The notion of Kennedy's betrayal is a certain perspective of the Bay of Pigs Invasion which supposes that President Kennedy's refusal to give proper air support to Brigade 2506, caused the defeat of the invasion. This lack of air support later spurred a sense that John F. Kennedy had betrayed Brigade 2506, and that Cuban exiles immediately started to view him as soft on communism. This soft reputation also supposedly pushed early Cuban exiles to vote Republican in contrast to Kennedy's own Democratic party, creating a long tradition of popular support for the Republican party among Cuban Americans. The supposed immediate distaste for Kennedy among early Cuban exiles has also inspired conspiracy theories that Cuban exiles were involved in Kennedy's assassination.[1] [2] [3]
This interpretation of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, has been analyzed by critics, who instead claim that a notion of "betrayal" was not popular among Brigade 2506 veterans immediately after the invasion, and that the "Kennedy's betrayal" narrative does not wholly explain the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, or why Cuban Americans came to largely support the Republican party.
One day into the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy received a telegram from Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, stating the Soviets would not allow the U.S. to enter Cuba and implied swift nuclear retribution to the United States heartland if their warnings were not heeded.[4]
On the second day into the invasion, Kennedy ordered the Alabama Air National Guard to halt its bombings of Cuba. The Alabama Air National Guard originally intended to bomb Cuban airports to debilitate the Cuban Air Force. Without the bombings, the Cuban Air Force could effectively bomb the Brigade 2506 invasion force, ending the invasion.[5]
After the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy briefly established Operation Mongoose to organize clandestine missions against Cuba. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy agreed with Khruschev, that the United States would not sponsor any more exile incursions into Cuba. By 1963, Kennedy was ordering Cuban exile militants to cease all violent operations launched from the United States, while operations from other countries were still tolerated.[6]
In 1964, a series of failed exile attacks occurred against Cuba. Manuel Ray's Cuban Revolutionary Junta, and Manuel Artime's Movement for Revolutionary Recovery, both failed in their respective attacks on Cuba. Soon after, the CIA began cutting funding to various militant exile organizations.
Soon after the invasion, Brigade 2506 started a veterans association, and published a note in 1964, praising Kennedy on his birthday. Journalist Haynes Johnson interviewed many of these veterans and published a book in 1964 The Bay of Pigs: The Leaders' Story of Brigade 2506. In the book, most of the veterans fault CIA planning for the invasion's failure, rather than Kennedy himself.
Cuban-American lawyer Mario Lazo published in 1968 his book Dagger in the Heart; American Policy Failures in Cuba, that Kennedy is at fault for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Bay of Pigs veteran and Miami politician Alfredo Duran claims that the betrayal narrative became popular among Cuban Americans by the mid-1960s because it served as a propaganda tool for Republican politicians in Miami. Historian Michael Bustamante has claimed that the Kennedy's betrayal narrative only became popular after the United States started reducing support for Cuban exile militancy in the mid-1960s.
In 1976, the betrayal narrative was expounded upon by the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. In their investigation into John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, the committee concluded that Cuban exiles had a "motive" to assassinate Kennedy. That motive being a sense of betrayal after the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.[7]
In 1998, Bay of Pigs veteran and ex-CIA officer Grayston Lynch published his book Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs which openly describes Kennedy as cowardly, and that official U.S. intervention in the invasion was a reasonable idea since it would not have been diplomatically disastrous, as Kennedy and other officials believed. The 1998 book Politics of Illusion by James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, and the 2001 book Bay of Pigs by Victor Andres Triay, sustain the betrayal thesis of Lynch, and go on to focus on the suffering of the Brigade 2506 soldiers captured and imprisoned after the invasion.[8]
In the 2015 book Latinos and the 2012 Election political scientist Gabriel R. Sanchezthat proposes the idea that the Kennedy's betrayal narrative may explain the Republican affiliation of early Cuban exiles, but that later Cuban immigrants are unconcerned with the legacy of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and make political decisions based on recent policies regarding family travel to Cuba and remittances.[9]