By Pedro Rioseco on March 29, 2022
Before appearing as defendants before a revolutionary tribunal on March 29, 1962, the 1,181 mercenaries paid by the United States who invaded our country at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, believed that their adventure would be a stroll and that the people would welcome them with open arms.
The harsh reality awaited them on the very sands of Playa Giron and Playa Larga when militia rifles confronted from the very first moment of their invasion and the strafing of the populations of that area of the Zapata Peninsula, part of the free territory of Cuba since January 1, 1959.
The judicial process initiated 60 years ago was held at the Prince’s Castle in Havana between March 29 and April 4, 1962, and almost a year after the proclaimed First Great Defeat of Imperialism in America, the details of the wicked aggression, planned, financed and organized by the U.S. government since May 1960, were revealed to the world.
Many mercenaries when testifying before the tribunal said “they sent me”, “I came as a cook” or “they told me that there would be no opposition”, but they were surprised by the heroic resistance of the popular militias and the young artillerymen, the nascent Revolutionary Armed Forces and its incipient Air Force, with Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz at the head, directing the combats.
After hearing the news of the invasion in April 1961, the entire Cuban people mobilized. The workers and peasants took their places in the nascent militias, the young rebels took over the student centers and turned them into training centers for the use of weapons and the nascent State Security took to safety the ringleaders who were plotting to create a fifth column in the rearguard.
The tribunal that judged the mercenaries was presided over by Commander Augusto Martinez Sanchez and also acting as members were Commanders Juan Almeida Bosque, Sergio del Valle Jimenez, Guillermo Garcia Frias and Manuel Piñeiro Lozada. Dr. Santiago Cuba, from the Supreme Court of Justice, acted as prosecutor; Captain Narciso Fernández acted as secretary and Dr. Santiago Béjar, professor at the University of Havana, acted as a public defender.
The court pronounced the sentence in Case 111 on May 17, 1962, against the captured mercenaries, who were condemned to pay high indemnities and as subsidiary penalties up to 30 years in prison, “with obligatory physical labor until the indemnity is satisfied”. The mercenaries captured in Playa Giron and its surroundings, punished for the crime of treason, also lost their Cuban citizenship.
The three main leaders of the mercenary Brigade 2506, José Alfredo Pérez San Román, Erneido Andrés Oliva González and Manuel Artime Buesa, were sentenced to pay the country half a million dollars each in compensation. The other mercenaries were ordered to pay 100,000, 50,000 and 25,000 dollars, according to the responsibility they had in the frustrated invasion. The total amount of the sentences imposed on the 1,181 mercenaries tried amounted to US$ 62,300,000.
Since May 1961, just a few weeks after the defeat of the frustrated invasion, the then Prime Minister of the revolutionary government, Fidel Castro Ruz, had expressed his willingness to return all the prisoners to the United States, in exchange for Washington’s agreement to compensate the island materially.
Three days after the court’s sentence, on May 20, 1962, the Prisoners’ Committee was formed and traveled to the United States to negotiate the release of the Brigade members. The government of John F. Kennedy, embarrassed by the failure in 72 hours of his expected invasion, did not want to participate officially in this process, and the negotiation was left in the hands of the private initiative that was grouped in the so-called Roosevelt Committee, which, in spite of its good wishes, could not give a quick solution to the problem.
In June 1962, the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, incorporated lawyer James Donovan into the negotiations of the so-called Commission of Prisoners’ Relatives. The talks on prisoner exchange were interrupted during the October Crisis but resumed on December 18, and agreements were signed on the 21st of that month.
That agreement committed the United States to pay, within six months, the $62,300,000 in medicine and food for children while Cuba would release the prisoners, who began to leave immediately for the United States.
The White House did not complete its commitment, since it failed to pay two million dollars, but, as Fidel said: “They had to accept the payment of the indemnity and for the first time in its history imperialism paid a war indemnity”.
Source: Granma, translation Walter Lippmann – Cuba News