Bay of Pigs Vets Fight for Home

On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 19, San Román sent a desperate message to Lynch on the Blagar and then to Washington: "Fighting on beach. Send all available aircraft now! In water, out of ammunition. Enemy closing in."

Later he said, "I can't wait any longer. I am destroying my radio."

The radio clicked dead. The frogmen decided to stay together and surrender. They handed their weapons to soldiers who were fleeing into nearby swamps. The beach fell into chaos. There was no escape. "Everybody was out for themselves," Felipe Silva says. "That was the end."

That the able-bodied frogmen chose not to leave their wounded comrades, "that was the most beautiful part," Eduardo says.

Later that day, the radio in a 1956 Buick cruising along a road near Cuba's southern coast was tuned to Radio Swan, a 50-kilowatt station based on a tiny island off Honduras. The CIA had covertly constructed the station to spread anti-Castro propaganda to Cuba beginning in May 1960.

An announcer boldly proclaimed the Miami exiles were victorious and Ché Guevara was dead.

What a travesty of truth, thought Eduardo, disgusted as he watched the road pass from the Buick's back seat. Beside him was another wounded brigade fighter, Rolando Toll, whose body was seared by shrapnel. Eduardo's mind drifted from the dull pain of his leg to the uncertainty that he would live beyond this day.

A pair of Castro militiamen sat up front. One pointed a gun toward the captives while the other drove. "Do you have a wife or children?" he asked Eduardo.

"Yes," Eduardo answered.

"What a pity, because you're never going to see them again."

They arrived at a Matanzas jail where hordes of Castro supporters paraded by to insult Eduardo and Toll. "Take off your shoes," one man needled. "You don't need your shoes. We're going to execute you."

On the morning of April 21, Eduardo, his fellow captured frogmen, and hundreds of other prisoners were shuttled on buses to Girón Beach. They waited there for hours. "We thought, This is it," Jorge Silva says. "We figured we were going to be shot."

But the captives were herded back onto the bus and driven to Havana, where they were shoved in front of TV cameras. Dazed, dirty, and dehydrated fighters appeared under a sign that read, "Fatherland or Death. We won."

Eduardo was not chosen. His clothes were bloody and torn. He remembers devouring Chinese fried rice and plantains, his first real meal after days of crackers and guava paste. Felipe Silva and Eduardo were then sent to a hospital, where an orthopedic surgeon put a cast on Eduardo's leg.

Soon after the men were captured, Casares and Cantillo, who were with Lynch and the U.S. Navy ships offshore, volunteered to return to the beach to search for survivors. They found about 30 men, naked or in underwear. A few had resorted to eating iguanas. Cantillo scooped up one survivor like a baby. The man whispered into Cantillo's ear: "¿Ganamos?" Did we win?

Cantillo felt like crying and asked Lynch: "What should I tell him?"

"Tell him we have lost the battle but not the war."

They gave up the rescue once American sonar spotted a Soviet submarine heading into the bay. The American fleet moved out to sea.

After 10 days in the hospital, Felipe Silva and Eduardo would join the 1,100 other prisoners at Palacio de los Deportes, a boxing and basketball arena in Havana, where the exile fighters would endure sleeping on bleachers for more than a week. They were given yellow shirts to wear. Castro called them "yellow worms," cowards who were enemies of his revolution.

In the end, the brigade lost more than 100 men in the invasion, including Blas Casares's 22-year-old half-brother, whose B-26 was shot down. Four American pilots were killed.

By June 1961, the prisoners ended up at Castillo del Príncipe, an 18th-century Spanish fort, where guards prodded them with bayonets. They spent their days praying the rosary, playing chess, and listening to a fellow prisoner strum a classical Spanish guitar someone had smuggled in. The meals were mostly rice and beans.

"When they took out a spoonful of black beans, everybody would say, 'Oh, there's a piece of meat,'" Felipe Silva recalls. "And when they started fishing around, it was rats."

Elena wrote Eduardo letters, but they were returned unopened.