Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

Welcome to 50 Weeks that shaped America Week 16.

Now, we are doing a series for America's 250th birthday looking at key stories that added up to where we are now. And this

week, for the first time in our series, we talk JFK, we talk Cold War, we talk anti-communism,

and we talk covert CIA shenanigans. We are headed to April of 1961 and the bungled invasion of

Cuba, also known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

About 1,500 CIA-backed dissidents are sent to Cuba with the idea that they would invade

the country, spark a populist rebellion against the leftist leader Fidel Castro, who had

recently taken power.

Cuba would be free.

The U.S. would further exert its influence over Latin America.

The USSR would be defeated. None of that, listeners, happened. But it's a very fascinating

answer as to why. So this week, in two parts, it is the Bay of Pigs. Here, as always, Nicole

Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter-Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there.

Right off the bat, I have to ask you, this isn't in our prep. Do you know why it's called the Bay of Pigs?

Assuming a Bay. Okay, well, yeah. That's where they landed. Yeah. That's where they landed.

It was called the Bay of Pigs before they landed. And it is an inlet. It's on the southern coast of Cuba. In Spanish, it's called the Baya de Cochinos. Baye de Cochinos. Now Cochinos, sort of colloquially slangy means pig in Cuban Spanish. And so it became known as the Bay of Pigs. It's sort of less about the animal, more kind of like a pigish person, like a, you know, like a bad person.

But the Cochino is also the actual name of a coral fish, the queen triggerfish, Latin name, the blasted Vitula.

And it's the, and in Spanish that is called the Cochino, and there are a bunch of them in the coral reefs in this Gulf. And they look like, they look like typical coral fish. They're like neon blue and yellow and orange. You can look them up. They're kind of on the bigger sides. So people actually catch them and eat them very popular. But that is surely where, where at least at first the name for this bay came

from they named it after this fish then it kind of got you know melded into morphed into pig and then

the u.s pigs and now we just say it over and over bay pigs and i at least i was itching to find out

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