Chuck Todd
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And it's like, he also went to boarding school.
He also sort of, I think he was raised
So that was first evidence that the Bay of Pigs didn't stay in 1961.
Weirdly isolated from other kids.
More than 1,100 members of Brigade 2506 are captured.
Eventually, they're released in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine.
We forget he's still out there.
But the defining moment came after.
In Miami, before tens of thousands of Cuban exiles,
Kennedy receives the brigade's flag.
He's not yet.
They're not angry at Kennedy yet.
And he makes a promise that it will be returned to a free Havana.
It never has.
And that's when failure becomes memory.
It got turned into a betrayal for Cuban exiles.
This wasn't about just the United States.
This is about John F. Kennedy, the belief.
He encouraged it, he launched it, and then he didn't follow through.
That's the way the Cuban exile community saw it.