Page 36 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 36 of 237

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In New York the CIA phoned Jones with Bulletin No. 2*:

The Cuban Revolutionary Council announces a successful landing ... Because Cuban Revolutionary
Council members are now totally occupied with the dramatic events unfolding in Cuba, their views will
be made known to the press solely through the Cuban Revolutionary Council's spokesman, Dr. Antonio
Silio.

The Council may have been totally occupied, but it was not totally free. Held in their barracks house at Opa-
locka, the Cuban leaders were chafing. They were told they had been brought there so they could be flown to the
beachhead as soon as it was secured. The United States would then recognize them as the legitimate government
of Cuba.*

The Council leaders donned their khaki uniforms, in readiness. They were allowed to take walks along the hard-
surface road in front of the house. But when Carlos Hevia, who was to be the foreign affairs minister of a free
Cuba, went to take a stroll, a CIA man warned him not to go very far. The area was rough and wild, the CIA man
insisted, and the surrounding shrubbery was full of rattlesnakes.

***

Mario and the men of E Company had pushed back the militiamen and seized a T-shaped crossroads near Playa
Larga.

"At 6:00 A.M. in the morning we saw the first plane. It had blue stripes on it. The sun wasn't out yet. At first 1
didn't see the stripes, and I was wondering, Is it going to shoot at us or not? It was ours. At that time we heard a
real big noise and saw a couple of lights. It was a truck coming up the road with militia. We shouted the password
'aguila' and the other one answers 'negra.' * But we didn't get any answer. We shouted 'aguila' again but we got
no answer. The truck was coming closer, so everybody turned their weapons and started shooting and that thing
exploded just like that, Pow! It jumped in the air and came down in flames. Then we saw there were three women
and two girls, little ones, that's all, in the truck, and a couple of militiamen. I don't know how that happens but
that's what we got out of it, three women and two girls, killed."

By dawn Castro's air force was taking a heavy toll of the invasion fleet. About 9:00 A.M., following a direct hit
from the air, the Houston began to sink. Captain Luis Morse managed to edge the transport onto a reef a mile and
a half from shore to keep it from going under completely. Along with most of the 120 men of the fifth battalion,
Perez Salvador had to swim to the beach. The one-time professional baseball player stripped to his shorts, kicked
off his shoes and jumped into the Bay of Pigs.

At 9:15 A.M. in San Juan, Puerto Rico, CIA Director Allen Dulles mounted the speaker's rostrum in the La
Concha Hotel to the applause of the thousand members of the Young Presidents Organization. He launched into
the keynote speech of the convention. For his topic this morning Dulles had chosen "The Communist
Businessman Abroad."

***

Joaquin Varela, a slight, twenty-eight-year-old former Cuban Air Force pilot, led the relays of B-26s over the
beaches. With Castro's air force still in action, the bombers were flying straight to disaster. Eight exile pilots died
that April morning.