Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

Welcome back to 50 Weeks that shaped America, Week 16. This is part two of our look at the bungled invasion of Cuba, aka the Bay of Pigs Fiasco.

To reset, we are in April 14th of 1961.

Kennedy has been president for a couple months now, and he is meddling a little bit in this plan

that the CIA has been working on for a better part of a year at this this point to go in attack Cuba and try and spark a populist uprising. We will get into how that goes down over the days of April 15th, 16th, and 17th. But here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wasley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. All right. Kennedy has said

eight planes instead of 16. You can do it with that. And on April 15th, 1961, the plan goes into action.

So eight planes hit three Cuban airfields. They knock out about half of Castro's air defenses,

which is not enough. And they knock out half. And they used half the number of

planes. So maybe if they'd used the full number of planes that the CIA had recommended, they would

have been able to really buy themselves some cover here. One of the really fascinating tidbits here is

we mentioned this last episode. We talked a lot about this last episode. You know, the idea here

was not to frame this as a U.S. invasion. The whole idea here

was to sort of make it seem like and really spark an internal Cuban uprising. So on the morning

of April 16th, a bullet-riddled plane lands at the Miami airport, and the pilots come out

and they gather the press around them and they proclaim that they are

defected Cuban fighter pilots who have been so swept up in this initial spark that they've

defected from Cuba, flown their planes to Miami and are here for the cause to fight against Castro.

Reporters, to their credit, kind of look around and look at the plane and they say,

man, that, that looks

like a really fresh paint job on that plane there that says Cuba on the side of it.

And wait a minute, don't be, don't Castro's planes have plastic noses and this one is solid metal?

You know, Castro eventually would hear, would get wind of this and say, even Hollywood

...