JFK

Up in Smoke

One night in 1961, shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was planning one final, covert action in mainland Cuba. An action, he assumed, that would go slightly more smoothly than the last CIA funded effort. Two years earlier, in 1959, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro came to power and began the process of seizing all foreign property, businesses and land, using the newly created ministry for the recovery of misappropriated assets. Many of the seized assets were American-owned. In response to this, the US administration attempted and failed at numerous covert ground-based guerrilla-tactics, attempting to overthrow the newly created communist party in Cuba. As Fidel Castro struggled…