/

I realize this is not the focus of your question, but I believe there are some important details your framing leaves out.

1. The plan was developed under Eisenhower. Indeed, it was pitched under the leadership of the CIA director who was the brother of Eisenhower's Secretary of State. Eisenhower said no - not because he thought it was dumb, but because he thought it was unfinished. He asked for more work to be done on what happened to make the invasion a success and what would happen when the invasion succeeded.
2. This brings us to the further work the CIA did providing extra training to the exiled Cubans and the way in which the invasion would inspire an uprising which would greatly bolster the numbers of the counter-revolutionary forces and support an alternative government until fresh elections could be held or until a relatively stable puppet government could be installed.
3. Kennedy had a legacy problem when he came into office. What do you do with a very large bunch of Cubans and their families who are familiar with the plan and who are champing at the bit to take their country back and rescue their loved ones if you junk the operation? As bombastically dumb as the plan was, he knew that the mess he had been left was too big to ignore and although it was unlikely to succeed, he both felt he had to go through with it, and he was desperate to do something to deliver Cuba from Castro. Kennedy had little faith that it would work but he had to do something with the Cuban legacy fighters and he had made such a big deal about Cuba in his debates with Nixon the previous year.
4. Here is my answer. Castro. That wily fox could see the invasion, or something like it, 90 miles away, so to speak. The CIA had assured Kennedy this would work because it was straight out of their Guatemala Play Book. Castro saw it coming for the same reason that the CIA were complacently certain it would work: they had done it before. Historians are divided on how many hare-brained attempts the CIA made on Castro over the years - but the archives admit to twenty and the Cubans claim over 35. They never got him. He was sometimes lucky, but always paranoid.
5. It is true that Kennedy hesitated and would not follow through with the air support - but he knew, and now we do too, that the rudimentary attempts to conceal the American planes' country of origin had failed and that it would be deemed an outright act of war. Likewise the futility of the marine landing - which was lost on the brass - was not lost on Kennedy. It was a lesson which would save the world from antihalation the following year. The marines were supposed to support and consolidate. Not capture the beachhead. Their part of the mission was never intended to be invasion. If that had been the plan, training the Cubans would have been pointless.
6. The Bay of Pigs debacle/triumphant victory is emblematic of so much of the cold war. Shadow proxy engagements which ultimately thwarted their own stated intent through a corrupting of trust on all sides. The failure of the invasion directly led to Castro inviting Khrushchev to place missiles on Cuba and brought us all so close to disaster.

There is of course, so much detail I am glossing over, but I would reiterate my answer to the question you posed. It was Castro. He was the person most responsible for the victory.

I would however, take issue with your assertion:

>"... we know of course that a major reason why the operation failed was because Kennedy refused to through with the plan fully."

Kennedy himself recognized that the failure for the operation rested with him. He had his doubts about it from the beginning - just like Eisenhower did but unlike Ike, he went through with it.

But, it didn't fail because he refused to go through with the plan fully, it failed because it was spectacularly fucked from the beginning. Perhaps he should have sent in the marines to rescue the invasion force under air cover. It certainly would have been the humane thing to do for the men who were killed or captured and brutalized. But it would not have won them anything. It was already over by that stage.

The Bay of Pigs was a rare event in human history. Like the Battle of Cannae for Hannibal, the Bay of Pigs was for Castro a perfect victory. For the Americans - like the Romans, it was a total, abject failure.

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The training had been done under Eisenhowers Administration, Kennedys problem was he left Dulles in charge of CIA when he took over.

Have you read a single word I wrote?

>Absent any prior known history of astronomy, they just might end up deducing that the sun does not travel round the earth, but that it is the other way around.

Knowing that the Earth revolves around the Sun isn't history of astronomy - it's just astronomy.

Knowing who and how demonstrated this, and the reactions to such a discovery as well as its effects, is History of Astronomy. Learning from those events is important because it's much more than simple and pedantic sciolism, it means gaining a deeper understanding of social phenomena surrounding science and why our current perception of science is what it is (and thus also be able to challenge it), which is an incredibly useful tool for a scientist, especially when engaging with the public.

>Having the history available prevents us from having to re-do all the work all the time, and that’s good. But in addressing the title question: no, science does not need history.

If you do not understand the difference between science and history of science, how can you make a call on how the latter affects the former?

And the whole plan was just a fuck up from the beginning.

It was all planned for a different location, then changed last minute without adjusting anything.

Dulles even mentioned privately afterward that he always knew that the invasion would very likely require US air or naval fire support but just assumed that when things were going down, Kennedy would agree. Kennedy did not agree to intervene militarily though.

More than anything, this is on Allen Dulles.

Was it a fuck up? I thought the bay of pigs happened largely without JFKs awareness on the idea that he would be forced to act once the fighting started and that it didnt happen

It did. It was that, and Kennedy feeling like he was embarrassed by Khrushchev the first time they met that caused him to draw a line in the sand in Vietnam.

I'd compare it to scratching in eight-ball.

Also doesnt help that us backed regimes in south america have a nasty habit of gross human rights abuses

Historian says yes!

I would say maybe, but not much is needed. I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone with a degree in physics and PhD in astrophysics, with an interest in various areas of history that rarely have anything to do with the sciences. (Though I am interested in how the early USSR approached the field of statistics, so if anyone has any recommendations there I'd be grateful)

As part of my education we quite frequently did learn about the history of the concepts we were studying. It is useful to learn about older ideas of how things were, why they might have been reasonable to believe at the time, and how they were proven wrong. And also something of the history of the scientists who made various discoveries. I remember one lecturer making sure to point out that the dubious history of the man the Lindemann lecture theatre we were in was named for.

So yes, a history of where the field has come from is useful, and is already present as part of an education in the sciences. But when it comes to actually doing scientific research, no it really isn't needed. When you're trying to figure out a sensible geometry for your simulation or analyze a time-series, the history of the techniques you're using really isn't relevant. The history of physical simulation is likely a fascinating topic for someone to study, but has no bearing on how you go about actually doing it.

And all this talk about the usefulness of history to the sciences has been about the use of the outputs of the academic field. It is useful to know the facts of where things came from, but history as a field is so much more than that. But the practice of doing history isn't really relevant at all to the sciences (except in so far as it is relevant to everything).

The converse really isn't true. The practice of doing history often requires, in part, doing science. Be it dating, statistical analysis of economic data, climate records, or many other things. After all, without that grounding in reality you're just telling stories.

When I talk about leadership I'm not talking about their ideology. But their role in the Cuban political structure.

Happy Wednesday everyone!

Finally got through Lincoln by David H. Donald, and it's fantastic. A bit on the longer side, but you won't find this book dissappointing. Very well written, and full of interesting details. Highly recommend!

Not sure about Che but, my understanding is that Castro had an unparalleled understanding of the terrain because he fished there. Combine that with all the other known misperceptions/lack of support, it was like shooting fish in a barrel for the Cubans.

One has to wonder if because the failure was so catastrophic, it later encouraged Kennedy to send “Military Advisors” into Vietnam

The Cuban exiles were outnumbered, yet still inflicted more casualties on their foes, who where in the defensive position, which is usually stronger.

I’d say they fought well. The failure was in the planning, intel collection/analysis, and the lack of support.

Maria Arana's Bolivar: American Liberator is an excellent book on the life of one Latin America's most influential 19th century figures, Simon Bolivar. The book further explores the Bolivarian revolution, its root causes and ultimately Bolivar's downfall.

Leadership? He was a Marxist–Leninist AND a Cuban nationalist. Those are ideologies, not military attributes. His brand of fighting was guerilla warfare which is how he gained control of Cuba. None of that had anything to do with the incompetence and poor training of the Cuban exiles who mainly fought (if you want to call it that) in the invasion. The plan failed because it was ill-conceived, not because of Castro's "leadership".

I was being a bit tongue in cheekical.

Science is not universally 'dictated' by politics and good basic science in areas like physics and chemistry, has been, and should continue be, based on what experiments based on theory tell us. There will always be the status quo and controversial new ideas that get tested. A good read in this regard is Einstein's early attempts to get his theories accepted.

For medicine and environmental science, and other applied sciences, I agree that politics is a factor, because more money spent on what politicians want.

But still, in science, if your politically-driven science is bad, your projects will not ultimately succeed. Bad green science won't bring us a better power source or battery. If the emperor has no clothes, the scientists will be found out.

In history, there are naked emperors running around everywhere, getting rewarded for it. Liars and revisionists get extra airtime for poorly researched work that fits the political story certain politicians want people to hear.

Thus idea that science is fundamentally ideologically corrupt is pushed by the people who want to REALLY corrupt it. And unfortunately, a lot of well-meaning naive scientists are just going to roll over while the way hiring and research are done is corrupted, because they want to avoid conflict.

"Thank you for the bay of pigs", is what Castro supposedly said to Kennedy after the attempted invasion.

They were poorly equipped, and had no support, and underestimated their enemy; it was US who had a biggest part in it's failure.

Was Che Guevara a good commander? I know nothing about his military story, but it seems he played an important role in the cuban revolution, but dont know if he was vital for winning the war. Then there was the Bay of Pigs invasion defense but his influence there is debated as this thread shows, and then he went to have some blunders in Africa and Bolivia, but I dont know if that was the case of him trying to do the best with little resources or just made poor decisions that lead to his death

Any recs for South American Wars of Independence (particularly in the north, but I'm not picky)? The only one that I could find on the subreddit booklist was by Robert Harvey, and, well, I read his bio of Simón Bolívar and it was awful. Factual errors, perpetuating myths, and none of it cited. My Spanish is coming along nicely, so English or Spanish books are both welcome.

people really hate being invaded

They are kinda two questions when worded that way but the general gist of my question is do you think Che deserves any credit at all for the Cuban military victory at the Bay of Pigs?