Talk:Bay of Pigs Invasion

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An event on this page is a April 17 selected anniversary (may be in HTML comment)

Contents 1 Back to the future 2 US involvment in related events 3 Overuse of the phrase "the invaders" 4 Weird quote box 5 Non-neutral sources. 6 Casualty Figures 7 Soviet Tactical Nukes 8 NPOV

[edit] Back to the future

Quote: in a future interview with CNN, he said ... could someone who knows what is meant by this phrase please correct it, thanks. Maikel 09:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, since I have know idea where in the article this is I don't know, but it's possible that the interview with CNN happened happened after the event they are disscussing, thus making the statement correct. Michael1115 (talk) 01:17, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] US involvment in related events

What about a small background on other US funded "terrorism"/guerilla warfare (usually in order to overthrow dictators). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.80.160.16 (talk) 22:46, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Article does mention the CIA was confident it might be able to overthrow Castro because of two previous coups it helped. Tempshill (talk) 03:54, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Overuse of the phrase "the invaders"

Repeatedly in the section mentioning the battles, the article refers to U.S. forces as "the invaders". This isn't very neutral.

JonJ (talk) 20:02, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

that is actually a neutral term, any force making an invasion is usually referred as an "invader", as using something like "The liberators" would prove just too biased for such a sensitive topic.151.196.51.252 (talk) 05:18, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Weird quote box

Potential enemies of the Revolution were neutralized, arrested, or shot while resisting arrest. Because of the lack of prison space (apparently Batista had not built enough jails), suspected counterrevolutionaries were unceremoniously rounded up and corralled in any facility available, be it sports stadium, school or schoolyard, etc., to prevent the people from aiding the expected invading force. Dr. Miguel A. Faria Jr.[1]

What is with the weird right-justified quote box? (I copied and pasted it over to the right.) I have not seen anything like it on Wikipedia. Why does it exist? Why this quote in particular? Surely there are more interesting quotes, if for some reason this 'quote box' should exist. Tempshill (talk) 03:53, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Non-neutral sources.

I notice that a few of sources in particular are used for a great deal of the most controversial and non-neutral analysis in this article -- many statements of what happened and why the invasion failed are attributed to them, usually to blame the Kennedy Administration. Their interpretations also seem to go against most of the remaining sources in the article (compare vs the well-sourced "CIA Report" section", which places the blame on internal CIA incompetence.) The sources I object to, to varying degrees, are these:

• Faria, Miguel A (2002). Cuba in Revolution: Escape from a Lost Paradise, 93–8.
• LAZO, Mario, Dagger in the Heart: American Policy Failures in Cuba (1970), Twin Circle Publishing, New York, pp. 257–312.
• WYDEN, Peter, Bay of Pigs: The untold story (1979), Simon and Schuster, New York, pp. 93–172.
• Fontova, Humberto (2002-04-29). The Bay of Pigs: The Truth. News Max. Retrieved on 2007-12-24.

While they have their place in the article, they tend to have clear political agendas and interpretations of the invasion that are not universally accepted; it would be better to find more neutral sources for the things that they are used to cite, or to qualify the positions they take and the incidents the comment on as either not universally accepted, or not universally accepted in their significance to the degree that those sources frame them. --Aquillion (talk) 09:52, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Casualty Figures

I improved the box with the casualty figures. Before it listed government forces losing only around 170 men but I believe this is good enough. The previous edition lists only caaulty figures for the regular army and fails to give even an estimate for the losses that the Cuban militias sustained. The new figures, I think, provide the reader with a better understanding of the battle. The old casualty figures listing 176 dead for the Cuban government is misleading becuase it fails to take into account that massive numbers of militiamen also took part in the battle.

I ask other contributors to keep the accuracy of the casualty figures in mind. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.3.232.37 (talk) 18:08, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Soviet Tactical Nukes

It's my understanding that there was a Soviet advisor on the scene with tactical nuclear warheads ready to go and full authority to use them. Does anyone know anything about this?

Oh, here we go.

"USSR, draft directive, Directive to the Commander of Soviet Forces in Cuba on transfer of Il-28s and Luna Missiles, and Authority on Use of Tactical Nuclear Weapons, September 8, 1962."

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/620908%20Memorandum%20from%20Malinovsky.pdf

AThousandYoung (talk) 00:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

The above directive, if genuine, was issued in September of 1962, in the month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and was not part of any planned or authorized response by Soviet forces to the anticipated Bay of Pigs invasion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.169.146.91 (talk) 00:24, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

This article seems to have been written by a handful of people with a strong inclination toward cuban exiles. It places all the blame of the "failure" on Kennedy administration and goes to the extreme to prove that cubans wouldn't have resisted if it weren't for "foreign advisors", place of landing, lack of air support, you name it. Same comment goes for the article on the "War against the Bandits", to which this article refers countless times: the views of the Cuban government are "partisan", the reaction of the cuban side was "cruel", their leaders always followed the "tactics" of others, the sources to that article are divided between "Pro-cuban government" and "Others". In this article, for example, people dead on the US side did not die, they "lost their lives". The British intelligence, reporting on popular support for the government, was not mistaken, they "choose to ignore reports". The number of cubans dead is ludicrous, most web references I find give a number in the hundreds, for example http://library.thinkquest.org/18355/the_bay_of_pigs_attack.html. The references are commented, for heavens sake, and many of them are pamphlets written by cuban exiles or obscure books without an ISBN. I fail to find a single reference to the Cuban government opinion on the issue. Apparently Cuba had no army at the time of the invasion: the forces that resisted are named in a thousand ways, but they're not the "Cuban army". The article repeat itself up to three times on the same issues, trying to avoid mentioning the merits that the cuban army could have had on the result of the operation. There are no references to the reject this "operation" created among other countries and the public demonstrations against the invasion in Europe or Latin America http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0806555.html . The issue of the US government hiring mercenaries to invade a country with which it was not at war is not even raised, nor the denials by Kennedy himself 5 days before the invasion about the United States having "no intention of intervening in Cuban affairs". Most of the criticisms to the article in this discussion page are immediately answered by El Jigue or El Jique (he doesn't sign with his user name and it varies), whose point of view is evidently sided toward the exiles: his answers in this page are incorpored verbatim into the article (I've never seen that in Wikipedia, btw). Its a shame for Wikipedia to have an article like this and it shows how NPOV policies are not enough in the face of persistent editing from people with an agenda. Even criticisms about the poor english of the article are confronted with "please, be specific". This article shouldn't be included in the calendar until totally rewritten by someone who has a clue on how to write history, a simple editing is not enough. I tried to start, but I throwed up my arms in despair, it's a task that easily can take days. --Ciroa (talk) 06:48, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

(moved thread to btm of talk pg) No particular argument, the article is a bit of a mess. Perhaps your best approach would be to just work through one section at a time, redo it in NPOV and with (preferably English-language) sources from both sides. I've watched this article for many months but I don't have the tools available to treat it properly. I haven't seen El Jigue here for a while, he may still be under admin sanction, but I'm not sure about that. This article could use some attention, perhaps the calendar will bring just that. Franamax (talk) 07:21, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Ciroa, gives excellent and spot on analysis on this article. I don't have the time right now to assist him, as I am working on other endeavors, but I do concur with his diagnosis of an extremely POV article.    Redthoreau (talk Redthoreau 15:45, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

There're plenty, plenty of articles on Wikipedia which are extremely POV. I tried to remove some of the more blatant OR in the article, but more work needs to be done. 202.40.139.170 (talk) 13:00, 29 May 2008 (UTC)