The Welcome to JFK in The Enduring Secret.

I'm your host, Jeff Crudell. Welcome to JFK in The Enduring Secret.

I'm your host, Jeff Crudell.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

Today's episode is episode 150, and as promised, it's the epilogue episode that relates to the story of Pepe San Romaine.

As you'll recall, Pepe was the commander of Brigade 2506, and it's also an epilogue related to the Alabama National Guardsmen

who flew those final missions in the Bay of Pigs invasion. They were those few Americans that fought

and died for the cause alongside the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. The idea of doing a short epilogue came to me after a stunning moment as I was completing

some of the research on the Bay of Pigs series.

I wanted to do more on Pepe San Romaine, and after I got done reading all the material that I

had gathered about him, I quickly Google him to see

if there was something more or more relevant in terms of what happened to him after he returned

to the United States, after his imprisonment in Cuba following the Bay of Pigs invasion.

I was stunned when one of the first articles that popped up before me on the internet

was an article that showed his age at death. He was only 58. Well, immediately, I wondered whether he

had perhaps contracted cancer or perhaps had something else tragic happen. So I began to search a little more,

and quickly I came across an article that appeared in the Washington Post. It's an article entitled

The Last Casualty of the Bay of Pigs. And it was written by Myra McPherson, and it appeared in the post on October 17, 1989.

By the time I finished reading it, I couldn't hold back the tears for this man, for someone I never knew.

But because I knew more of his own heroism in 1961 because of the work that we've all done together,

what I read in this article about him was all the more richer.

But it also made his ending to me all that more tragic.

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